Page 56 of Property of the Bikers

“I need you to tell me something,” I say.

“Okay,” he says.

“Dmitri’s name was in a comms log from before he emailed me,” I say. “I need you to tell me what that means.”

Jax is quiet for a moment. Not the quiet of a man deciding whether to lie. The quiet of a man deciding how to tell the truth accurately.

“We knew he’d reach out eventually,” he says. “Reeve flagged him in the initial background check as a potential contact point. Someone with guilt and self-interest is a usable source if the contact gets managed correctly.” He holds my eyes. “When he emailed you, we already had a protocol in place for how to handle the information he’d give us. Cade approved it.”

I look at the bar surface. “You used my connection to him,” I say. “Without telling me you were using it.”

“Yes,” Jax says.

He doesn’t dress it up. I appreciate that more than I would appreciate an explanation, which would require me to decide whether I believed it, whereas the plain yes just sits there as a fact requiring no interpretation.

I nod once. “Thank you,” I say, and I leave.

Viktor planned my life without asking me whether I wanted the life he was planning.

Cade planned my survival the same way.

Different cage. Same decision.

I walk back to my apartment and I sit on the edge of the bed and I look at the south window and I give myself four lines of internal monologue about what that means, and then I put it away and I pick up the perimeter notes I’ve been building and I add two entries and I close the notebook.

* * *

Maya finds me on Thursday morning with the compound map.

It’s not the full security map, nothing Reeve would have on his screens. It’s the general layout document that gets handed to new support staff, a building diagram with access points marked, nothing operationally sensitive. I’ve been cross-referencing it with what I’ve learned from weeks of approved walks and common room observations.

She stands in the doorway of my apartment and looks at the map on the table and then at me. “What are you doing?” she says.

“Preparing for the worst,” I say.

She comes in and sits down across from me and looks at the map. “You think they’ll dispose of you after the baby’s born,” she says. It isn’t a question.

“Viktor planned to,” I say. “He built the entire framework around the delivery date. Insurance policy effective three weeks before. Doctor authorized to make decisions about my body during a period of maximum vulnerability. Email chain discussing my removal once my function was complete.” I look at the map. “Nobody here has told me what happens after. Nobody has said the word permanent in the context of after the birth.”

“Cade said permanent in front of forty men,” Maya says.

“Cade said it weeks ago,” I say. “Viktor said it for two years.”

Maya looks at me for a long moment. “There’s a difference,” she says, “between a man who claims you privately and a man who claims you in front of his entire club and puts it on record.” She leans forward slightly. “Viktor never claimed you publicly. He kept you. Keeping doesn’t cost you anything. Claiming does. It costs reputation, it costs political capital, it creates obligation in front of witnesses.” She looks at the map. “Cade made a public claim and called a war vote in the same breath. That’s not a man building a folder in a locked drawer. He’s putting his name and his club’s name on the line in front of every person whose opinion matters to him.”

I look at the window.

“You’re politically embedded here,” she continues. “Not because they like you. Because they’ve tied their sovereignty and their reputation to your presence. Letting you go now, or disposing of you after the birth, would undermine every decision they’ve made in the last month. It would tell the Bratva that Ruthless claims can be reversed under pressure. It would tell the club that the president’s word has a shelf life.” She sits back. “You’re not disposable. You’re load-bearing.”

I want to believe that.

I want to believe it in the way I wanted to believe Viktor’s steady voice at the edge of the bed, telling me everything was going to be fine, which is not a comfortable comparison to be sitting inside.

I don’t ask her the question I actually need answered, which is whether the post-delivery plan includes me staying permanently in every sense of the word: housing, status, and presence, not just the baby. I don’t ask it because I’ve been carrying the fear of the answer for days, and the uncertainty is still more bearable than confirmation would be if the confirmation went the wrong way.

I fold the compound map and put it in the notebook with the perimeter notes.

Maya watches me do it and doesn’t say anything.