Page 77 of Property of the Bikers

They sit down. Cade is across from me, Jax beside him, Reeve at the end of the table with his notebook, which he doesn’t open.

I put my book down. “I need to say something,” I say.

Nobody tells me to go ahead. They just wait, which is what they do, and I look at the three of them in the common room light, and I think about five weeks of this world and what it’s done to me and what I’ve done to it and what’s on the other side of Friday if everything goes the way the plan says it goes.

“I’m not staying because I’m trapped,” I say.

Cade looks at me.

“I know how this started. I know I came here because Viktor was going to kill me, and you were the only wall I could think of that his money couldn’t move. I know the claiming was a war declaration first and everything else second.” I look at each of them. “That’s not why I’m staying anymore. I’m choosing this. All of you, this world, this life. Permanently.”

I pause.

“Is it permanent for you?”

“Permanent,” Cade says without hesitation.

Jax looks at me, and the easy performance is completely gone, and what’s underneath it is what I suspected was underneath it from the first morning he brought breakfast and stayed longer than the food required.

“From the night you walked in,” he says. “Chin up, seven months pregnant and moving like you owned the room you’d never been in before. I knew then.” He pauses. “Permanent doesn’t cover it, but it’s the closest word available.”

Reeve looks at me across the table. “No exit,” he says. “I made that decision in the first week, and I don’t revisit decisions. Nothing that happens after Friday changes it.”

My mind drifts to the folder tied with a black ribbon. Viktor’s voice through the bathroom door saying, “Don’t worry about the wife.”

I came here for a wall, but I found three men who fight alongside instead of in front of, who claim instead of contain, who held this ground for five weeks against financial pressure, a fire, a near-retrieval, and a contractor with a completion clause, and who are going to walk into a hospital on Friday and end the thing that’s been running since before I got on that bus.

After Friday, the wall will be gone because the threat is gone.

What’s left is this.

“After Friday, we build something real,” I say. “We build a family. On purpose, with all the specifics that means inside this world.”

“We’re already building it,” Cade says.

“I know,” I say. “I’m saying I want to keep going.”

Jax and Reeve nod.

Cade looks at the table and back at me.

The common room runs its Wednesday evening around us, the compound settling into the night outside the windows, the perimeter lights coming on, the rotation beginning its circuit.

I look at the three of them, and I think that this is what it looks like when people have stopped performing for each other entirely, when everything that needed to be said has been said, and what’s left is just the fact of being in the same room, and the room is enough.

It has been enough for a while now.

I look at Cade. “Stay,” I say.

He looks at me.

“All three of you,” I say. “Tonight.”

The table is quiet for a moment.

Then Cade says, “Yes.”

Jax’s green eyes lock on mine, the easy mask completely gone. He gives me one slow nod. Reeve closes his notebook without a word. His answer is in the way he stands up with the others.