Page 92 of Property of the Bikers

He looks at me for a moment. Then he looks at Reeve.

Reeve nods once.

Cade looks at the monitoring feed.

The feed shows Viktor’s network sitting silent across every channel Reeve has been running for five weeks. The silence now is different from the silence of the last thirty-six hours.

“She needs to know,” Cade says.

“Yes,” I say.

He stands up, picks up his jacket from the back of the chair, puts it on, and walks to the door.

He stops. “Good work,” he says.

He says it the way he says everything that matters. Flat and direct, without dressing it up.

Then he goes to find Mira.

I sit down at the desk where Cade was sitting, look at the monitoring feed, and drink the coffee he left, going cold, because I’ve been awake since six forty and it doesn’t matter that it’s cold.

Viktor Sokolov is gone.

The siege is over.

Chapter Thirty-Nine

MIRA

It’s Saturday, and the compound feels different.

Not quieter. The workshop is running, the bar is open, and men are moving between buildings with the ordinary purpose of a working day. But the energy underneath all of it has changed.

I felt it this morning when I walked to Doc’s for my scheduled check, and two men at the gate nodded at me with something in their faces that wasn’t there yesterday.

Not relief exactly. Resolution.

Ghost and Reeve came back at eleven.

I saw them from the south window, two trucks pulling through the gate in sequence, Ghost first and Reeve three minutes behind him. Neither of them came to find me. They went directly to the security office, and the door closed behind them.

I sat with my book and didn’t read it. I already knew. I didn’t know the details. I didn’t know where, how, or the last thing Viktor Sokolov said before everything that came after.

Now Cade is at my door. Jax is behind him, and Reeve is already inside the compound, leaning against the hallway wall like he’s been there a while, like he knew this conversation was coming and positioned himself accordingly.

“Is it over?” I ask.

“It’s over,” Cade says.

“He’s dead.”

Not a question.

Cade doesn’t deny it. He holds my eyes and says nothing, and the nothing is the confirmation, and I stand in the middle of my apartment with all three men watching me, and I let it land.

Viktor Sokolov is dead.

The man who sat at the edge of my bed and brought me tea in the first trimester and told me in a low, steady voice that everything was going to be fine. The man who built a folder tied with a black ribbon while I was drinking that tea. The man who hired a contractor with a completion clause and sent a team to a hospital on Friday morning to sedate me and transport me to a location I would not have left.