Page 58 of Property of the Bikers

He turns from the window. “We made the baby’s permanence explicit in front of the entire club. We made her protection explicit. We never made her permanence explicit. From her perspective, those are two different categories, and only one of them has been fully addressed.”

I sit with that.

He’s right.

I don’t like that he’s right because it means I made an error in a place I didn’t know I could make an error, which is worse than making an error in a place you’re watching. I was watching Viktor’s network. I was watching the perimeter. I was watching the club’s response to the financial pressure, the fire, and the counterstrike. I was not watching the gap between what I said in that church room and what she heard.

“We need to tell her she’s permanent,” Jax says. “Explicitly. Post-delivery, housing, status, all of it. In terms she can hold on to rather than interpret.”

“I thought the claiming covered that,” I say again, because I need to say it one more time to close it.

“I know you did,” Reeve says. “It didn’t.”

I stand up and go to the window that Reeve vacated, and I look at the yard. The frost on the gravel, the workshop with its bay doors open, two prospects moving between the storage building and the main building.

Here’s the thing I don’t say out loud.

If I ask her the explicit question, if I sit down across from her and define the terms of permanent in every dimension she needs them defined, she will have to answer it.

Not out loud, necessarily. But the question creates clarity, and clarity runs both ways. What if the clarity she arrives at is that she has been tolerating this world until the baby is safe, and then she wants to leave it? What if forcing the question gives her the vocabulary for an exit she hasn’t fully articulated yet?

I hold that for thirty seconds.

Then I put it down.

The risk of her arriving at that clarity on her own, without the conversation, and acting on it without telling us, is operationally worse than the risk of the conversation producing an answer I don’t want.

A woman who decides to leave after an honest exchange is a situation I can manage. A woman who decides to leave and has been quietly mapping the compound’s blind spots and learning the patrol rotation is already beyond management.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

MIRA

Doc doesn’t ask how I’m feeling.

He never does. He takes the blood pressure cuff off the hook and wraps it around my left arm, inflates it, reads the number, deflates it, and does it again, and the second number sits between us on the clipboard the same way the first one did a month ago, except this time it’s higher.

He sets the clipboard down.

“Talk,” he says.

I look at the exam table paper under my hands.

“Blood pressure’s up,” he says. “Not dramatically. Enough. Baby’s fine, heartbeat’s strong, positioning is good, all of that is fine. You’re the problem.” He pulls the chair from the desk and sits down across from me. “Something’s running in you that isn’t running right. I need to know what it is so I can tell you whether it’s going to hurt the baby.”

I look at the window. Small, high up on the wall, the same gray Montana sky it’s been showing me for weeks.

“Nobody has told me what happens after the baby’s born,” I say.

Doc looks at me.

“Viktor had a plan for after,” I continue. “I found it in a locked drawer. Insurance policy, medical directive, email chain discussing my removal once my function was complete. He had the whole thing built before I was three months along.” I look at my hands. “Cade claimed the baby and claimed me and called a war vote and none of that tells me where I am in six months when the baby is here and the siege is resolved and I’m no longer the asset with the medical complication and the Bratva problem. Nobody has said that part out loud.”

Doc is quiet for a moment.

Then he says, “You’re sleeping with the President and the VP, and the Road Captain is ready to follow after them.”

I look at him.