Page 34 of Property of the Bikers

Jax comes at six.

He doesn’t bring food this time. He knocks, and when I open the door, he’s in a gray shirt with the sleeves pushed up and his hands in his pockets, and he looks at me for a moment before he says anything, reading something in my face that I wasn’t aware of putting there.

“Bad day?” he says.

“Defining moment,” I say. “Come in.”

He comes in and sits in the chair, and I sit on the edge of the bed.

I tell him about Dmitri’s emails in the same way I tell him everything, factually and without conveying the emotional content of it. He listens without interrupting, which is one of the things about him I’ve stopped pretending not to notice.

There are several things about Jax I’ve stopped pretending not to notice.

The way he fills a room without trying. The hands, which I noticed the first night in the bar when he lifted my bag off my shoulder with a movement so smooth I didn’t clock it until it was already done. The jaw. The green eyes that appear relaxed but are not relaxed at all when you know what to look for.

I know what to look for now.

I’ve been looking for eleven days, and I’ve been filing what I see in the same place I file everything that doesn’t have an immediate use, and the file has been getting full.

He doesn’t say anything when I finish telling him about Dmitri. He looks at the window for a moment with his elbows on his knees, and then he looks back at me. “How are you?” he says.

“Cleaner,” I say. “It’s strange. It should feel worse, and it feels cleaner.”

“Because you already knew,” he says.

I look at him.

“Not the specifics,” he says. “But the shape of it. You already knew the shape of it, and now you have the words for it. That’s different from finding out something you didn’t know.”

I sit with that for a moment.

He’s right, and the fact that he’s right without me having to explain the distinction to him is something I add to the file without looking at it directly.

“My last external connection,” I say. “He was it. There’s no one left outside this fence line who knows I’m here.”

Jax looks at me steadily. “There are people inside it,” he says.

It’s a simple sentence, and he says it simply, without weight or emphasis, just as a fact being stated. But it lands the way simple true things land when you’ve been braced for something more complicated, and I look at him, and he looks back at me, and the room is very quiet for a moment.

“Yeah,” I say. “There are.”

He stays for two hours.

We talk about things that have nothing to do with Viktor or Dmitri or the compound’s security protocols, small things, the kind of conversation that happens when two people have stopped performing anything for each other.

He tells me about a bar fight he broke up at nineteen that led to him accidentally befriending the man he was trying to eject from the premises, who then followed him around town for the next six months.

He tells it with the self-deprecating timing of someone who is genuinely funny rather than someone who’s trying to be, and I laugh, and the laugh feels so unfamiliar in my own chest that I notice it happening.

When he leaves, he stops at the door and looks back at me.

“You’re going to be alright,” he says.

Chapter Sixteen

CADE

I see her from the office window at half past three.