Page 68 of Property of the Bikers

I don’t argue with it.

By ten thirty, the framework is built.

Viktor has seven to ten days.

We have everything except the date, and the date will come when Doc administers the labor simulation, and we walk through the hospital doors, and we do what we’ve been rehearsing.

I look at the map on the monitor.

The red lines still converge on this compound.

After next week, they won’t converge on anything.

One way or another, this ends.

Chapter Thirty-One

REEVE

The message comes through on a channel that shouldn’t exist.

Not our channel. Not Viktor’s known network. Something in between, a frequency that’s been dormant since I flagged it in week one and filed it under low-priority monitoring because the traffic on it was too thin to mean anything.

It means something now.

I read it twice before I move.

I know what he’s planning. I have proof. I need to meet. Not for her. For me. I’m next.

No name. The digital signature traces back through two relay points before it resolves to a server I’ve seen once before, in the background of Dmitri Volkov’s financial profile. A personal relay he set up eighteen months ago and has used exactly three times.

I call Cade.

Mira reads the message, standing at the security office window with the morning light behind her, her jaw set.

“He’s scared,” she says.

“Yes.”

“Not guilty. Scared.” She hands the phone back. “There’s a difference. Guilty people confess. Scared people bargain.” She looks at the window. “He thinks Viktor is going to clean house. Tie off loose ends before the operation executes.”

“Which makes him either genuinely useful or a man Viktor sent to walk us into a counter-trap,” I say.

She looks at me. “Dmitri doesn’t have the operational sophistication for a counter-trap. Viktor would know that.” A pause. “He’s scared, and he’s real, and he has something. Whether it’s worth anything is what the meeting is for.”

Cade looks at me across the desk. “Arrange it,” he says.

The compound runs its Monday morning around us while we prepare.

Ghost leaves first, forty minutes ahead, in a vehicle that doesn’t belong to the club. He takes a route that adds twenty minutes to the drive and arrives at the diner early enough to sweep the lot, check the interior, confirm the location is clean, and settle into the southeast corner table with a coffee and a view of both entrances before anyone else arrives.

Jax pulls the car around at nine forty-five.

Mira is already at the main house door when I come through it, jacket on, bag over her shoulder, standing with the particular stillness of someone who has made a decision and is waiting for the world to catch up with it. Cade argued against her coming for approximately thirty seconds before he read her face and stopped arguing.

She gets in the back.

The drive is quiet. The highway runs flat and gray under an overcast sky, the mountains behind us, the plains ahead. I watch the mirrors, Jax watches the road, and Mira watches the window.