Page 31 of Mustang

“Evidence is solid.Prisoner’s contained.Cole’s operation has three, maybe four days before it comes apart completely.”His gaze held mine for a beat longer than it needed to.“Club’s handling it.”

Three words.Club’s handling it.The oldest phrase in our language, the one that meant brothers were moving, channels were open, and whatever needed doing would get done by men who knew how to do it quietly.I’d heard it a hundred times in twenty years.Had said it myself.Had built a life around the certainty that those two words carried, and standing in a courtyard with Hannah’s pulse under my hands and Ace’s steady presence at my shoulder, I felt the weight of it settle into its proper place—not gone, not lighter, just distributed across shoulders that could carry it because they weren’t carrying it alone.

I released a breath.Slow.Deliberate.Felt it leave my lungs and take something with it—the coiled readiness that had lived in my muscles since the first crack of rifle fire, the hypervigilance that had kept me scanning the tree line even while my hands were checking Hannah for injuries.My shoulders dropped.A fraction.Not much.Enough that I felt the difference, the ache of tension unwinding after holding too long, and Hannah’s eyes tracked the change because she’d been watching me long enough to read the tells.

I pulled her against my chest.One arm around her shoulders, my hand finding the back of her head where her hair fell loose and warm against my palm.She came into the space without hesitation, her face pressing against the front of my cut where the club’s patch sat over my heart, and I felt her breath through the leather, warm and even, and the smell of her,bread flour and sleep and something underneath that was just her, just Hannah,cut through the cordite and the blood and the morning dew like something I’d been waiting for without knowing I was waiting.

“It’s done.”I said it low, against the top of her head, the words meant for her ears only.Not a promise.Not a guarantee.A statement of fact as I understood it: the threat had a name now.The club had the name.And men like Garrett Cole didn’t survive having their operations laid bare by a brotherhood that had just taken a direct hit and was still standing.

She didn’t answer.Didn’t need to.Her arms came around my waist, under my cut, her palms flat against the small of my back, and she held on the way someone holds on when they’ve been falling for a long time and have finally found something solid to grab.

Around us, the compound moved.Brothers with brooms sweeping brass from the gravel.Two men securing the buckled gate with chain and a come-along winch, pulling the twisted metal back into something resembling closed.The prospect with the grazed shoulder sitting on the clubhouse steps while Socket cleaned the wound with whiskey and a cotton pad, his face tight but his mouth shut because complaining wasn’t in the prospect handbook.Someone had backed a flatbed truck up to the wrecked SUV and was rigging chains through the crumpled frame, the engine ticking as it cooled in the strengthening dawn.

I kept one hand on Hannah’s back.Felt the rise and fall of her breathing through the flannel, steady and alive against my palm, and I watched my brothers work with the quiet pride that came from leading men who knew their jobs and did them without being told twice.The compound was battered.The gate would need replacing.The east fence had taken rifle fire in three places and the razor wire was hanging in loose coils where bullets had clipped the support posts.But the clubhouse stood.The bikes were untouched under their canvas covers.The perimeter was secure and the threat had a name and the woman in my arms was whole and breathing and here, which was the only metric that had ever really mattered.

I looked down at the top of her head.Red hair catching the first true sunlight of the morning, the pale gold of it warming against the gray flannel of my shirt, and I thought about the cabin—the sealed window, the reinforced chair, the herbs on the windowsill and the smell of bread in log walls that had never smelled like anything but gun oil before she arrived.She’d brought all of that here.The warmth.The certainty.The gravity of a person who made broken things whole by the simple act of caring for them, and I understood, standing in the wreckage of a compound that had just survived an attack because twenty men had moved as one, that what she’d built in that cabin hadn’t been left behind when we drove away.It had come with us.Was here now, in the gravel under our feet and the air we were breathing and the way my hand rested on the small of her back like it had found the place it was supposed to be.

Hannah lifted her face from my chest.Looked up at me, her green eyes clear in the morning light, and I saw everything I needed to see without her saying a word.No fear.No uncertainty.Just the steady presence of someone who had walked through fire and come out the other side standing beside the man who’d walked through it with her.

The compound around us was already healing.Brothers calling to each other across the courtyard, the rattle of tools, the low rumble of the flatbed’s engine as it took the strain of the wrecked SUV.Ace had moved to the guard tower, his phone out again, coordinating whatever came next with the efficient calm that had kept the club alive through twenty years of worse mornings than this one.

I kept my hand on Hannah’s back.She stayed at my side, bare feet on cold gravel, my flannel shirt hanging off her frame like something that belonged there, and the morning opened up around us—gray giving way to gold, cordite thinning on the wind, the compound battered but standing, the club intact, and Hannah Morgan, baker and witness and mine, no longer hidden, no longer a secret, finally exactly where she was supposed to be.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Hannah

The gravel crunched under my boots as we walked away from the compound, the noise of the club fading behind us: engines idling, voices carrying across the courtyard, the distant thud of the main door swinging shut.I’d picked the farthest corner of the lot, where the pine shadows stretched long across the stones and the brothers couldn’t hear what I was about to say.The afternoon light cut everything in sharp relief, like the mountain was holding its breath.

Hannah walked beside me.She’d changed out of my flannel sometime in the hours since morning, into a borrowed t-shirt from one of the prospects’ women and a pair of jeans that were too long for her.She’d rolled the cuffs twice.Her red hair was loose around her shoulders, catching the last gold of the day, and she kept her arms folded across her chest the way she did when she was thinking hard about something she wasn’t ready to voice.I’d watched that posture for thirteen days in the cabin.Knew what it meant.

I stopped when the compound noise had thinned to something I could talk over.Turned to face her.My cut sat heavy on my shoulders, the leather warmed by the day, the silver rings on my fingers catching light where the pine shadows broke.I held myself the way I always held myself,still, controlled, nothing wasted,but my jaw was tight and I could feel the muscle jumping along the scarred edge where the morning’s adrenaline had left its mark.I exhaled slowly through my nose.One breath.Two.The kind of breathing you did before you said something that couldn’t be unsaid.

“You can leave.”

The words came out flat.Clean.No ornament, no lead-in, just the offer laid between us on the gravel like something I’d been carrying since the first night in her kitchen and had finally decided to set down.

“I mean it,” I said when she didn’t speak.Her green eyes were steady on mine, reading, the way they always read—patient, thorough, missing nothing.“No guilt.No obligation.The club’s handling Cole.The threat’s contained.You walk out that gate, get in a car, go anywhere you want—back to your bakery, somewhere new, doesn’t matter.I won’t think less of you for it.Won’t hold it against you.Some lives aren’t built for this.”I gestured back toward the compound without looking at it.“For any of it.”

My voice had dropped to the register I used for things that mattered.The quiet one.The one that made prospects stand straighter and brothers stop talking.I didn’t reach for her.Didn’t crowd her space.Kept my hands at my sides where she could see them, rings and scars and all of it, and watched her face for whatever came next.

She didn’t hesitate.

I’d prepared for hesitation.For the shift of weight, the glance toward the road, the stillness of a person weighing options that had consequences no matter which way they fell.I’d seen it a hundred times in twenty years of hard conversations.The pause.The calculation.The moment where someone decided whether what they wanted was worth what it would cost.

Hannah didn’t give me any of that.

Her chin lifted.One smooth motion, decisive, the copper in her hair catching the light where it fell across her forehead.She stepped forward instead of back.Closed the gap between us with two strides that scattered gravel under her borrowed boots and reached for my hand—her fingers finding two of my silver rings, wrapping around them with a warmth that went straight through the metal into skin that had stopped registering temperature the way it should a long time ago.

“I’m not going anywhere.”

Four words.Delivered the way she delivered everything—directly, honestly, with the full weight of what they meant behind them.No performance.No dramatic pause.Just the truth, laid between us on the gravel the same way I’d laid my offer, and the distance between those two truths was exactly zero.

My free hand came up before my brain had finished processing what she’d said.Found the side of her face, palm cupping her jaw, thumb brushing the ridge of her cheekbone where the morning’s dust had long since been washed away.Her skin was warm.Dry.I could feel the fine bones beneath my fingers, the architecture of a face I’d memorized without meaning to over thirteen days in a cabin that had stopped being a hiding place days ago.I tucked a strand of red hair behind her ear,copper bright against the fading light, soft where it slipped between my fingers,and held her gaze because looking away felt like a betrayal of something I hadn’t named yet.

Neither of us spoke.

The compound was quiet behind us.Brothers moving through the aftermath, the rattle of tools, the low murmur of voices that carried on the afternoon wind without reaching us where we stood.A crow called from somewhere in the pines.The light kept changing, gold bleeding toward orange at the edges, and Hannah’s fingers stayed wrapped around my rings like she’d found something she intended to keep.