Chapter 13
Chapter Thirteen
MIRA
My vitamins are on the nightstand.
I put them there four days ago because the bag they were in kept falling over on the floor, and I got tired of picking it up, so I lined them up beside the lamp in the order I take them, prenatal first, iron second, the fish oil capsule I’ve been choking down every morning since the second month because the OB said it mattered.
I look at them every morning when I wake up, and this morning, for the first time, I don’t think about how long they’ve been there.
That’s new.
I sit up slowly, the way I do everything in the mornings now that the baby has opinions about how quickly I’m allowed to change position, and I look at the room. The gray sweater I wore yesterday is folded over the back of the chair.
My flat boots are beside the door instead of inside the bag where I originally kept them, because taking them in and out every time was inefficient, and at some point I stopped doing it.
The bag itself is in the corner, still packed mostly, but the front pocket is open and has been open for three days because that’s where I keep the piece of paper with the four phone numbers on it, and I got tired of unzipping it every time I needed to check something.
A week ago, this room was a place I was put.
I haven’t decided what it is now, but it isn’t only that anymore.
I get up and go to the bathroom and run the shower hot, and I stand under it and look at the tile wall and think about nothing in particular. That’s new too.
A week ago, my brain ran constantly, cycling through Viktor’s timeline, the documents, and the variables I could and couldn’t control. This morning, it’s just the shower and the hot water and the sound of the compound starting its day outside the window.
I get dressed. I sit on the edge of the bed, and I wait.
I don’t catch myself doing it immediately. I’m looking at the door and thinking about my next checkup with Doc when I realize I’ve been sitting on the edge of the bed listening for footsteps in the hallway for the last four minutes.
Jax brings breakfast at half past eight.
He has every morning this week. Not always the same thing, not always from the kitchen, twice he brought something from a place in town that does breakfast burritos that are better than they have any right to be, given that the place looks like it hasn’t been renovated since 1987.
He stays longer than the food requires. He asks questions that aren’t interrogations and listens to the answers in a way that makes me answer more than I planned to.
I’ve been waiting for him.
I examine that for exactly two seconds, and then I put it down and go look out the window.
The compound is running its Friday morning.
A prospect is moving between the main building and the workshop with a toolbox.
Ghost is at the gate, arms crossed and head tilted, talking to one of the men on rotation, breath fogging in the cold.
The mountains behind everything are lit up sharply in the early light, the peaks white now, the sky above them so blue it looks artificial.
I stood at Viktor’s windows for two years, looking at Seattle.
I never once stood there like this.
A few nights ago, I was in the main room of the main building, which I’d been cleared to use in the evenings, and I watched Cade walk the north fence line from one end to the other.
Two of the rotation men were on the circuit, but Cade walked it himself, hands in his jacket pockets, moving at the pace of a man covering ground he knows by heart. He stopped at the northeast corner for a long moment and looked out at the road beyond the fence, and then he turned and walked back.
He didn’t know I was watching.
Or he did and didn’t register it as worth acknowledging.
I thought about that for longer than I should have.
Last night I woke at two in the morning to the sound of voices in the hallway, low and brief, and I lay in the dark and tracked them.
Two voices. Cade and Reeve, from the sound of it, were running through something that couldn’t wait until morning. I heard Cade’s voice stop outside my door for a moment, not long, the natural pause of someone registering that the room behind the door is occupied, and then his footsteps moved on.
I lay there after they passed and looked at the ceiling for twenty minutes.
These are not the behaviors of a woman counting the days until it’s safe to leave.
I know what those behaviors look like. I ran through them every day for three weeks in Viktor’s apartment. Everything I did pointed somewhere outside the place I was in.
Nothing I’m doing now points outside.
* * *
It’s half past eight, and there’s a knock on my door.
“Yeah,” I say.
Jax opens the door with his elbow because both hands are full. A plate in one, a mug in the other, and a brown paper bag folded over at the top, hooked on two fingers. He looks at me on the edge of the bed and then at the window and raises his eyebrows.
“You’re up,” he says.
“I’ve been up for an hour.”
“Good.” He sets the plate and mug on the nightstand beside the vitamins and holds out the paper bag. “Burritos again. The guy who runs that place asked if the pregnant woman liked them. I told him you ate two last time.”
“I was hungry last time.”
“You’re always hungry. You’re growing a person.” He pulls the chair from the corner without being invited and sits down, and I take the bag and open it, and the smell of eggs and green chile and something that is aggressively not Seattle fills the room.
I eat standing at the window because my back is better when I’m not sitting, and Doc told me to move more. Jax sits in the chair with his coffee and looks at the same view I’m looking at, and we don’t talk for a few minutes, which is one of the things about him I’ve stopped trying to analyze.
He’s comfortable in silence in a way that most people aren’t.
“Reeve picked up a new vehicle on the rural road feed this morning,” he says, without particular inflection. “Different plates than the two from last week. Clean registration.”
I chew and look at the mountains. “How many does that make?”
“Three distinct vehicles over seven days. Different plates, different makes, different times of day.” He drinks his coffee. “Same road. Same slow pattern.”
“He’s mapping the patrol rotation,” I say.
“That’s what Reeve thinks.”
“Viktor doesn’t move until he knows the gaps.
He’ll run surveillance for as long as he needs to before he tries anything physical.
” I look at the last of the burrito in my hand.
“He’s patient. It’s the thing people underestimate about him.
They see the money and the network, and they think that’s the threat. The patience is the threat.”
Jax is quiet for a moment.
“What was it like?” he says. “Before you found the folder. Living with someone who was building that while you were in the same apartment.”
I think about how to answer that honestly.
“Ordinary,” I say. “That’s the part that stays with me.
It was completely ordinary. He made coffee in the mornings.
He asked about my OB appointments. He sat at the edge of the bed when I was sick in the first trimester, and he was steady and calm and present.
” I look at the window. “The ordinary was real. That’s what I keep coming back to.
It wasn’t performance. He wasn’t pretending to be a normal husband while secretly building an elimination plan.
He was both things at the same time without any contradiction between them. ”
“That’s what makes him dangerous,” Jax says.
“That’s what makes him dangerous,” I agree.
He nods and looks at his coffee cup and turns it slowly in his hands, and there’s a moment where I almost ask him something I’ve been sitting on.
The thing he said about the hospital administrator that he shouldn’t have known, but I look at his face, and I put it away again.
Not yet.
“Church voted last night,” he says.
“I know. Maya told me.”
“What did she tell you?”
“That it passed. That it wasn’t unanimous.” I look at him. “That the men who voted for it voted for the club’s position, not for me specifically.”
He looks up. “She said that?”
“She said it in different words. But that’s what she meant.”
He holds my eyes for a moment and then looks back at his cup. He doesn’t confirm or deny it, which is confirmation enough.
I finish the burrito, fold the paper bag, and set it on the nightstand. The coffee is decaf again, which I’m making peace with, and I hold it in both hands, looking at the room.
My vitamins on the nightstand. My boots beside the door. My gray sweater on the chair. The piece of paper with four phone numbers in the open pocket of my bag in the corner.
A week.
I try to run the clean version of this in my head, the one where the logic is simple and the terms are clear. I’m here because Viktor wants me dead. I stay because leaving at seven months pregnant with stress-induced hypertension endangers the baby.
The compound is secure. The men are capable. The arrangement is operational, not personal, and I understand its terms and accept them because I have no better option.
Then I think about Cade walking the fence line when Ghost was available to do it.
I think about Jax in this chair every morning for seven days.
I think about Reeve standing in the doorway when he brought the phone back, asking if I needed anything, which was a question he absolutely did not need to ask and asked anyway.
I think about lying awake at two in the morning, listening to footsteps stop outside my door.
I set the mug down.
I don’t want to leave. That’s the problem.
Not Viktor. Not the compound. Not the rules Cade laid down like jurisdictional law.
Me. I’m the problem. I want to stay in a cage because the people holding the keys have started to feel like reasons.
I don’t examine that further. Examining it would require deciding what to do about it. I’m not ready to do that yet.
Jax stands up, takes his coffee cup, and looks at me in the way he has that isn’t quite a question. “Same time tomorrow,” he says.
“Same time tomorrow,” I say.
He goes.
I stand at the window for a long time after he leaves, looking at the compound going about its Friday, the mountains behind the fence line, the road beyond that I can’t see from here but know is there, and somewhere on it a vehicle with clean registration plates running a slow, patient circuit.
Viktor’s reach is long, and his patience is longer, and he’s coming in the particular inevitable way that things built with enough time and enough documentation tend to come.
I know that.
What I didn’t account for, when I got on the bus in Seattle with a fake ID and a bag I could carry, is that the thing waiting on this end of the road would be harder to leave than the thing I left behind.
At least Viktor’s cage had a shape I could map.
This one keeps changing its dimensions every time Jax sits in that chair.