Chapter 27
Chapter Twenty-Seven
MIRA
Doc doesn’t ask how I’m feeling.
He never does. He takes the blood pressure cuff off the hook and wraps it around my left arm, inflates it, reads the number, deflates it, and does it again, and the second number sits between us on the clipboard the same way the first one did a month ago, except this time it’s higher.
He sets the clipboard down.
“Talk,” he says.
I look at the exam table paper under my hands.
“Blood pressure’s up,” he says. “Not dramatically. Enough. Baby’s fine, heartbeat’s strong, positioning is good, all of that is fine.
You’re the problem.” He pulls the chair from the desk and sits down across from me.
“Something’s running in you that isn’t running right.
I need to know what it is so I can tell you whether it’s going to hurt the baby. ”
I look at the window. Small, high up on the wall, the same gray Montana sky it’s been showing me for weeks.
“Nobody has told me what happens after the baby’s born,” I say.
Doc looks at me.
“Viktor had a plan for after,” I continue.
“I found it in a locked drawer. Insurance policy, medical directive, email chain discussing my removal once my function was complete. He had the whole thing built before I was three months along.” I look at my hands.
“Cade claimed the baby and claimed me and called a war vote and none of that tells me where I am in six months when the baby is here and the siege is resolved and I’m no longer the asset with the medical complication and the Bratva problem. Nobody has said that part out loud.”
Doc is quiet for a moment.
Then he says, “You’re sleeping with the President and the VP, and the Road Captain is ready to follow after them.”
I look at him.
“You think those three men are running a catch-and-release program?” He leans forward slightly.
“The club claimed that baby publicly. In front of every patch and every prospect with the gavel coming down and the vote recorded. You think they’re going to let the baby’s mother walk after that?
After a war oath? After three weeks of financial pressure and a burned building and a counterstrike and a medical transfer that almost took you?
” He shakes his head. “That’s not how this works. ”
“Viktor claimed me too,” I say. “He married me in front of forty people.”
“Viktor,” Doc says, “is a weak-ass Bratva strategist who couldn’t tell the truth about what he wanted so he built a folder instead.
” He says it with the flat certainty of a man who has been practicing medicine inside a motorcycle club for fifteen years and has a specific opinion about every kind of man he’s encountered in that time.
“Cade Mercer runs sovereign territory. Those are not the same caliber of person, and you know they’re not the same caliber of person. ”
I look at the window again.
“But,” Doc says, and I look back at him, “you won’t know until you ask.
Sitting in your apartment running Viktor’s pattern against Cade’s behavior is not information.
It’s an interpretation. Interpretation gets women killed.
” He holds my eyes. “Ask the question. What happens after the baby’s born.
Force an explicit answer. You have the right to that answer, and these men will give it to you if you ask directly because that’s how they operate, which you would know if you stopped interpreting and started talking. ”
I sit with that.
“The blood pressure,” I say.
“Will come down when the thing that’s driving it comes down,” he says.
“Which, in your case, is uncertainty. Remove the uncertainty. Your job today is to go back to that compound and ask the question you’ve been afraid to ask.
” He stands up and replaces the cuff on the hook.
“Come back Monday. I want to see the number again.”
* * *
Reeve knocks at half past two.
I open the door, and he’s standing in the hallway in his jacket with his hands in his pockets and the particular quality of stillness he carries everywhere, and he looks at me for a moment before he speaks.
“Can we talk?” he says.
I step back and let him in.
He comes inside and looks at the room briefly, and then he looks at me and doesn’t sit down. Neither do I.
We stand in the middle of the apartment with the south window throwing its low afternoon light across the floor between us.
“Doc told me,” he says.
“What did he tell you?”
“That you’re scared of post-delivery disposal.” He says it directly, without softening it or building toward it. “I’m telling you explicitly that it won’t happen. I want you to know that before you make any decisions.”
“What decisions?”
“Whether to stay after the baby’s born,” he says. “Whether to accept what we’re offering.” He holds my eyes. “I want it to be a choice you make with accurate information rather than a choice you make because the alternative is Viktor.”
I look at him.
Reeve doesn’t come to people.
People come to Reeve, to the security office, to wherever he’s positioned himself with his notebook and his screens. He waits, and he watches, and he lets the information arrive.
He came to me.
He’s standing in the middle of my room now, and he looks different from how he looks in the security office or across a briefing table.
Not softer. Just more present somehow, like he’s stopped running the operational layer for five minutes, and what’s underneath it is a person who made a decision and walked across the compound to act on it.
“What are you offering?” I ask.
“Permanence,” he says. “All three of us. If you want it.”
He crosses the room and kisses me.
I kiss him back.
He pulls back slightly and looks at me, and his eyes up close are a gray that shifts depending on the light, and right now in the afternoon light coming through the south window they’re the color of the mountains on a clear day, and I understand that I’ve been noticing the color of this man’s eyes for a month and only admitting it to myself right now.
“You’ve been observing,” he says. His voice is lower than usual, the operational register stripped away to something underneath it that sounds like the actual person rather than the person running the protocol.
“You’re intelligent under pressure. Strategic.
You don’t panic. You don’t spiral. You assess, and you act.
” He holds my eyes. “I choose you. Permanently. That’s the offer.
The baby’s already Ruthless. You become Ruthless. All the way.”
“You choose me,” I say.
“Every commitment I’ve ever made has been a decision,” he says. “Not a feeling. A decision made after observation, after certainty, after deciding this was the line I would hold regardless of the cost.” He pauses. “I’m making one now.”
I look at him for a long moment.
Then I reach up and pull him back down to me.
Reeve’s mouth is certain against mine, not rushed, not hesitant. He kisses like he has already weighed every possible outcome and decided this is the one he’ll commit to.
His hand rests at the small of my back, steady, guiding me backward toward the bed without ever pulling or pushing. When the backs of my knees touch the mattress, he slows the kiss, tasting me one last time before he draws away just enough to look at my face.
He reaches for the hem of my shirt. I lift my arms. He peels the fabric off slowly, folds it once, and sets it on the chair beside the bed.
His gray eyes move over my bare skin with the same focused attention he gives to security feeds and wire transfers.
No hunger that overrides everything else. Just complete presence.
My breasts feel heavy and full, the skin tight, nipples already drawn tight from the cool air and the weight of his gaze. Pregnancy has changed them dramatically in the last few weeks. They ache more often now, sensitive in a way that makes even soft fabric feel like too much some days.
Reeve notices.
He steps closer and cups both breasts from underneath, lifting their weight gently in his palms like he understands exactly how much they pull.
The relief is immediate. I exhale slowly.
His thumbs brush lightly across my nipples, and my breath catches.
He does it again, slower, watching my face the entire time, adjusting the pressure the moment he sees my reaction.
He leans down and presses a kiss to the top of one breast, then the other. His lips are warm. Then he opens his mouth and takes one swollen nipple between his lips. The wet heat closes around me, and I let out a soft sound I didn’t plan to make.
He sucks gently at first, testing, learning the exact pressure that makes my back arch. When he finds it, he stays there, sucking with slow, deliberate pulls while his tongue circles the sensitive peak.
He switches to the other breast and gives it the same careful attention.
One hand continues to support the first, thumb stroking the wet skin in time with his mouth.
Every movement feels considered. He notices when my breathing changes, when my fingers tighten on his shoulders, when my thighs press together. He adjusts without me saying a word.
Reeve lifts his head for a moment. His lips are wet. He looks at my breasts like they are important data, then meets my eyes. “These are heavier now,” he says quietly. “They ache more?”
I nod.
He lowers his mouth again, but this time he’s even more deliberate. He supports the full weight of one breast in both hands while he sucks deeper, pulling more of me into his mouth.
The pull is strong, and pleasure blooms low in my belly, thick and warm. He groans softly when a faint taste hits his tongue. My body is already preparing, leaking just a little under the attention.
He doesn’t pull away. If anything, he takes more.