Page 19 of Mustang

The fire popped.Sparks flew.The draft found another gap and sent the flame sideways again, and shadows moved across Mustang’s face in patterns that made him look older, harder, and almost unbearably tired.

“Why didn’t you finish the job?”

The question sat there, clean and unadorned.After everything,the gun in my kitchen, the zip ties, the cabin, the kiss by the fire,I needed to know why I was still alive.

He picked up his mug.The coffee had gone cold; mine had too.He drank anyway, as if the act gave his hands something to do and bought his mouth another second.

Whatever answer he carried showed in fragments: the set of his shoulders, the way his gaze refused to settle, the tightening of his fingers around the tin before he put it down.Decker Holt.The green sedan.The client who wasn’t just a client.The club that needed money.The contract he had broken.He hadn’t told me everything, but enough of the shape had emerged for me to understand I had not been spared for a simple reason.

He set it down.Mine sat still beside my hands.His had never looked warm to begin with.

“Because you offered me coffee.”

The words came out rough.Unpracticed.Each syllable carried gravel, as if his voice hadn’t been built for this kind of truth.He didn’t elaborate.Didn’t explain about the gun in his hand or the zip ties in his pocket or the way I must have looked across my kitchen counter—not with bravery, exactly, but with the quiet resignation of someone who had decided panic would not save her.He didn’t tell me what the coffee meant to him.Maybe he couldn’t.Maybe the words for it didn’t exist in the language he spoke.

Four words for a decision that had cost him fifty thousand dollars and might cost him more before this was done.They should have sounded too small for the shape of what had happened between us.Somehow, they didn’t.

I didn’t answer.Didn’t nod or shake my head or offer him the kind of understanding people reach for when the truth is too small to explain the damage around it.I just sat with my hands flat on the table, my eyes steady on his, while the fire burned behind us and the room held a different kind of quiet.

I reached across the table with the same care I used for dough, stew, the wooden spoon against the cast-iron skillet, and rested my fingertips on his scarred knuckles beside the cold mug.Warm.Dry.The contact lasted three seconds, maybe four.No draft.No pop from the fire.Just my skin against his, my fingertips tracing the ridges of old wounds that mapped a history I didn’t know and probably shouldn’t.

I pulled back.My hand returned to my side of the table beside my mug, but I kept my eyes on him.Waiting, patient and steady, no longer sure whether waiting was fear or faith.

His hand stayed where I’d left it.The warmth of my touch seemed to linger there, though maybe I only wanted it to.He didn’t move.Didn’t reach for me.Didn’t do any of the things the charged quiet between us seemed to invite, and that restraint told me as much as any answer he could have given.

A log settled, sending orange sparks against the grate.The flame leapt once, then steadied.Woodsmoke, dried herbs, and the fragile warmth of two people breathing the same air filled the cabin.

The burner phone remained unused.Unanswered.Twenty-four hours, less now, and beyond the tree line the mountain kept its secrets while Mustang kept his.For tonight, with the fire going and his hand still where I’d touched it, the client could wait.The lies and truths and fifty thousand dollars could wait until morning, when the light through the cracked shutter would remind us both that this cabin was a hiding place, no matter how much it had started to feel like home.

I left my hand where it was.He left his where it was.The distance across the scarred table held exactly what it needed to, and for now, that was enough.

CHAPTER NINE

Mustang

I had the coffee halfway to my mouth when the knock hit the door: three taps, deliberate, the same rhythm we’d used for twenty years to signal a brother on the other side.My hand went to the Glock before my brain finished registering the sound, muscle memory overriding everything else, and I was on my feet with the mug still steaming on the table.

Nine days.No contact.No messages the encryption couldn’t handle.I’d known someone would come.Hadn’t expected it this soon, or this directly.

The tree line outside the window was still.Morning fog hung low between the pines, the kind that muffled sound and hid movement.I cracked the door an inch, gun hand low and ready, and found Ace standing on the porch with a black tactical bag slung over one shoulder and an encrypted laptop case in the other, his steel-blue eyes doing a fast sweep of the tree line before they landed on my face.

He looked like he’d driven through the night: salt-and-pepper stubble, eyes tight at the corners, the leather of his cut darkened with dew along the shoulders.The VP patch on his chest caught the weak morning light.For one second his expression stayed flat and assessing before the corner of his mouth pulled up.

“You went dark for thirteen days, brother,” he said.Voice low, measured.No accusation in it.Just fact, delivered the way Ace delivered everything.“Figured either you were dead or you did something stupid.”

I stepped back, door widening, but didn’t lower my hand from the Glock.Habit.A habit you didn’t break no matter who was standing on your porch.

Ace came through.The door closed behind him with the soft click of the latch I’d oiled three days ago.He set the tactical bag down beside the repaired chair,the one with the bracket I’d installed while Hannah slept,and stood there with the laptop case still in his grip, taking in the cabin with that methodical sweep I’d watched him do a thousand times.Taking inventory.Reading the room the way he read terrain before moving through it.

I did my own sweep.Front window.Kitchen.The bedroom door, still closed.No second set of boots on the porch that I could see through the gap.No engine sound from the road.Ace had come alone, which meant he’d decided this wasn’t club business yet.Not officially.Not until he’d seen whatever the fuck I’d done.

The quiet carried twenty years of history: rides in the dark, tells read under pressure, and a shared understanding of how badly a situation could turn before the first word was spoken.Ace’s gaze tracked the dish towel on the oven handle, the herbs on the windowsill, the second mug on the table.

Then Ace’s gaze landed on Hannah in the kitchen.

My gray henley hung off one of her shoulders, the collar loose, the hem hitting mid-thigh over a pair of the wool socks I’d given her.Her red hair was loose, falling past her shoulders in a mess that caught the morning light from the window, and there was flour dusted across her left cheekbone in a smudge she hadn’t noticed.A spatula in her right hand.Behind her, eggs crackled in the cast iron, the sound sharp against the quiet.

She stopped when she saw Ace.Didn’t freeze — just went still, the way a body does when it registers a new presence in a space it thought was settled.Her green eyes moved from Ace to me, then back to Ace, and her grip on the spatula adjusted.