Page 20 of Mustang

Ace turned toward her, took in the henley, the flour on her cheek, the spatula in her hand.Then his eyes came back to me.

Then his whole body shook.

Not a chuckle.Not the dry half-laugh he gave when someone said something actually funny.A full, unguarded roar that started in his chest and came out unchecked, a laugh I had never once heard from him in twenty years of knowing exactly what his face did in every possible situation.His head went back.His shoulders heaved.The sound hit the log walls and bounced, and the window above the repaired chair, the one I’d sealed at five in the morning with weatherstripping and a putty knife, actually rattled in its frame.

He set the laptop case down, braced both hands on his knees, and managed, “You are everything you ever made fun of,” before losing it again.The words broke apart between laughs.One hand pressed to his mouth like he could physically hold the sound in and failed completely.

I stood there with my arms crossed and jaw tight, letting him get it out.What else was I supposed to do?Tackle him?Tell him to shut the fuck up in my own cabin while the woman I’d pulled from a kitchen at midnight stood in the doorway wearing my shirt and cooking eggs?The math didn’t work.None of this worked.

Hannah looked between us.Her expression went from confusion to amusement, the corner of her mouth lifting the way it did when she caught me doing a thing I hadn’t meant to be caught doing.She turned back to the stove without a word and flipped the eggs, the spatula scraping against cast iron with a sound that cut through Ace’s dying laughter.

He straightened, wiped his eyes with the back of his hand, and dragged in a breath that still shook at the edges.When he faced me again, his cheeks were flushed, the lines around his mouth deeper than they’d been a minute ago, and another laugh threatened before he swallowed it down.

“I need coffee,” he said, voice rough.“And you need to start talking.Not necessarily in that order.”

Hannah set a mug in front of him without being asked.Fresh coffee, black, the ratio she’d learned from watching me for thirteen days.Ace studied the mug, gave her a single nod, approval, acknowledgment, the closest thing to thanks he was capable of in that moment, and wrapped his hand around the tin.

I stayed where I was.Arms crossed.Back against the wall.The Glock still on my hip, Ace at my table, Hannah moving through my kitchen like she belonged there.The pressure in my shoulders eased by a fraction.Whatever came next, I wasn’t facing it alone.

Even if the first thing my vice president did upon finding me was laugh until he cried.

Hannah brought the eggs to the table on a plate she’d warmed by the stove.Set it between us.The yolks were still runny, the way I liked them, and I hadn’t told her that either.She’d just noticed.

Ace picked up his fork.Studied the eggs.Then me.The corner of his mouth twitched.

“Shut up,” I said.

He didn’t.But he ate, and outside the sealed window, the fog kept its distance.

Ace set his fork down and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.The laughter vanished, replaced by the flat focus I’d watched him deploy in church meetings for two decades — eyes narrowing, jaw setting, the shift from a man amused to a man taking inventory.

He reached for the tactical bag at his feet, unzipped it, and pulled out the encrypted laptop.Black matte, no logos, expensive as most motorcycles and built for one purpose: keeping secrets.He set it on the scarred table, booted it with a thumbprint, then entered a sixteen-digit passcode without looking at the keys.

“The contract you received,” he said, voice level now, all trace of laughter burned away.“It had no exfiltration clause.”

I knew what that meant before he finished the sentence.Every job that came through our usual channels included it as standard protocol — the line that told the operator how to confirm completion and collect payment without exposure.Photograph requirements.Drop locations.Clean confirmation windows.The architecture of walking away.

Its absence meant one of two things.Neither of them good.

“Client was either sloppy,” Ace said, tapping the screen where the contract document was open, his finger landing on the blank field where the clause should have been, “or the client never intended for you to walk away clean.”

I leaned over the table.Forearms flat on the wood, the grain pressing into my skin through the sleeves of my henley.The document on screen was the same one I’d received thirteen days ago — grainy photograph attached, handwritten address on a napkin, fifty thousand dollars cash on delivery.Everything exactly as I remembered it except for what wasn’t there: the exit strategy.The how-to of surviving the job after the job was done.

“No exit protocol,” Ace said.“No clean confirmation window.You finish the girl; you become the loose end.”

The words landed hard.Hannah’s eggs sat half-eaten on the plate, yolks congealing while the fog outside thickened until the window became a sheet of pale gray.

Ace pulled up a secondary file.Financial traces — transactions mapped across a spreadsheet, dates and amounts and routing numbers highlighted in yellow.“Payment bounced through three shell accounts before landing in a fund connected to Blackwater Solutions.Private security contractor out of Delaware.They’ve got ties to organized crime through a holding company that fronts for Martinelli’s outfit.”

Martinelli.The name heated the room.We’d done work for him before: clean jobs, well-paid and light on questions.This wasn’t clean.This was the kind of contract you farmed out when you needed deniability: contractor to club, club to trigger finger, trigger finger to fall guy when everything went south.

Decker Holt fit into it now too.The black Tahoe outside Hannah’s bakery, the green sedan with Ohio plates, the distribution corridor forty miles south of Pine Creek: not the threat, just cover.Blackwater had leaned on Holt’s network to run local surveillance without putting their own people on the ground, a rented set of eyes far enough removed from anything that could be traced back to them.I’d spent thirteen days chasing a man who’d never been in charge of anything.Small fish, borrowed for the day.

I studied the spreadsheet.The numbers told a story I’d seen before, just never from this side of the equation.Client hires contractor.Contractor hires club.Club provides the muscle.And when the muscle completes the job, the contractor ensures there’s no muscle left to talk about it.

Hannah sat across from us, her hands wrapped around her mug, steam long gone.She wasn’t looking at the screen.Wasn’t reading the financial traces or the contract language or any of the details Ace had laid out with surgical precision.She was watching my face.Her green eyes moved across my features the way they had for thirteen days — reading, assessing, the same careful attention she’d given everything in this cabin from the moment I lowered the gun in her kitchen.

I glanced up and caught her gaze.She held it, steady as always.My chair scraped half an inch closer before I’d decided to move it.Close enough that my shoulder nearly brushed hers.