Page 99 of Property of the Bikers

“Think they’ll ever fully accept it?” Jax says.

I look at the table. At the empty chairs, the few holdouts who left without stopping to speak to Mira, the prospects who are still recalibrating.

“Don’t need full acceptance,” I say. “Need operational unity. Got that.”

Reeve looks at the room. “Enough for now,” he says.

He goes.

Jax stays beside me for a moment longer. He looks at Mira, who’s still at the back of the room, still in the vest, talking to one of the men who stopped on his way out.

She’s laughing at something.

The laugh is real, I can tell from here, and the man she’s talking to is laughing too, and the vest fits her the way it fits someone who was always going to be wearing it, which is to say it looks like it belongs there.

“Yeah,” Jax says. “Enough.”

Chapter Forty-One

JAX

Two weeks after Viktor Sokolov stopped being a problem, the compound looks like itself again.

Not like it did before Mira arrived, exactly. Something has shifted in the permanent way that things shift when a world absorbs something significant and keeps moving.

The Bratva sent nothing. Reeve confirmed it at the end of week one. No encrypted channel traffic. No financial movement through any of the networks he’s been monitoring.

Viktor Sokolov’s disappearance has been internalized as a man who overreached on sovereign territory and paid the operational price, and the Bratva’s calculation is the same as Reeve predicted. Not worth a war over one strategist who miscalculated. The ledger closes. They move on.

Ruthless moves on too.

I’m carrying a box of nursery supplies through the main house hallway on a Tuesday morning when Maya comes around the corner from the other direction, holding a paint swatch in each hand and an expression that says she has an opinion and is about to share it.

“Sage or slate,” she says.

I look at the swatches.

“What does Mira want?” I say.

“Mira said she doesn’t care as long as it’s not pink.”

“Then sage,” I say. “Slate is too cold for a baby’s room.”

Maya looks at the swatches.

“Sage,” she agrees, and she turns around and goes back the way she came.

I keep moving down the hallway.

The nursery is the room that used to be a storage space off the main corridor near Cade’s quarters. We cleared it three days after the church vote, which was four days after Viktor, the first moment anyone had the capacity to think about anything other than the operation or its aftermath.

Cade made the call without being asked. This room. Near his quarters, close enough to hear the baby in the night and far enough that she has her own space.

It’s taken shape fast.

The crib came in from Billings on Thursday, assembled by Ghost of all people, who spent two hours on the floor with an instruction manual, a set of Allen keys, and the focused determination of a man who has decided this is his task, and he’s going to execute it correctly.

He didn’t ask for help, and nobody offered any because Ghost’s competence is not something you interrupt.