Chapter 4
Chapter Four
JAX
Thursday nights at Ruthless run slow, and I like them that way.
The bar does maybe a third of its Friday volume, which means I can hear myself think, which means I can watch the room without working at it. Hayes and two of the mid-level patches are at the far table with a card game that’s been going on since six.
Prospect named Cole is restocking the cooler at the far end of the bar, moving bottles like someone who knows he’s being evaluated even when nobody’s looking at him directly.
I’m always looking at him directly. He just can’t tell.
That’s the thing about running a room. You don’t look at the things you’re watching. You look at everything else and let your peripheral vision do the actual work. I learned that a long time ago in a context that had nothing to do with a bar in Montana, and I’ve never stopped using it.
I’m wiping down the counter when the door opens.
Cold air moves in first. Then she does.
She’s visibly pregnant, wearing dark jeans, a gray sweater, and flat boots. Brown hair pulled back. No jewelry that I can see. One bag on her shoulder.
She stops two steps inside the door.
Most people who walk into Ruthless for the first time stop the same way, taking in the room, adjusting to the light and the noise and the atmosphere of a place that doesn’t go out of its way to make strangers comfortable. They stop, and they look uncertain, or they look like they’re reconsidering.
She doesn’t look uncertain.
Her eyes move across the room in a pattern I recognize.
Exits first. Then the people, assessed in clusters rather than individually, threat-reading rather than curiosity.
Then the bar, and me behind it, and she holds that for a beat before she walks forward.
Chin up the whole way. Hands steady at her sides.
Pregnant and she moves like someone who knows exactly where she is and chose to be here anyway.
I set down the cloth. Put both hands on the bar and smile at her the way I smile at everyone who walks up to this counter, open and unhurried, nothing behind it that she needs to see yet.
“What can I get you?”
She doesn’t sit down. She puts one hand on the bar and looks at me directly. “I need to speak with Cade Mercer.”
Not is he here. Not I’m looking for someone. His full name, stated flatly, like a key she’s been carrying and is now using.
I hold the smile and let one beat pass. “You know Cade?”
“I know of him,” she says. “Tell him Mira Sokolov is here.”
Two flags in under thirty seconds. Full name and a direct ask for the president. She didn’t come in here lost. She came in here with a destination already mapped and Cade’s name is the address.
“Mira,” I say, like I’m trying the name out. “You want to sit down? You look like you’ve been traveling.”
“I’m fine standing.”
“Humor me.” I come around the bar and pull out the stool at the near end, the one tucked into the corner where the bar meets the wall, away from the card game and away from Cole and away from the front window.
She looks at the stool and then at me and I can see her running a quick calculation, deciding whether sitting is a concession she wants to make.
She sits.
Good. She’s off her feet and out of the sightline of the front door and I’m between her and the rest of the room, which is exactly where I need her.
“Water?” I ask.
“Please.”
I go back behind the bar. Fill a glass, add ice, set it in front of her. While I’m doing that I pull out my phone with my other hand, angle it below the counter, and type a message to Ghost. Two words. Bar. Now. I send it before I’ve finished filling the glass.
She wraps both hands around the water and drinks. Her hands are steady, I notice again. Not gripping for comfort. Just holding. Whatever she’s been through to get here, and from the look of her it’s been a stretch, she isn’t rattled by it. She’s filed it somewhere and kept moving.
That’s not a civilian response. That’s a trained one, or close enough to it that the distinction doesn’t matter right now.
I lean on the bar in front of her, elbows down, keeping my posture easy. “Cade’s not here right now. I can get a message to him. Won’t be long.” I pause. “You want to tell me what this is about, or you want to wait and tell him directly?”
“I’ll wait,” she says.
“Fair enough.”
I pull my phone out again, unhurried, the way you do when you’re checking something that doesn’t require explanation.
Text to Reeve this time. Mira Sokolov. Female, late twenties, heavily pregnant, alone.
Bar. Run it. I send it and put the phone face down on the counter in front of me, visible, so she can see I’m not hiding that I’m using it.
She’s watching me. Not obviously. She’s looking at the bar surface, but she’s watching me the way I was watching Cole a few minutes ago, peripheral and precise.
I like her immediately and set the feeling aside because liking someone is not the same as trusting them and trust is not something you extend to a woman you’ve known for four minutes who walked into your president’s bar asking for him by name.
“You come far?” I ask.
“Far enough.”
“Alone?”
She meets my eyes. “Yes.”
One word and she holds it flat, not defensive, just factual. She knows why I’m asking and she’s answering without performing anything around the answer. That’s another flag, different from the others. She understands the nature of this conversation better than most people would.
Hayes laughs at something from the card table and she doesn’t flinch or turn her head. She keeps her eyes on me. I note that.
Cole finishes restocking the cooler and straightens up. I catch his eye over her shoulder and tilt my head slightly toward the back hallway. He reads it, nods once, and heads that direction without saying anything. Good prospect. Knows when he’s being asked to disappear.
The door at the far end of the bar opens and Ghost comes through it. He doesn’t come to the bar. He finds a spot near the wall two tables back, orders nothing, sits down with his phone and a view of the entire room. He doesn’t look at her. She doesn’t look at him.
Now there’s a man at the door she came in through, one at the wall behind her, and me in front of her.
She’s holding her water glass.
“That bag looks heavy,” I say. “You want to put it down?”
She glances at the bag on her shoulder. “It’s fine.”
“I’ve got a hook right here.” I lean over and tap the hook mounted under the bar lip on her side, the one that’s been there since we built this counter.
Before she’s decided whether she wants to use it, I’ve already reached over and lifted the strap gently off her shoulder with one hand, the way you do when you’re being helpful, and hung it on the hook below the bar.
Out of her reach without making it obvious it’s out of her reach.
She watches the bag go and then looks back at me. Something moves behind her eyes. She knows what just happened, or she almost knows, the way you almost know when someone has done something so smooth that your instincts register it a half second after the moment has passed.
I smile at her. She doesn’t smile back.
Her phone is in the outer pocket of the bag. I saw it when I lifted the strap, corner of it visible through the mesh. I need it out of that pocket and I need a moment to get it without her clocking the motion.
“You eaten?” I ask.
“I’m not hungry.”
“We’ve got food. Nothing fancy. Kitchen does a burger that’ll keep you on your feet.” I’m already turning toward the back. “Let me check if there’s anything left from tonight.”
I take four steps toward the kitchen hatch, which puts me directly between the bag and her line of sight, and I reach down to the hook, unzip the mesh pocket, and pocket the phone in one motion while I’m calling back toward the hatch, “Hey. Anything left on the grill?”
A voice from the kitchen says something affirmative.
I turn back. “You’re in luck.”
She’s looking at me steadily. The bag is still on the hook. Her hands are still around the water glass. She doesn’t know. Or she does and she’s decided not to show it, which would tell me something different and more significant about who she is.
Either way she’s still sitting there, which is what matters right now.
I lean on the bar again. Phone in my pocket, her bag on the hook, Ghost at the wall, the front door behind her. I pull out my phone one more time and type to Cade. Three lines. Woman at the bar. Mira Sokolov. Asking for you by name. Contained. Waiting on your word.
I set the phone down and look at her.
She’s looking back at me with the expression of someone who has done a full assessment of her situation and is waiting to see what the next move is.
“Cade will be here,” I tell her. “You want more water while you wait?”
She looks at her glass. Still half-full. She knows I know that.
“No,” she says.
“Okay.” I straighten and pick up the cloth from where I set it when she walked in. Start wiping down the counter again, the same section I was doing when the door opened, like the last ten minutes were just a natural interruption in an ordinary Thursday night.
She watches me do it. She’s trying to work out whether she’s a guest or something else.
I can see it in the way her eyes track the room now, slower than they did when she walked in, recalculating.
She knows something shifted. She’s not sure what.
She’s sitting on the stool at the corner of the bar with her hands around a water glass and her bag on a hook below the counter and her phone somewhere she can’t currently see, and she walked in here thinking she was walking into a waiting room.
She isn’t in a waiting room.
She’s already inside the process. Has been since the moment she sat down on that stool and let me put her bag on the hook.
My phone buzzes once against the counter. Reeve. Two words: Running it.
I pocket the phone and look up at her.
“Shouldn’t be long,” I say.
She nods. Wraps both hands back around the glass.