Page 51 of Property of the Bikers

“You haven’t heard a word Hayes said in the last ninety seconds.”

I pick up my coffee. “What do you want, Reeve?”

“You’re allowed to want her,” he says. “That’s not the question. The question is whether Cade’s claim is exclusive or shared.”

I look at the table. At Cade’s phone, at Mira’s plate, at the four inches of space between their shoulders that is now four seconds of forearm contact on record in the memory of every man in this room.

“Club doesn’t do poly,” I say.

“Club does what the president decides,” Reeve says. “He hasn’t told you to back off. He hasn’t done anything that indicates an exclusive claim.” He drinks his coffee. “That’s a signal. Cade doesn’t omit things accidentally.”

I know that.

I’ve known Cade for a long time, and I’ve never once seen him omit something that mattered by accident. Everything he doesn’t say is as deliberate as everything he says, and what he hasn’t said to me since the night of the claiming is get back.

“There are men in this room running calculations right now,” I say, quietly enough that Hayes can’t hear it. “Holloway. Briggs. Walsh is too new to know what he’s looking at, but he’s filing it anyway.”

“Yes,” Reeve says.

“If this becomes a faction issue, it destabilizes everything we’ve built around her protection.”

“Also yes.”

“So the question isn’t whether I want her,” I say. “The question is whether what I want can be handled in a way that doesn’t hand the men who are already uncomfortable with this arrangement a reason to push back harder.”

Reeve looks at me with the gray eyes that are always measuring something. “That’s a more useful question,” he says. Then he takes his coffee and goes back to wherever he came from, because Reeve never stays in a conversation longer than the conversation requires.

I stay at the counter.

Down the table, Torres, a mid-level patch who has been riding with the club for eight years and has the dry, unhurried manner of someone who sees most things and comments on very few of them, says something to the man beside him that makes the man beside him laugh. I catch the tail end of it.

“Intel boys always read rooms.”

It’s directed at no one in particular, a throwaway observation about something else entirely, and Torres is already moving on before the words have fully landed. The man beside him laughs and reaches for the coffee pot and the conversation shifts.

I clock Mira at the far end of the table.

She didn’t react visibly. She’s still eating, still sitting where she was, the forearm no longer against her shoulder because Cade put his phone down and picked up his fork. But her eyes moved toward Torres when he said it, a quick sideways shift, and then they moved to me, and for half a second we’re looking at each other across the length of the table before she looks back at her plate.

She caught it. She connected it to something and she caught it and she’s filing it in the same place she files everything, behind a face that gives you nothing unless you know what to look for.

I know what to look for.

I find Cade after breakfast in the yard, where he’s talking to Ghost about the gate rotation schedule and the two of them are standing in the cold with their breath fogging. I wait until Ghost finishes and heads back to the gatehouse and then I fall into step beside Cade as he turns toward the office.

“I need sixty seconds,” I say.

He doesn’t slow down. “Walk with me.”

We walk across the yard toward the main building, and I talk while we walk because Cade absorbs information better in motion than standing still, which is something I figured out in year two and have been using since.

“The breakfast this morning,” I say. “Half the room clocked it. Holloway, Briggs, Torres, the new prospect. They’re running the math on what the president’s relationship with the protected woman means for club structure and precedent.”

“I know,” Cade says.

“I need to know if the claim is exclusive or shared,” I say. “Not for personal reasons. Because if it’s exclusive, I manage the optics one way, and if it’s shared, I manage them a different way, and managing them wrong creates a faction problem we don’t need on top of everything else.”

Cade walks for three paces without answering.