Chapter 28
Chapter Twenty-Eight
JAX
Saturday morning, and the three of us are at breakfast when she walks in.
I see Cade register her first, the slight shift in how he’s holding his coffee cup, the way his eyes move to the door and stay there for a half second longer than they’d stay for anyone else.
Reeve doesn’t look up from the table immediately, which means he already knew she was coming, which means he heard her footsteps in the hallway before the door opened, which is exactly the kind of thing Reeve notices and doesn’t mention.
I look at the door.
Mira stands in it for a moment, then comes in, pulls out the chair across from Cade, and sits down, and the table settles into the particular silence of people who have things to say and are deciding who goes first.
She goes first.
“We need to talk,” she says. Not aggressively.
Not emotionally. The flat, direct register she uses when she’s decided something is going to happen and is stating it as fact rather than asking permission.
“What happens after the baby’s born. Am I staying?
What is this, the three of you and me, and what are the rules? ”
Cade looks at his coffee.
Reeve looks at the table.
I look at her. “You’re staying,” I say, because someone needs to say it first, and Cade delivers terms better when he’s had a moment to hear them framed, and Reeve already stated his position yesterday and doesn’t need to restate it immediately.
“If you want to. Permanent. All three of us. That’s the offer on the table. ”
She looks at me and then at Reeve.
“Already told you my position,” Reeve says. “Yesterday. It hasn’t changed overnight.”
She looks at Cade.
He puts his coffee down. “You’re not temporary,” he says. “Never were. Baby’s Ruthless, you’re mine, you’re ours, before the birth and after it, and that doesn’t change based on what Viktor does or doesn’t do or how the next two weeks resolve.” He holds her eyes. “Permanent.”
The word lands in the room and sits there.
She looks at all three of us in sequence. “All three of you,” she says. “How does that work in MC culture?”
“Nontraditionally,” I say. “Cade’s word is law in this club. He’s claiming you as old lady, shared between the three of us. The men who matter voted on it. The ones who didn’t like it voted anyway and lost.” I hold her eyes. “The club adapts, or it doesn’t. That’s not your problem to manage.”
She looks at the table for a moment. “No secrets about post-delivery plans,” she says.
“That’s a boundary. My history is of powerful men building frameworks around me without telling me what they’re for.
I can’t operate inside ambiguity anymore.
I need explicit communication about plans that involve me before they’re executed, not after.
” She looks at Cade specifically. “No more handled situations I find out about from a comms log.”
Cade meets her eyes. “Fair. You hear the plans. We hear your concerns. No surprises in either direction.”
She nods once. “Public behavior,” she says. “How do I navigate being with three men in front of the club without creating the faction problem Jax is already managing?”
I lean forward slightly. “Respectful in public, private stays private. No possessive displays that force the men who are still calculating to pick a side. United front, which means if there’s a problem between any of us, it gets handled away from the club floor.”
I pause. “You don’t manage the optics. That’s my job. Your job is to exist in this club—competently and without asking for permission you’ve already been granted.”
She looks at Reeve. “Jealousy management. Between the three of you.”
“Addressed,” Reeve says. “We’re not competing. We’re coordinating. The distinction matters operationally, and it matters personally. If it becomes a problem, we communicate about it before it becomes visible.”
She looks at Cade.
“Brotherhood first,” Cade says. “We don’t let you divide us because you’re not trying to divide us, and we’re not built to be divided by a woman, even one we’re all claiming. We coordinate.” He picks up his coffee. “Same as everything else.”
The table is quiet for a moment.
She looks at her hands. “I want this,” she says.
The words come out carefully, like she’s weighed each one before releasing it.
“It scares me. The permanence scares me, and the structure scares me, and the fact that I can’t fully tell the difference between choosing this and having no other choice scares me most of all. ” She looks up. “But I want it.”
I look at her across the table.
She’s eight months pregnant, and she’s been on this compound for over a month, and she’s been mapping the blind spots in the fence line as insurance while simultaneously sitting across breakfast tables from the men she’s been mapping them against, and she just said I want this in a voice that didn’t perform anything around the words.
I’ve been reading people for a long time.
That landed true.
“Good,” I say. “Because we’re not letting you go.”
Cade picks up his coffee and drinks it, and the conversation is over.
Reeve opens his notebook.
I look at Mira.
She’s looking at the table with an expression I’ve seen before and am only now connecting to its source. A month ago, in the bar after she first arrived, I read her accurately enough that it registered as oddly precise.
The hospital administrator details the exact methodology. The operational read was more than a guess, and she filed it and didn’t pursue it.
She’s connecting those dots right now.
I watch it happen across her face without her knowing I’m watching it, the slight tension at the corner of her jaw, the way her eyes go to the middle distance for a half second before she pulls them back to the table.
She’s looking at the warmth I’ve been bringing to every breakfast and every evening visit and every two hours of conversation that covered everything except the thing running underneath all of it, and she’s seeing that the warmth was real and the warmth was also deployed, and both of those things are true in the same breath.
She looks up and meets my eyes.
I hold them, and I don’t look away because there’s nothing to hide from the acknowledgment. The warmth was real. I am genuinely here. The intelligence underneath it is also real. Those aren’t contradictions.
She holds my eyes for a moment, and then she looks back at the table.
She doesn’t say anything about it.
I pick up my coffee and drink it, and the morning runs on around us, the compound starting its Friday outside the windows, the workshop opening up, Ghost’s truck at the gate, the mountains doing what they always do.
The terms are set.
The permanence is stated.
Viktor Sokolov has only weeks before the baby arrives and his custody window closes permanently, and he’s been quiet for seventy-two hours, which Reeve flagged this morning as the silence of a man who has finished planning and is waiting for his moment.
I look at the window.
The terms are set, the clock is running. We’re as ready as we’re going to be, and none of that is the same as being ready enough.
I finish my coffee.
Across the table, Mira reaches for the plate Maya left and starts eating, and Reeve writes something in his notebook, and Cade reads something on his phone, and the morning looks exactly like a normal Saturday morning at the main house table.
It isn’t.
But it looks like one, and right now, looking like one is the best any of us can do.