Page 30 of Mustang

The man’s jaw worked.Blood bubbled at the corner of his mouth.He said nothing.

“Your team was deployed as a secondary measure.Primary contractor fails to confirm, you get sent in to clean up the loose ends—the target and the operator both.That’s the playbook.I’ve seen it before.”

Still nothing.His eyes held mine with the flat resistance of someone who’d been trained to endure, to wait out the first round of pressure, to see if the man asking questions knew enough to be dangerous or was just fishing.

I reached down and picked up the surveillance still.Held it in front of his face, close enough that he couldn’t look away without turning his head, and I watched his pupils contract when they registered what they were seeing.

The image was grainy but clear enough.A city street at night.A man in a suit walking past the storefront of Hannah’s bakery, the pale blue apron visible in the window behind him.And twenty feet behind the suited man, another figure—taller, broader, hand extended toward the small of the suited man’s back where the shape of a suppressor was just visible against the dark fabric.

“She saw your boss put a bullet in a city councilman,” I said.“In a parking garage on her way home from work.That’s what this is about.Not what she did.What she saw.”

The man’s jaw tightened.A muscle jumped in his temple, once, twice, and then his gaze dropped from the photograph to the gravel between us.Not a nod.Not a word.But the tightening was enough—the body betraying what the mouth wouldn’t say, the oldest tell in the book.

Ace shifted his weight.The barrel of his rifle came to rest on the man’s shoulder, not pressing, just present, the cold metal making contact with skin still hot from the fight.The message was clear without being spoken: the next round of questions would come with a different kind of encouragement.

“Garrett Cole,” the man said.The name came out thick, distorted by the blood in his mouth and the damage to his nose, but we all heard it.“Mid-level.Political fixer out of the mayor’s office.He’s been running cleanup for eighteen months.Buying silence when he can, eliminating when he can’t.”

“Who’s he cleaning up for?”

“Reeves.”The name came easier than the last one, like the man was relieved to hand somebody else the weight of it.“Councilman Reeves.Cole’s been on his payroll two years, maybe more.Every problem Reeves can’t afford in the papers, Cole makes disappear.Money moves through a shell company, Meridian, something like that.Cole’s the hands.Reeves is the one who decides whose name goes on the list.”

I kept my boot where it was.My knee settled onto his bound wrists, adding pressure in a slow, controlled increase that made his breath catch again.“The councilman.”

“Richmond.Was pushing back on zoning variances for a development Cole’s people had money in.Cole decided Richmond was more liability than asset.”A pause.His eyes found the surveillance still again, still clutched in my hand, and something passed across his face—not remorse, not exactly.The look of a man realizing, too late, that the job had dimensions he hadn’t been briefed on.“The baker was supposed to be collateral.Wrong place, wrong time.Cole doesn’t leave witnesses.”

I held his gaze for three long seconds.Reading the tells, the micro-expressions, the things his body was saying that his voice wasn’t.The story fit.The pieces locked together—the financial traces Ace had pulled, the contract with no exit strategy, the tactical team sent to clean up what the primary operator had failed to finish.Eighteen months of a political fixer using private contractors to eliminate problems, and Hannah Morgan had walked into the crosshairs because she’d been standing at her bakery window at the wrong moment on the wrong night.

I straightened.My knee came off his wrists, and he sagged against the gravel, relief flooding his features for half a second before the reality of his situation settled back in.Prisoner.Contained.Expendable to the same people who’d sent him here.

I handed the documents to Ace without looking at him.Our eyes met for a fraction of a second: the look that passed between us contained twenty years of shared understanding, of operations run and consequences faced and the cold calculus of what happened next when a club brother’s woman had been targeted by a man who needed to disappear.Ace nodded once.Took the papers.Folded them back into the laptop case with the same methodical care he brought to everything.

“Secure him,” I said to the two brothers nearest the clubhouse door.“Call Draper.Tell him we’ve got a package that needs relocation, no law enforcement, no paper trail.He’ll know what to do.”

They moved.Fast.Efficient.The prisoner was on his feet between them before he could process what was happening, his bound wrists held at an angle that discouraged struggle, and they walked him toward the clubhouse with the practiced coordination of men who’d handled worse than one bloody contractor on a Tuesday morning.

I turned.

Hannah stood at the edge of the courtyard.She’d moved from the doorway—crossed twenty yards of open gravel while the interrogation was happening, bare feet on cold stone, my flannel shirt hanging off her frame like armor two sizes too large.Her face was pale.The kind of pale that comes from hearing your own death plotted aloud by the man who’d been sent to deliver it.But her chin was up.Her green eyes found mine across the gravel with a steadiness that made something in my chest twist—not pity, not protectiveness, though both were there.Something closer to recognition.The look of someone who’d been afraid for so long that fear had burned itself out and left something harder in its place.

She’d heard every word.Garrett Cole.Political fixer.Eighteen months of silenced witnesses and a city councilman dead on the street outside her bakery window.The architecture of the thing that had nearly killed her, laid bare in the gray light of a compound courtyard by a man with a broken nose and nothing left to lose.

She didn’t flinch.Didn’t look away.Held my gaze across the bloodstained gravel with the same unwavering focus she’d shown in a kitchen thirteen days ago when I’d raised a gun and she’d offered me coffee instead of screams.

The compound held its breath around us.Brothers tending to a grazed shoulder on one of the prospects by the guard tower.The smell of cordite thinning as the dawn wind picked up.The buckled gate hanging at its crooked angle, metal groaning softly where the hinge had given way.

I crossed the gravel toward her.

I reached her and my hands found her shoulders before my mouth found words.Turned her gently, once, scanning—the flannel shirt, the bare arms, the pale skin of her throat where the collar hung open.My palms ran down her arms to her wrists, checking for blood that wasn’t hers, for damage that hadn’t happened, for any sign that the firefight had reached the one person in this compound I couldn’t afford to lose.

She was clean.Unharmed.The gravel had left a fine dust on the soles of her bare feet and there was a smudge of something,cordite, probably, or dust from the clubhouse doorway,across one cheekbone, but her skin was whole under my hands, her pulse steady where my thumbs pressed against the inside of her wrists.I could feel it, the double-beat beneath the skin, and the fact that it was there at all,strong, regular, alive,made something in my chest unclench by degrees I could measure but not name.

“I heard what he said.”Her voice was quiet, steady, carrying just enough to reach me and no further.The green of her eyes had darkened in the gray light, but the focus was the same—direct, unflinching, the way it had been since the first night in her kitchen when she’d looked down the barrel of a gun and offered coffee instead of panic.“Garrett Cole.That’s a real name.That’s a real person who can be stopped.”

I nodded.Once.My hands were still on her wrists, her pulse against my palms, and I didn’t let go because letting go meant acknowledging that the moment had passed and I wasn’t ready for that yet.Not with the smell of cordite still hanging between us and the compound in ruins around us and the weight of what had nearly happened still sitting across my shoulders like something I could feel the shape of.

Ace appeared at my shoulder.Phone already to his ear, his voice low and measured as he coordinated with someone on the other end, Socket, probably, or one of the prospects manning the comms desk inside.He didn’t look at us directly.Kept his eyes on the tree line, on the brothers securing the perimeter, on the practical geometry of damage control.But I felt his presence the way I always did—calm, competent, the steady counterweight to whatever chaos the club had walked into.

He finished the call.Pocketed the phone.Turned to me with the plain conviction of a man delivering a report he’d already verified.