Page 74 of Property of the Bikers

We’re going to use that advantage to its fullest.

I push back from the table and stand up.

Two days.

Chapter Thirty-Three

CADE

Ghost is running the team through corridor positions when I see her.

The workshop floor has the east wing layout chalked out in white lines, entry points marked, and intercept positions numbered. Two of Ghost’s men are moving through it on his hand signals while the other two stand against the wall and watch.

Ghost doesn’t speak during the drill. He uses his hands, a flat palm for hold, two fingers for move, a closed fist for stop, and the men read him without hesitation, adjusting positions in the chalk corridors without breaking stride.

They’ve been running this all afternoon, and it shows. The movements are getting cleaner. Less thinking between the signal and the response.

I watch the first pair run the elevator intercept. They hit the position half a second ahead of Ghost’s signal, which means they’ve started anticipating the sequence, which means the sequence is becoming automatic. Ghost sees it too. He adjusts the next signal slightly, changes the timing, forces them to respond rather than predict.

They adjust. Good.

The second pair takes the stairwell. I watch them move through the chalk lines, the taller one taking the high position, the other covering the access point below. Ghost signals the approach and they respond and it’s clean, clean enough that Ghost gives them a single nod before resetting for the next run.

I’m watching him set up the third sequence when movement in the yard outside the workshop door catches my eye.

Mira and Reeve, in the space between the workshop and the storage building.

I stop watching the drill.

She’s running the code phrases, but not the way you run something you’re memorizing. The way you run something you’re internalizing, which is different.

Reeve feeds her a variable I can’t hear from this distance and she responds, and her face shifts into the register, the scared-but-holding quality she needs for Friday, and then Reeve says something and she resets.

No pause to check herself. No look to him for confirmation.

She just resets and goes again.

Reeve gives her another variable. She takes it in, adjusts the register, delivers. He stops her with one hand and says something. She nods and runs it again from the top.

The second pair finishes the stairwell intercept and Ghost looks at me.

I nod once toward the yard. He follows my eyeline and looks and turns back to his team without commenting, because Ghost understands the difference between information that requires response and information that requires filing.

I step outside. The cold hits immediately, the particular sharp cold of a Wednesday afternoon in Montana when the sun is already setting. I lean against the workshop wall with my arms crossed and I watch.

Reeve runs her through five scenarios in the time I stand there. Five distinct situations, each one a different deviation from the baseline plan. Viktor’s team arriving early. A genuine medical complication overlapping with the operation. An unplanned presence on the floor.

Each scenario requires her to adjust her register without breaking cover, to fake the fear that looks like a woman in labor and not like a woman who knows exactly what’s happening in the corridor outside her room.

She doesn’t break cover once.

Not even on the fourth scenario, which from the look of Reeve’s setup is the most complicated of the five, the one that requires her to hold two things simultaneously, the performance of not knowing and the knowledge of exactly what signal to give and when.

She holds both.

When she finishes the fifth scenario Reeve gives her the small, precise nod he reserves for things that meet his standard. She rolls her shoulders once and waits for the next one.

Footsteps on the gravel beside me. Jax comes to stand at the wall and looks at what I’m looking at and says nothing for a long moment, which is unusual for Jax, who usually fills silences before they finish forming.