Chapter 20
Chapter Twenty
MIRA
I spend the morning not going to Cade’s office.
I sit in my apartment, and I eat the breakfast Maya brings, and I look at the south-facing window, and I think about a building two miles down the road that is a shell of blackened timber and collapsed metal because I got on a bus in Seattle two weeks days ago and came here.
I drink the decaf. I go to the bathroom. I fold the gray sweater and put it in the drawer where it belongs, and then I stand in the middle of the room and look at the drawer.
The auto shop employed four men full-time and another two on a part-time basis.
It was a primary revenue source for the club’s legitimate business arm.
The equipment inside it represented years of accumulated investment.
All of it is gone, and the reason it’s gone is sitting in this apartment, folding sweaters and drinking decaf and trying to find a way to make herself useful enough to justify the cost of keeping her here.
I go to Cade’s office at half past one.
I don’t knock, which I probably should, but the door is half-open, and I can hear voices inside, and by the time I’ve registered that I should have knocked, I’m already through the door, and the moment for it has passed.
Cade is at the desk. Reeve is against the far wall with his notebook open. Jax isn’t there yet, but the three coffee cups on the desk suggest the meeting has been running for a while and will continue after I’ve said what I came to say.
Cade looks up. “Close the door,” he says.
I close it and stay standing because sitting down feels like a concession I’m not ready to make.
“The fire,” I say. “Was it definitely Viktor?”
“Yes,” Reeve says, from the wall.
“You’re certain.”
“The accelerant signature matches a method used in two prior incidents connected to his network in other jurisdictions,” Reeve says.
“The timing, two weeks days after his first formal contact with Cade, is consistent with his escalation pattern. And the targeting is too precise to be coincidental. He knew the shop’s schedule.
He knew the overnight window. He had information about the compound’s operational structure that a random actor wouldn’t have. ”
I look at the desk. “He’s hurting you because of me,” I say. “If I weren’t here, the shop would still be standing.”
Cade looks at the papers in front of him.
“Let me go,” I say. “Not back to Viktor. I’ll find somewhere else, somewhere far enough that he stops looking here and starts looking somewhere else.
I’ll take the evidence with me, and I’ll find a way to use it, and you won’t have to absorb any more of this because of a woman you’ve known for two weeks. ”
“No,” Cade says.
I wait for more. There isn’t more. Just the one word, delivered to the papers on his desk, flat and final.
“People could get hurt,” I say. “Real people, your people, men who voted for a club position and didn’t sign up to have their livelihoods burned down.
The next round won’t be a building. Reeve said as much this morning.
If Viktor escalates again, it won’t be property, and that happens because I’m here. ”
“Already decided,” Cade says. “You stay. Baby stays. Viktor learns Ruthless doesn’t negotiate.”
“You’re not negotiating. You’re absorbing damage that exists because of me.”
“Same answer.”
I look at him. At the side of his face, the jaw, the deliberate focus on the desk that isn’t avoidance but isn’t engagement either.
Two weeks and I still can’t fully read him, which is unusual for me, because I can usually read people the way I read documents, in order, accounting for what’s redacted and working with what’s visible.
Cade redacts everything.
“I’m not worth this,” I say.
He looks up.
It’s the first time he’s looked at me directly since the claiming, since I stood in the church room and said I accept in front of forty men, and the look lands with a weight I wasn’t prepared for.
Not warmth. Not sympathy. Something more direct than either of those things, something that doesn’t ask anything of me and doesn’t offer anything to me and simply is, the way facts simply are when they don’t require your agreement to be true.
“That’s not your call,” he says.
Four words. He holds my eyes for two more seconds and then looks back at the desk, and the moment closes the way it opened, without announcement or ceremony.
I stand there with the four words sitting in my chest, and I don’t know what to do with them, so I file them where I file the other things about Cade that don’t fit cleanly into any category I have, and I keep my face where it is.
The door opens, and Jax comes in. He doesn’t knock either, which tells me something about the nature of this office and this circle of men, and he reads the room in the half second it takes him to take it in, the way he always reads rooms. His eyes move from me to Cade to Reeve and back to me, and then he closes the door behind him and leans against it.
“You’re trying to leave again,” he says.
“I’m trying to make a logical argument.”
“You’re trying to sacrifice yourself because a building burned, and it’s easier to make yourself the problem than to sit inside the solution.
” He looks at me with the green eyes that are never quite as easy as the rest of him suggests.
“You’re worth it. Baby’s worth it. The club decided that in a room full of men who don’t decide things without running the math.
Stop trying to override a vote that isn’t yours to override. ”
I open my mouth.
“Mira.” He says my name once, not harshly, but with enough weight that the thing I was about to say stays where it is.
“The club answered the question. Your job now is to stop being the thing that needs defending and start being something useful. Those are different jobs, and one of them is better for you than the other.”
I look at him.
Then I look at Reeve, who has been standing against the far wall through this entire exchange with his notebook and his operational stillness, watching everything and saying nothing and missing nothing.
“What do you know about Viktor’s operations?” I ask him.
Reeve tilts his head slightly. “Specifically?”
“His network. The way he recruits institutional contacts, the financial architecture, the shell company structure, the chain of accountability between him and the people who execute his methods.” I hold his eyes.
“I lived with him for two years. I translated for him in three languages across four countries before I married him. I read his documents and sat in his meetings and watched him build and manage relationships with people who didn’t fully understand what they were building and managing them for.
” I pause. “I know things about how he operates that aren’t in any file you’re going to find through a database search. ”
Reeve looks at me for a long moment.
The corner of his mouth moves. Not quite a smile. Something more economical than a smile, the expression of a man who has revised an estimate upward and is acknowledging the revision without making a production of it.
“Do you want to help?” he says.
“I want to end this,” I say.
The room is quiet for a moment.
Cade is looking at the desk. Jax is looking at me with an expression that’s somewhere between approval and the particular satisfaction of a man who said something would happen and it did.
Reeve closes his notebook and pushes off the wall and straightens up, and there’s something different in the way he’s standing now, the particular quality of a man who came into a room with one assessment and is leaving with a revised one.
“Monday morning,” he says. “I’ll pull everything I have on the network structure.
You tell me what matches what you know and what doesn’t, and we build a more accurate picture from the intersection of the two.
” He pauses. “There are gaps in the financial architecture I haven’t been able to close from the outside.
If you were in proximity to how he operates, you may have seen the inside of some of them without knowing what you were looking at. ”
“I’ll know what I was looking at,” I say, “once you show me what you have.”
He nods once, picks up his notebook, and moves toward the door.
“Reeve,” Cade says, without looking up.
Reeve stops.
“Run her through the counterstrike plan first. She knows his methodology better than anyone in this room. If there’s something we’re missing, I want to know before it executes rather than after.”
Reeve looks at me. “Tomorrow morning,” he says. “Eight o’clock.”
He leaves, and the office settles into the particular quiet of a room where something has just shifted, and the people in it are absorbing the shift at different speeds.
Jax is still leaning against the door with his arms crossed, and when I look at him, he raises his eyebrows slightly, a small gesture that says I told you so without the words.
Cade is writing something on the papers in front of him, a note in the margin, and he doesn’t look up, and I understand that the conversation is over in the way Cade ends conversations, not with a conclusion but with a return to work that is its own kind of conclusion.
I go to the door, and Jax steps aside to let me out.
In the hallway, the compound noise comes back, voices from the bar and the clang of the workshop and someone’s boots on the porch, and I stand in it for a moment and let it settle around me.
Viktor burned a building this morning to show Ruthless what he could reach.
On Monday morning, I’m going to sit across a table from Reeve and show this club what I know about the man who built that plan, and whatever that knowledge is worth, I’m going to spend every last piece of it.
I’m not a liability sitting inside these walls waiting for a resolution that someone else engineers.
I’m the person who photographed those documents and got on that bus and came here because I ran the math and found the answer, and the math I can run on Viktor’s network is more detailed and more current than anything in Reeve’s files.
It’s time to use it.
I walk down the hallway toward my apartment, and for the first time since I arrived on this compound, I’m not walking away from something.
I’m walking toward something.
The difference is not small.