Page 89 of Property of the Bikers

“Yes,” I say. “Which means we watch the edges. Anyone who has regular contact with this compound’s operations gets a monitoring flag starting tonight.”

Ghost nods.

We work through the rest of it. The logistics of removal, location requirements, disposal methodology, and communication to the Bratva afterward that preserves Viktor’s face publicly while making the internal message clear.

Operational failure on Ruthless ground. Matter resolved. No further correspondence required.

The Bratva won’t escalate over one strategist who miscalculated territorial sovereignty. The math doesn’t work in their favor. Viktor’s standing was already damaged by the contractor’s operational failure. His disappearance will be absorbed as a natural consequence of overreach.

That’s the plan.

By six thirty, it’s built.

I sit in the security office after Ghost leaves, and I look at the monitoring screens. Viktor’s network is still quiet. No movement, no signals, no indication of what he’s decided.

The silence is still running.

I don’t know yet whether it’s the silence of a man standing down or the silence of a man loading a weapon.

Thirty-six hours.

We find out which one it is before the window closes.

I open a new monitoring protocol for the compound’s peripheral contacts, and I start running names. One of them will lead me to him.

I’m going to find it before he moves.

Chapter Thirty-Eight

GHOST

Reeve calls me at seven forty on Saturday morning.

“Got him,” he says.

That’s all he says. I’m dressed and in my truck in four minutes.

* * *

The peripheral contact monitoring Reeve built last night produced a result.

A supply vendor who runs parts to three Ruthless-adjacent businesses in Millhaven made a cash transaction at a gas station on Route 12 at eleven PM.

It’s standard enough except that the transaction was flagged because the gas station’s exterior camera caught a second vehicle parked at the far end of the lot during the transaction, a black sedan with Washington plates that didn’t belong to anyone in Reeve’s database.

Reeve ran the plates at six AM.

Rental. Seattle airport. Rented Thursday under a corporate card connected to an entity two layers removed from Viktor’s primary network, which is two layers closer than Viktor usually leaves his connections.

He was in a hurry.

Or he was confident enough that he didn’t think we were watching the edges.

Both possibilities end the same way.

Reeve tracked the sedan through three camera feeds across Millhaven, none of them official, all of them the kind of coverage a man who has been running compound security for twelve years knows how to access without leaving a record.

The sedan parked outside a bar on the east side of town at eight PM on Friday. The bar has Bratva-adjacent ownership, the kind of connection that lives three handshakes from anything traceable yet is clear enough for people who know what to look for.