Page 85 of Property of the Bikers

I open the room door.

The corridor is empty at the near end, which means Ghost’s team has cleared it. The operative moving toward the floor is heading toward a corridor that looks exactly like what he expects: a private hospital floor with a high-risk maternity patient in a room at the end of it.

I hear him before I see him.

Footsteps. Measured. A man moving with purpose and trying not to look like it.

I press myself against the wall just outside my room door, and I breathe, and I find the register. The scared-but-holding quality. The woman in early labor who has come out of her room because something felt wrong and she needed to move, and she doesn’t know what’s happening in the corridor, and she’s scared, and she needs help.

I’ve run this forty times.

He comes around the corner.

He’s in scrubs with a patient advocate lanyard, and he’s holding a tablet, and he looks exactly like what his paperwork says he is, a healthcare professional responding to a high-risk transfer case, and his eyes find me the moment he clears the corner.

“Mrs. Sokolov,” he says. “I’m here to help with your transfer.”

“I don’t know what’s happening,” I say. My voice does exactly what the rehearsal trained it to do. “Nobody told me about a transfer. I just needed to walk⁠—”

“It’s all right,” he says. He takes a step toward me. “There’s a specialist facility better equipped for your situation. We just need to⁠—”

“I want to go home,” I say.

Not the abort phrase. The panic phrase. The one that means I need Ghost in the next thirty seconds.

I start moving, not running.

A woman in labor doesn’t run. She moves fast, scared, and unsteady. I move toward the stairwell door at the end of the corridor, the way I’ve rehearsed it, the way that looks like a frightened woman looking for an exit and not like a woman leading a target exactly where she needs him to go.

He follows.

Of course he follows.

I push through the stairwell door.

Ghost is on the landing.

The takedown takes four seconds. I don’t see all of it because I’m against the wall with my hands flat on the surface and my eyes forward, the way Reeve told me to position myself during a close-quarters intercept, but I hear it, and four seconds later, the operative is on the floor with Ghost’s knee in his back and a zip tie on his wrists, and the stairwell is quiet.

Ghost looks at me. “Clean,” he says.

I nod.

My hands are shaking slightly against the wall. Not from fear, not from the operation, from the contraction that chose this exact moment to peak, because the baby has never once cared about operational timing and apparently isn’t starting now.

I breathe through it.

Ghost speaks into his comms. “Four contained. Floor secured. Package safe.”

Jax finds me in the corridor two minutes later. He comes through the stairwell door and looks at me against the wall, and his jaw is set in a way I haven’t seen since the night of the claiming, when he looked at the church room and understood what was about to happen.

“You didn’t have to engage,” he says.

“Yes, I did,” I say. “He was moving toward the floor. Ghost’s team was in the service corridor with three detainees. If I stayed in the room, he would reach my door before Ghost could reposition.” I hold his eyes. “He needed a believable target. I gave him one. Ghost had line of sight the entire time.”

Jax looks at me for a long moment. His jaw is still set. “You scared the hell out of me,” he says. Not in anger. Just as a fact being stated.

“I know,” I say. “I’m sorry for that part.”