Page 26 of Mustang

Mustang’s bike.I knew the sound without having heard it before, the way you know certain things about a person without being told — a pitch of their movement through the world made audible.

Time passed.I stopped counting minutes because counting made each one longer, and instead I sat on the floor with my back against the concrete wall and my knees pulled to my chest and Mustang’s jacket wrapped tight around me, and I listened to the radio through the door and tried not to imagine what the cracks of gunfire meant when they found their mark.

The door opened without warning.No knock, no call — just the heavy mechanism engaging and the steel swinging inward, and Mustang stood in the frame with his cut dark across his shoulders and something wet on his right knuckles that wasn’t sweat.

He didn’t look injured.That was the first thing I registered — no blood on him except what wasn’t his, no limp, no favoring of any one limb.He looked exactly the way he had when he’d left, except colder, the set of his jaw harder, and his eyes did that fast sweep of the room that took in every corner before they landed on me.

“You good?”he asked.

I nodded.My voice was somewhere beneath the knot in my throat, and nodding was still all I had.

He crossed the room in two strides, crouched in front of me with his forearms on his knees, and his hand came up to my face, callused palm against my cheek, thumb moving once across my jawline in a gesture so gentle it felt like it belonged to a different man than the one with blood on his knuckles.

“Two down,” he said.His voice was low, meant for me alone, the words delivered with the same plain conviction he used for everything.“One caught.Loch took a graze.Prospect’s shoulder is messier but he’ll live.”His thumb moved again, a single pass, and then his hand dropped back to his knee.“They came for the shop because they knew we’d be there.Not because they knew about you.Not yet.”

I found my voice somewhere beneath the knot.“Did they—”

“Talk?No.”Something moved across his face — not quite a smile, nothing that gentle.The hard line of a man who’d asked a question and hadn’t liked the answer.“Man spat blood on my boots and called me a name his mother would be ashamed of.Doesn’t matter.We know who sent them.”

Outside the door, the compound had settled into a different kind of quiet — not peaceful, purposeful, the sound of men regrouping, tending wounds, securing perimeters.Through the gap where the door hadn’t quite closed, I caught fragments of conversation — Loch’s voice, thick with something that might have been pain or might have been fury, muttering about concrete pillars and insufficient cover.Ace’s measured tones, lower, discussing something with Socket that involved coordinates and timestamps.

Mustang’s phone buzzed against his hip.He pulled it out, looked at the screen, and something in his expression shifted — not much, a fractional softening around the eyes that I wouldn’t have caught thirteen days ago but caught now because I’d spent thirteen days learning the geography of his face.

J.D.’s text, displayed in stark white against black:She’s good.Asking about you.

Mustang read it once.Pocketed the phone.Looked at me for a beat longer than he needed to, and then he was on his feet, moving toward the door with that same unhurried stride that covered ground faster than it had any right to.

In the common area, Ace was waiting.Blood on his left forearm where he’d wrapped it with a shop rag, his expression set in the focus of a man who was already three steps ahead of whatever came next.Mustang crossed to him, glass crunching under his boots.I hadn’t noticed the glass before, fragments of the shop’s front window clinging to his treads, catching the overhead light in dull gleams.

“This ends now,” Mustang said.His voice carried across the common area without him raising it, the way certain sounds carried in certain rooms.“All of it.”

Ace nodded once, sharp.“Church.Tonight.”

Behind them, near the bar, Loch was winding a fresh rag around his forearm where the graze had split the skin open.Blood had soaked through the first bandage and was working its way into the second, and his mouth was moving around words I couldn’t hear until the common area quieted enough that his voice carried.

“Told you women complicate things,” Loch muttered, the words directed at the ceiling beams or the row of patches or the empty air between himself and whatever god might be listening.“Every damn time.”

The room held the statement.Screwball, wiping down the bar with a cloth that was doing more harm than good to the blood on the oak, didn’t laugh.Socket, bent over his laptop at the nearest table, didn’t look up.Torque, who had appeared from somewhere with a first-aid kit in one hand and a bottle of whiskey in the other, set both down on the bar without comment.

Mustang stood in the center of the common area with glass under his boots and his brothers bleeding around him and the weight of whatever came next already settling across his shoulders, and for the first time since I’d known him, his mouth pulled into a hard line that wasn’t quite a smile — because for the first time, he didn’t argue with it.

I stayed where I was, pressed against the doorframe of the back room with Mustang’s jacket hanging off my shoulders and the dried herbs still pressed against my ribs, and I watched the man I loved stand in the wreckage of something he’d built and decide, with the same certainty he brought to everything, that he would build it again.

The common area held us all.The patches on the wall.The blood on the floor.The taut silence of men who had survived something and were already calculating what came next, and in that silence, beneath the fluorescent lights and the smell of gunpowder and the distant wail of sirens that nobody in the room seemed especially concerned about, I understood what it meant to belong to something that would burn the world down before it let you go.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Hannah

The room smelled like him.Gun oil and leather and something underneath that was just skin, just Mustang, the scent of a man who’d been moving through the world the same way for so long that his body had stopped bothering to announce itself.I stood just inside the bolted door with the cold concrete under my boots and took it in — the single bed, unmade, sheets rumpled the way sheets get when a man sleeps in them alone and doesn’t care how they look.A scarred wooden dresser against the far wall, its surface bare except for a handgun resting on top, barrel pointed at the wall, grip angled toward the door.The overhead bulb cast everything in dim yellow light that turned the concrete walls the color of old bone and made the shadows in the corners feel deeper than they were.

His cut hung on a hook behind the door.The leather was dark with dew or sweat or blood — in that light, I couldn’t tell which, and maybe it didn’t matter.The patches caught the bulb’s glow in dull crimson: Wicked Mayhem MC across the shoulders, President below that, the rank he’d earned through whatever twenty years in this life had cost him.I could still smell the pine from the mountain cabin on my clothes, underneath the sharper scent of cordite that had worked its way into the canvas of his jacket during the firefight.The dried herbs pressed against my ribs in the inside pocket, rosemary and thyme and the purple oregano, brittle now but still holding their smell.

Radio chatter bled under the door.Muffled, urgent, voices I didn’t recognize cutting across each other in the clipped rhythm of men coordinating something that couldn’t wait.Coordinates.Timestamps.Something about a perimeter sweep.Then a burst of distant gunfire cracked through the night — sharp, flat, the sound carrying across open ground before the compound walls swallowed it.My body knew that sound now.My body had decided, sometime in the past hour, that the appropriate response to gunfire was not to flinch but to listen, to count the shots, to calculate distance the way Mustang calculated everything.Three rounds.East side of the property.Farther away than the first volley.

Mustang crossed to the door and threw the deadbolt.The mechanism engaged with a solid clunk that echoed off the concrete.He moved to the single narrow window, high-set, reinforced glass, the kind that wouldn’t break without effort, and scanned the dark yard below with that flat, calculating gaze I’d watched a hundred times now.His jaw was set.The scar along it pulled tight against the stubble, a pale line in the yellow light.Whatever he saw down there satisfied him, or didn’t dissatisfy him enough to act on it, because he pulled the heavy curtain across the window with a single tug and turned back to face the room.

I sat on the edge of the bed.The frame creaked under my weight, springs complaining the way springs do in beds that weren’t built for comfort.My red hair fell loose around my shoulders, tangled from the run through the clubhouse, from Ace’s hand on my arm guiding me toward the war room, from whatever had happened in the thirty minutes between the first gunshot and this bolted door.There was a smear of ash on my forearm, gray black against skin, and I hadn’t noticed it until now.Probably from the shop.The front window exploding, glass and smoke and the acrid smell of something burning that wasn’t supposed to burn.