Page 18 of Mustang

I pulled my hand from her hair.Let it fall to the chair arm beside her hip, and then I leaned back, putting inches between us that felt like the distance between the cabin and the mountain outside—vast, unbridgeable, space that existed because someone had decided it needed to exist and was willing to live with the consequences of that decision.

Hannah stayed where she was.On her knees in front of the chair, her green eyes steady on my face, reading me the way she’d been reading me since the first day: not with fear, not with the wary caution people usually showed when they were trying to figure out if the man in front of them was dangerous.She was reading for a deeper truth, the one that lived beneath the surface of the words I’d just spoken, and whatever she found there made her expression shift from a question to a look I didn’t have a name for because I’d never seen it directed at me before.

Not hurt.Patient.

She held my gaze for three seconds.Four.Long enough that the fire popped twice behind us and the shadows jumped across the log walls and neither of us looked away.Then she stood in one smooth motion, gathered the first aid kit from the floor beside her knees, and carried it back to the sink without a word.

She didn’t look away from me until she had to.Until the angle of the counter and the distance between us made it physically impossible to keep her eyes on mine while her hands were busy putting the antiseptic back on the shelf above the herbs.I watched her back—the flannel shirt hanging off one shoulder where it had slipped during the bandaging, her red hair falling loose down her spine, her hands moving with the same economy they brought to everything—and the ache in my ribs wasn’t from the cuts.It was the door behind her, the one she hadn’t walked through.

I sat by the fire.The gauze pulled tight across my ribs with each breath, the antiseptic burning dull beneath the bandage where the deepest cut was already trying to heal itself.The cabin was quiet.The wood stove crackled.Outside, the mountain sat in late afternoon light, pine and fir standing patient on the slopes, and somewhere beyond the tree line the green sedan with Ohio plates was parked or wasn’t, and the client had thirty-six hours left on his deadline, and none of that mattered as much as the fact that Hannah Morgan was twenty feet away washing her hands at my sink and had stayed when she could have left.

I stared at the door.Solid wood, reinforced with iron brackets, the same door I’d shoved through an hour ago with blood on my shirt and a story I wouldn’t tell.It was closed.Latched.Keeping the cold out and the warmth in, and the woman on the other side of the room was humming again,low, absent, three notes of a melody I almost recognized before they faded back into the sound of water running,and the silence between us was not the silence of damage.

It was the silence of two people waiting.

I pressed my palm against the gauze where it crossed my ribs and felt the ache bloom outward, and I didn’t reach for her.

Not yet.

Not until she was free to choose.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Hannah

The fire had been burning for hours by the time I found the words.Not the blue flame under the skillet where I’d cooked dinner—the wood stove in the main room, throwing orange light across the log walls whenever a draft slipped through the gaps Mustang hadn’t sealed.He sat in the battered armchair, ribs bandaged beneath his shirt, the gauze pulling tight with each breath.Across the scarred table, the burner phone lay like evidence neither of us knew how to claim.

It had buzzed once an hour ago.Mustang had checked the message and set the phone back without responding.Twenty-four hours.Less, now.The client was getting nervous, which meant someone above him was getting nervous, which meant the lie about mountain terrain and frost lines had about a day left before it collapsed.

He set his mug beside it.The tin hit wood with a soft clack that sounded too loud.My gaze flicked there, then back to the fire, where a settling log sent orange sparks against the cast-iron door.My fingers tightened around my own mug just enough to turn the skin pale across my knuckles.

“This wasn’t random.”Mustang’s voice came out flat and clipped, the way it did when he was delivering a truth that cost him something.He kept his eyes on the fire, on the sparks, on anything that wasn’t my face.“The contract on your life.It wasn’t because you saw something you weren’t supposed to see.It was because you saw a specific murder.”

I didn’t move.Didn’t speak.Steam rose from the mug between my palms, and I listened with every part of me gone still.

“Downtown parking garage.Three weeks ago, the night you closed the bakery late and cut through because the sidewalk was torn up.”He paused, one hand shifting near his ribs as if the bandage pulled when he breathed.“There was a murder.You were there for it.”

His jaw tightened.The scar along it pulled against the stubble.Then his gaze dropped to the table, to the burner phone, to the space between us that had been filling with something neither of us had named since the moment I kissed him by the fire, and he told me to wait.

My knuckles went white.

It happened in pieces, as if my body belonged to someone else.The tendons in my hands stood out beneath the skin.The mug tilted forward, steam still rising, the liquid inside barely moving.My breath turned shallow and quick.I wasn’t looking at him anymore, or the fire.My gaze fixed on some middle distance between the table and the far wall, and whatever I saw there wasn’t in this cabin.Wasn’t on this mountain.Wasn’t anywhere Mustang could reach.

The fire popped.A draft from somewhere,not the sealed window, somewhere higher, near the roof joint or the doorframe,sent the flame sideways.Shadows jumped across the log walls, old patterns made strange by the fact that I was here, breathing shallowly around a memory I had worked so hard not to remember.

Mustang waited.He didn’t speak, didn’t reach across the table.He just sat in the armchair with bandaged ribs and split knuckles, hands flat on his thighs, giving me time to return to the room.

The memory surfaced in pieces.The smell of exhaust and old concrete.The parking garage at closing time, the sidewalk torn up outside so I’d cut through instead, my footsteps echoing off the pillars.Two men near the exit stairwell.One taller, one thinner, both speaking low enough that the words blurred into the concrete and the hum of a dying fluorescent tube.The stifled crack of a gunshot.Not loud.Not movie-loud.A flat, ugly sound that made my whole body seize.A body folding against the stairwell wall.My breath caught, stopped, then released in a slow exhale that trembled at the edges.Then the thin man turned.His eyes found mine across the garage, and the world narrowed to the space between us.

I set the mug down carefully, as if I were carrying too many things and couldn’t afford to drop any of them.Tin met wood.Steam rose.My hands flattened on either side of it, fingers spread, the grain disappearing beneath my palms as I leaned into the table like it was the only thing holding me upright.

I faced Mustang.

Firelight caught the steel-gray of his eyes and the hard line of his jaw.I felt steadier than I should have, like the worst thing had already walked through me and left me standing.My mouth was set.My jaw ached from clenching.For one second I remembered the woman from before,the baker in the photograph, smiling at someone who wasn’t him, unaware that her life had already tilted toward this room,and then I blinked, and I was just me again, sitting across a scarred table in a mountain cabin with my hands flat on the wood and Mustang watching me like the distance between us was both too small and too vast to cross.

“I remember.”Her voice was quiet.Even.No tremor, no upward lilt, nothing but the flat certainty of a fact being stated.“All of it.”

Quiet followed.Not the hostile quiet of the first days, or the tentative quiet of the mornings after.This was what happened when a buried truth came into the light and left both of you staring at it.