Page 45 of Property of the Bikers

“Same answer.”

I look at him. At the side of his face, the jaw, the deliberate focus on the desk that isn’t avoidance but isn’t engagement either. Two weeks and I still can’t fully read him, which is unusual for me, because I can usually read people the way I read documents, in order, accounting for what’s redacted and working with what’s visible.

Cade redacts everything.

“I’m not worth this,” I say.

He looks up.

It’s the first time he’s looked at me directly since the claiming, since I stood in the church room and said I accept in front of forty men, and the look lands with a weight I wasn’t prepared for. Not warmth. Not sympathy. Something more direct than either of those things, something that doesn’t ask anything of me and doesn’t offer anything to me and simply is, the way facts simply are when they don’t require your agreement to be true.

“That’s not your call,” he says.

Four words. He holds my eyes for two more seconds and then looks back at the desk, and the moment closes the way it opened, without announcement or ceremony.

I stand there with the four words sitting in my chest, and I don’t know what to do with them, so I file them where I file the other things about Cade that don’t fit cleanly into any category I have, and I keep my face where it is.

The door opens, and Jax comes in. He doesn’t knock either, which tells me something about the nature of this office and this circle of men, and he reads the room in the half second it takes him to take it in, the way he always reads rooms. His eyes move from me to Cade to Reeve and back to me, and then he closes the door behind him and leans against it.

“You’re trying to leave again,” he says.

“I’m trying to make a logical argument.”

“You’re trying to sacrifice yourself because a building burned, and it’s easier to make yourself the problem than to sit inside the solution.” He looks at me with the green eyes that are never quite as easy as the rest of him suggests. “You’re worth it. Baby’s worth it. The club decided that in a room full of men who don’t decide things without running the math. Stop trying to override a vote that isn’t yours to override.”

I open my mouth.

“Mira.” He says my name once, not harshly, but with enough weight that the thing I was about to say stays where it is. “The club answered the question. Your job now is to stop being the thing that needs defending and start being something useful. Those are different jobs, and one of them is better for you than the other.”

I look at him.

Then I look at Reeve, who has been standing against the far wall through this entire exchange with his notebook and his operational stillness, watching everything and saying nothing and missing nothing.

“What do you know about Viktor’s operations?” I ask him.

Reeve tilts his head slightly. “Specifically?”

“His network. The way he recruits institutional contacts, the financial architecture, the shell company structure, the chain of accountability between him and the people who execute his methods.” I hold his eyes. “I lived with him for two years. I translated for him in three languages across four countries before I married him. I read his documents and sat in his meetings and watched him build and manage relationships with people who didn’t fully understand what they were building and managing them for.” I pause. “I know things about how he operates that aren’t in any file you’re going to find through a database search.”

Reeve looks at me for a long moment.

The corner of his mouth moves. Not quite a smile. Something more economical than a smile, the expression of a man who has revised an estimate upward and is acknowledging the revision without making a production of it.

“Do you want to help?” he says.

“I want to end this,” I say.

The room is quiet for a moment.

Cade is looking at the desk. Jax is looking at me with an expression that’s somewhere between approval and the particular satisfaction of a man who said something would happen and it did. Reeve closes his notebook and pushes off the wall and straightens up, and there’s something different in the way he’s standing now, the particular quality of a man who came into a room with one assessment and is leaving with a revised one.

“Monday morning,” he says. “I’ll pull everything I have on the network structure. You tell me what matches what you know and what doesn’t, and we build a more accurate picture from the intersection of the two.” He pauses. “There are gaps in the financial architecture I haven’t been able to close from the outside. If you were in proximity to how he operates, you may have seen the inside of some of them without knowing what you were looking at.”

“I’ll know what I was looking at,” I say, “once you show me what you have.”

He nods once, picks up his notebook, and moves toward the door.

“Reeve,” Cade says, without looking up.