Page 24 of Mustang

The room settled around me.Not with welcome exactly, but with acceptance.I had been accounted for and filed under not a problem.Socket went back to the engine part.Screwball kept talking.Torque stayed quiet at the far end, hands busy with something that caught the fluorescent light in dull gleams.

I watched Mustang move through the room.

He didn’t move like other men.Each step had purpose, each gesture already decided.The prospect near the door straightened when Mustang passed.Socket tilted his head to catch a low word near the workbench.Screwball’s commentary died the moment Mustang’s expression shifted from neutral to business.The man who drew cinnamon-roll jokes and the man who could field-strip a handgun were the same person, and the transition took no effort at all.

By the time Mustang came back to stand beside me at the bar, the coffee in my mug was half-gone and the room had forgotten I was new.Or if it hadn’t forgotten, it had decided that new wasn’t the same as unwelcome, and that was enough.

I set the mug down.The tin made a soft click against the oak, and I turned toward him, close enough that my shoulder brushed his arm, and said it quietly enough that only he could hear it: “They’d do anything for you.”

Mustang didn’t answer right away.His eyes stayed on the row of patches behind the bar — crimson and black, mounted in frames that caught the light.Something moved across his face.Not pride.Something heavier.

Then: “Yeah.They would.”

Two words.He said them the way he said everything, plainly, like there was nothing left to argue.Truth that didn’t need dressing up because it stood on its own, solid as the oak bar beneath my palms.

I looked around the room.The patches on the wall.The bikes visible through the half-open garage door, lined up under the awning like machines waiting for orders.The men who hadn’t flinched when Mustang walked in with a woman no one was supposed to know existed — who’d nodded, poured coffee, pulled out a stool, and gone back to work because whatever their president had brought home was, by definition, worth bringing home.

This was what he protected.Not territory.Not money.Not reputation.This room.These men.Socket cussing over a stripped bolt, Screwball cutting tension with jokes, Torque anchoring the far wall without saying much at all.This was worth walking away from fifty thousand dollars for.Worth burning a safehouse for.Worth whatever came next.

I understood it then, standing at the bar with Mustang’s shoulder against mine and coffee warming my hands.Not with my brain.With my bones.

The realization settled across my shoulders, heavy and sure.I leaned into it the way I’d leaned into his hand on my back, because some weights were meant to be carried, and some men were worth carrying them for.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Mustang

Hannah was still wearing my jacket.The sleeves hung past her fingertips, the collar carried my scent, and the dried herbs pressed against her ribs in the inside pocket kept the mountain cabin with her even as Screwball refilled her coffee mug at the bar and Socket swore loudly at something under the fluorescent lights of the garage bay.

The clubhouse had settled around me the way a strange room eventually does when you stand in it long enough — the initial overwhelm giving way to individual details.The pool table’s green felt, worn thin at the corners.The row of patches behind the bar, crimson and black, mounted in frames that caught the overhead light.Men moving through the space with the easy confidence of people who’d built it and knew every inch.I’d been here maybe an hour.Maybe less.Time moved differently in rooms where nobody bothered with clocks.

Then the door to the back hallway swung open and Ace came through it with his phone in his hand and his face set in a way that made Screwball’s next joke die halfway through the sentence.

“War room,” Ace said, not to anyone in particular, but the words carried across the common area and landed exactly where they were supposed to.Socket set his wrench down with a clank that echoed.Torque straightened from whatever he’d been working on near the garage door.Screwball’s hand went still on the bar rail.

Mustang was already moving.He’d been standing beside me, close enough that our shoulders touched, and then he wasn’t.He was crossing the room with that unhurried stride that covered ground faster than it had any right to, his hand coming to rest on the small of my back in a gesture that wasn’t a question.

“Come on,” he said.

The war room was at the end of a corridor I hadn’t known existed.Windowless, concrete walls painted a dull gray that absorbed sound instead of reflecting it, the air thick with the stale feeling of rooms that didn’t get opened often enough.A single overhead bulb hung from an exposed wire, casting the space in a harsh, unforgiving light that turned everything the color of old bone.A corkboard dominated the far wall, already pinned with surveillance photographs, handwritten notes on index cards, strings connecting names to dates in a pattern that made my stomach tighten when I looked at it for too long.

A scarred wooden table sat in the center.Ace was already pulling out a chair, his laptop open and glowing blue against the gray.Socket followed with an armful of manila folders, a printed ledger, and a dossier labeled in black marker:Hargrove/Deluca — Case File 7.He dropped it all on the table with a sound like a burden being set down after too long.

I stood near the doorway.Mustang’s hand stayed on my lower back, not pushing, just present, and I understood without being told that I was supposed to be here.That whatever was about to happen in this room was happening because of me, and running from it wasn’t an option even if I’d wanted to.

Socket tapped a photograph.Grainy, shot from a distance, three men standing outside a downtown parking garage under a streetlight that washed everything in sodium yellow.The timestamp in the corner read 11:47 PM, three weeks ago.The night I’d closed the bakery late.The night I’d cut through the parking garage on my way home because the sidewalk was under construction and the detour signs had blown over in the wind.

“That’s Deluca,” Socket said, his finger landing on a broad-shouldered man in a camel coat.“Hargrove beside him.And this one,” his finger moved to the third figure, thinner, with a narrow face partially obscured by the shadow of the garage entrance “,we’re calling Priest.For now.”

I recognized the parking garage.The concrete pillars.The exit stairwell where I’d pressed myself against the wall and held my breath while a man I couldn’t see clearly put two rounds into another man’s chest thirty feet away.The sound had been wrong — not the sharp crack of movie gunshots but something flatter, wetter, the kind of sound that carried in concrete spaces and didn’t let go.

Mustang’s hand tightened against my back.Not enough to hurt.Enough to say he knew what I was seeing.

Ace traced his finger across the printed ledger.Columns of numbers, dates, routing codes highlighted in yellow marker.His voice was low and measured, the cadence of someone reading facts he’d already memorized.“Wire transfers.Three of them, over the past month, routed through a shell company called Meridian Holdings.Meridian’s registered to a holding company in Delaware, which is owned by a trust fund that traces back to City Councilman Elias Reeves.”

The name changed the air in the room.I knew it — everyone knew it.Reeves had been in the local papers for years, always photographed at charity galas with his hand on some donor’s shoulder, his smile the polished kind that suggested the person behind it had never worried about money in their life.

“Reeves has ties to organized crime through his construction contracts,” Ace continued.“We’ve known that.What we didn’t know was that he’s been laundering money through Meridian for the better part of a decade, and Meridian’s been paying Hargrove for wet work.”