Chapter 10
Chapter Ten
MIRA
I’ve been awake since four.
Not restless awake, not anxious awake. Just awake, the way I’ve been waking up since the third month of the pregnancy, eyes open in the dark at an hour that has no good reason for existing, body already running before my mind catches up to it.
The room they moved me to last night is smaller than the guest room.
One window, high up on the wall, the kind of window that lets in light without letting in a view.
A bed that’s actually comfortable, which I wasn’t expecting, with a wool blanket someone put at the foot of it that I pulled up around two in the morning when the temperature in the room dropped.
A nightstand with a lamp. A bathroom through a door on the left with a showerhead that runs hot immediately, which I discovered at four fifteen when I gave up on sleep and stood under it for ten minutes.
I’m sitting on the edge of the bed when the knock comes. Two knocks, unhurried.
“Yeah,” I say.
The door opens, and Jax comes in carrying a plate in one hand and a mug in the other, managing both with the easy balance of someone who has carried things through doorways a thousand times.
He’s in jeans and a dark henley, hair pushed back, and he looks like a man who has been up for a while and isn’t bothered by it.
He takes in the room in one sweep, the made bed, the bag still packed in the corner, me sitting on the edge of the mattress with damp hair.
He sets the plate on the nightstand without making a gesture. Eggs, toast, and a small cup of orange juice. The mug goes beside it.
“Decaf,” he says, nodding at the mug. “Doc’s orders for the pregnancy. Don’t shoot the messenger.”
I look at the mug. “There’s a doctor here?”
“Doc runs medical for the club. He’ll want to see you today or tomorrow.” He pulls the chair from the corner and sits down, not close, not far. The natural distance of someone who isn’t performing anything. “You sleep?”
“Some.”
He nods like that’s the answer he expected and doesn’t push it further.
I pick up the toast because I’m hungry and because sitting here not eating while he sits there watching me not eat seems like the worst option. The bread is thick-cut, and someone buttered it while it was still hot.
Jax leans back in the chair with his elbows on the armrests and looks at me in a way that isn’t quite casual. He isn’t making conversation. He’s observing, the way I observe things, taking inventory of something before he decides what to do with what he finds.
“You don’t look like someone who runs blind,” he says.
I eat the toast and look at him.
“You came in with photographs,” he continues.
“Not just a story. Not just fear. Documentation. You knew what you had, and you knew what it meant, and you knew where to bring it.” He pauses.
“That’s not a person who found out something bad and panicked.
That’s a person who found out something bad and planned. ”
“Is there a question in there?”
“Not yet,” he says.
I pick up the eggs and eat for a moment in the quiet. Outside the window, the light is the flat gray of a Montana morning that hasn’t decided what it wants to be yet. I can hear the compound running, distant voices, boots on gravel.
“Viktor operates through systems,” I say.
“Not people. He uses people to run systems, but the systems are the thing. Legal structures, financial networks, institutional frameworks. Things that move through official channels and leave official records and look, from any angle that gets examined, exactly like what they’re supposed to look like. ”
Jax doesn’t say anything. He isn’t filling the silence to be polite. He’s listening in the way that means he actually wants to hear what comes next.
“He doesn’t threaten people directly,” I continue.
“He doesn’t need to. He builds the outcome he wants into the paperwork in advance, and then the paperwork does the work for him.
By the time anything happens, it looks administrative.
It looks like the process is running correctly.
The people carrying it out think they’re just doing their jobs. ”
I set the plate down on my knee.
“The medical directive was the piece I understood last. I kept looking at the insurance policy and the email chain and thinking those were the plan. They weren’t.
They were the cleanup. The directive was the mechanism.
A doctor I’ve never met, with legal authority over my body at the moment I’m least able to argue with anyone, transferring me somewhere under medical necessity.
” I look at him. “I wouldn’t have been taken.
I would have been transported. By the time anyone looked at the paperwork, it would have been correct. ”
Jax is quiet for a moment.
“He would have had a hospital administrator on the payroll,” he says. “Someone in scheduling or patient services. Someone with access to records who could create the right documentation trail before the transport happened.”
I look at him.
That’s not a read. That’s not someone extrapolating from what I’ve described.
That’s a specific operational detail, the administrator, the scheduling access, the documentation trail, that I haven’t mentioned to anyone.
Not to Cade at the bar, not in any conversation since I arrived.
It’s the piece I hadn’t fully worked out myself until I was on the bus somewhere outside of Spokane, staring at the dark and running the sequence forward.
He said it like a man checking a box on a list he already has.
Something shifts in the back of my mind, and I file it without looking at it directly.
“He won’t stop,” Jax says. He says it simply. Just the truth of it sitting in the open air of the room.
“No,” I say. “He won’t.”
“How far does it go for him?”
I think about the email chain. The clean, patient language of it. The absence of anything that sounded like a person rather than a procedure.
“He doesn’t think of it as going far,” I say. “He thinks of it as finishing. Viktor doesn’t leave things unfinished. That’s not psychology. That’s just how he’s built. I’m a task on a list that hasn’t been completed yet, and until it’s completed, it stays on the list.”
“Until you’re erased or reclaimed,” Jax says.
“Those are the two outcomes he’s built toward,” I say. “He doesn’t have a third option in the architecture because he didn’t think he needed one.”
Jax looks at me steadily. “Then we don’t give him either.”
He says it without inflection, without the weight people put on lines they want you to remember.
He says it the way he said Viktor won’t stop.
Like a fact being stated. Like a property line being read from a deed, which I’ve now heard twice in two days in two different mouths and am beginning to understand is simply how things are said here.
Not a promise. A position.
I pick up the decaf and drink it. It tastes like coffee’s more responsible sibling, functional but not quite satisfying. I drink it anyway.
“How long have you been VP?” I ask.
“Seven years.”
“Before that?”
He looks at me with a pleasant expression that gives nothing. “Before that I did something else.”
He says it lightly enough that it doesn’t land as a refusal. It lands as a door that’s closed without being locked, which I understand is different. I don’t push it.
“The club voted last night,” he says, shifting in his chair. “On whether to hold the line with Viktor. Passed. Not unanimously.”
I look at him. “How far from unanimous?”
“Far enough that I’m telling you about it.
” He holds my eyes. “You should know that some of the men here made a calculation last night, and the answer they got wasn’t fully comfortable.
The vote held because Cade held it. But the calculation is going to run again every time the pressure goes up.
” A pause. “I’m not telling you that to frighten you.
I’m telling you because you’re the kind of person who makes better decisions with accurate information than with a managed version of it. ”
I sit with that.
He’s right. I am that person. It’s a strange thing, being read correctly by someone you met yesterday. Not uncomfortable exactly. More like finding a word for something you’d been describing around.
“What does the pressure look like right now?” I ask.
“Suppliers are canceling. Insurance audit triggered. Bank activity flagged.” He watches my face as he lists them. “Coordinated. Clean. Nothing that traces back to him directly.”
“Round two,” I say.
“How do you mean?”
“He sent the message last night. That was round one. Asking politely, giving Cade the option to resolve it quietly.” I look at the window.
“The financial pressure is round two. He’s not trying to hurt anyone yet.
He’s showing you what he can reach so that when he actually reaches it, you’ve already felt the shape of it. ”
Jax is quiet for a moment. Then he says, “That’s exactly what Reeve said.”
“Reeve’s right.”
“Yeah,” Jax says. “He usually is.”
Something moves outside the window. A sound first, a vehicle on gravel, and Jax turns his head toward it. He looks at the window for two seconds, and then his phone is in his hand, a message sent in the same motion, and he puts it back in his pocket before I’ve fully registered him taking it out.
He looks back at me.
“Two vehicles,” he says. “Rural road on the north side of the property. They’ve been circling since early this morning.”
The room doesn’t change. The light through the high window is the same flat gray. The plate on my knee still has the last piece of toast on it. Jax is in the same chair at the same distance, his posture the same easy configuration it’s been since he sat down.
Everything is exactly the same, and the temperature of it is completely different.
“Reeve’s already on it,” Jax says. He doesn’t say it to comfort me. He says it because it’s true and because true things are useful.
I look at the window.
Two vehicles on a rural road north of the compound, circling since early morning. Viktor moves pieces into position the way he always moves pieces, quietly and in advance, so that by the time the move happens, the infrastructure for it is already running.
He found the direction faster than Cade expected. Maybe faster than anyone expected.
I put the last piece of toast in my mouth, chew it, and look at the wall.