Page 86 of Property of the Bikers

He looks at the ceiling briefly and then back at me. “Are you hurt?” he says.

“No.”

“Baby.”

“Moving,” I say. “She’s fine.”

He exhales. “Reeve has the debrief,” he says. “Cade wants you back in the room.”

“I know.”

He steps aside, and I walk back down the corridor toward the room where Cade is waiting. The contraction monitor is still running its steady rhythm through the open door, and the east wing floor is quiet and controlled and exactly as secured as Ghost promised it would be, and Viktor’s extraction team is zip-tied in two separate locations in this building, waiting for Ghost’s logistics to make them disappear.

The trap worked.

Viktor’s final play is confirmed and contained.

What’s left is Viktor.

I walk through the door. Cade is standing in the middle of the room, and he looks at me the way he did the night I handed him the photographs at the bar.

I sit on the edge of the bed. “It worked,” I say.

He looks at me for a long moment. “Yes,” he says.

Outside the window, the hospital parking structure sits in the Friday morning light, and somewhere in a mobile command vehicle, Reeve is already building the next phase, and somewhere in Seattle, Viktor Sokolov is waiting for a confirmation that will never come.

One thing left.

End it.

Chapter Thirty-Seven

REEVE

Ghost confirms cleanup complete at two seventeen PM.

Four personnel from Patient Transfer Solutions were detained, processed, and removed from the hospital premises through the service exit without a single member of the public seeing anything that required explanation.

The hospital administrator has a privacy incident on record that will close without investigation. The floor is cleared. Doc has signed off on Mira’s discharge, stress-related false alarm, mother and baby healthy, no further intervention required.

Clean.

I open the message interface.

The encryption takes forty seconds to complete. I’ve built the routing through three relay points, each one untraceable back to this compound or any entity connected to it. When Viktor reads this message, it will appear to have originated from a server in Helsinki that is not connected to anything he can identify.

I type the message.

Your retrieval team has been detained and will not be returning. Mira Volkov remains on Ruthless ground and under Ruthless claim. This matter is now closed. Any further attempts to access her or the child she carries will be met with permanent resolution. No further communication is required or will be accepted.

I read it twice. Every word is deliberate. Retrieval team, not extraction team, because retrieval implies she was something to be recovered, which reframes his entire operation as a failure of asset management rather than a territorial violation. Detained and will not be returning is precise enough to convey everything to him without stating it directly. Permanent resolution is not a threat. It’s a description of what has already been decided.

I send it.

Then I open the monitoring feed, and I watch.

* * *