Chapter 41
Chapter Forty-One
JAX
Two weeks after Viktor Sokolov stopped being a problem, the compound looks like itself again.
Not like it did before Mira arrived, exactly. Something has shifted in the permanent way that things shift when a world absorbs something significant and keeps moving.
The Bratva sent nothing. Reeve confirmed it at the end of week one. No encrypted channel traffic. No financial movement through any of the networks he’s been monitoring.
Viktor Sokolov’s disappearance has been internalized as a man who overreached on sovereign territory and paid the operational price, and the Bratva’s calculation is the same as Reeve predicted. Not worth a war over one strategist who miscalculated. The ledger closes. They move on.
Ruthless moves on too.
I’m carrying a box of nursery supplies through the main house hallway on a Tuesday morning when Maya comes around the corner from the other direction, holding a paint swatch in each hand and an expression that says she has an opinion and is about to share it.
“Sage or slate,” she says.
I look at the swatches.
“What does Mira want?” I say.
“Mira said she doesn’t care as long as it’s not pink.”
“Then sage,” I say. “Slate is too cold for a baby’s room.”
Maya looks at the swatches.
“Sage,” she agrees, and she turns around and goes back the way she came.
I keep moving down the hallway.
The nursery is the room that used to be a storage space off the main corridor near Cade’s quarters. We cleared it three days after the church vote, which was four days after Viktor, the first moment anyone had the capacity to think about anything other than the operation or its aftermath.
Cade made the call without being asked. This room. Near his quarters, close enough to hear the baby in the night and far enough that she has her own space.
It’s taken shape fast.
The crib came in from Billings on Thursday, assembled by Ghost of all people, who spent two hours on the floor with an instruction manual, a set of Allen keys, and the focused determination of a man who has decided this is his task, and he’s going to execute it correctly.
He didn’t ask for help, and nobody offered any because Ghost’s competence is not something you interrupt.
The changing table came on Saturday.
The mobile that Maya picked out, with small wooden animals turning slowly on a white cord, went up on Sunday.
I stand in the doorway of the nursery this morning and look at the room that is almost ready for a person who isn’t here yet, and something moves in my chest that I don’t have a clean word for.
Mira got a message from Dmitri on Monday. I know because she told me, the same way she tells me things now, directly and without preamble, sitting at the kitchen table while I made coffee.
“Dmitri emailed,” she said.
“What did he say?” I ask.
“Heard Viktor’s gone. You’re safe. That’s all I wanted.”
I poured the coffee and put a cup in front of her, and sat down.
“You respond?” I said.
“No,” she said.
She picked up the cup.
I didn’t push it. There was nothing to push. She made her decision about Dmitri. She hasn’t revisited it, and she’s not going to. Former family is its own category, and it stays there.
We drank the coffee.
That was the end of it.
* * *
Doc’s appointment on Wednesday puts everything where it needs to be.
Mira is thirty-eight weeks. Baby’s weight is good. Position is correct. Blood pressure, which has been elevated since week three of the compound, is at the lowest reading Doc has recorded since she arrived. He writes the number on the clipboard and looks at it, and looks at her.
“Whatever you’re doing,” he says, “keep doing it.”
Mira looks at the number. “The siege ending helped,” she says.
“I imagine it did,” he says.
He sends her home with instructions to rest, eat regularly, and return in five days unless something changes before then.
She walks back across the compound in the afternoon light with Maya beside her, and I watch from the workshop doorway, not obviously, the way I watch most things.
She moves differently than she did when she arrived.
Not just the pregnancy, though that’s more visible every week.
Something in the way she carries herself inside the compound, like a woman who’s walking through a place that belongs to her, not a woman who’s navigating a place she’s been permitted to occupy.
It took a while.
It’s there now.
* * *
The parenting plan comes together over two evenings at the kitchen table.
Reeve writes it out because Reeve writes things out in the clean, sequential way he structures everything. Overnight rotation between the three of us, flexible based on operational demands, but with a baseline that doesn’t require Mira to manage alone.
Doc on call for the first three months. Maya available as backup. The main house layout adjusted so the nursery is accessible from all three of our quarters without going through shared spaces in the night.
Cade reads through it twice and signs off without changes, which means he’d already run it in his head before Reeve put it on paper.
I added one item.
Sunday mornings. Non-negotiable. Whatever is running, Sunday mornings are family breakfast in the main house. No exceptions for anything short of an active operational threat, and we’ve just spent weeks eliminating the active operational threat, so the exceptions list is currently empty.
Mira reads the plan at the kitchen table and looks at the Sunday morning item, and looks at me.
“Non-negotiable,” I say.
She look back at the paper. “Non-negotiable,” she agrees.
* * *
Two weeks out from the due date, the compound has assembled its version of a support structure around her without anyone calling it that.
Maya has a standing Tuesday visit that has been running since week two and isn’t stopping.
Ghost checks the main house security protocols every morning with the particular thoroughness of a man whose wife didn’t survive a birth and who has decided that nothing on his watch is going to go the same way.
Doc’s appointments are twice weekly and will go to every other day in the final week.
Cade is in the main house more than he’s in his office, which is a shift so significant that two senior patches noticed it and said nothing, which means they understand what it means.
Reeve now runs his monitoring feed from the main house common room three evenings a week instead of from the security office.
He says it’s a practical adjustment. It’s also a man who has decided that being in the same building as his family is a reasonable operational choice and is not explaining that to anyone.
I bring food. That’s my contribution. Has been since week one. I bring food and stay longer than the food lasts. I make Mira laugh when the compound’s weight gets too heavy, and I argue with her about engine configurations.
I run code phrase drills with her in the yard, and I sit beside her in Doc’s waiting room when she doesn’t ask me to because she doesn’t need to ask.
It’s what I do.
It’s what I’m going to do for the rest of my life, and I’ve stopped finding that prospect anything other than exactly right.
* * *
Saturday evening, and the compound is running its end-of-week noise.
I’m behind the bar for the first time in a while, and it feels both familiar and slightly foreign, the way things feel when you’ve been doing something else with your full attention and then return to the thing you were doing before.
Cole is on the other end of the bar, and he’s gotten better while I’ve been occupied, which is the kind of thing you notice when you’ve been watching someone develop and then look away and look back.
Mira is at a table near the wall with Maya and two of the club’s old ladies, who have gradually folded her into the fabric of the compound’s social world over the last two weeks with the efficiency of women who have decided something is happening and are making it happen.
She’s laughing at something. She’s wearing a Ruthless shirt over the bump, and her hair is down.
I watch her for a moment.
She’s just there. In the room. At the table.
Laughing.
Reeve appears beside me at the bar. He doesn’t order anything. He looks at the room for a moment, and then he looks at his phone, and he makes a note in the app he uses to track the things he tracks.
I watch him do it because I’m curious, and he knows I’m curious, and he doesn’t hide the screen, which means he’s decided I can see it.
A name. One name. An annotation beside it that I can’t fully read from this angle, but the word active is visible.
He puts the phone in his pocket.
“Someone from Viktor’s network?” I say.
“Adjacent,” he says. “Not surfaced. Still moving.” He looks at the room. “Probably nothing.”
“But you’re watching it,” I say.
“I watch everything,” he says.
I pour myself a coffee and go back to work.