Page 4 of Mustang

I closed her door.Circled to the driver’s side.Got in.The photograph was still there on the seat between us, facedown where I’d left it hours ago.Her grainy image pressed against the upholstery, unseen.

I put the truck in drive and pulled away from the curb.Headlights on, cutting twin beams through the fog.Low-hanging, thick, the fog turned familiar streets foreign.I kept both hands on the wheel.Ten and two.Eyes moving between the road and the mirrors, checking for headlights that shouldn’t be there, for movement that didn’t belong.

Nothing.Empty street behind us.Empty street ahead.The neighborhood slept on, unaware that the woman in the house with the wilting flowers and the bakery apron was gone, driven away by a man with a gun and a change of heart he still didn’t fully understand.

Hannah sat beside me, silent.Her bound hands rested in her lap, fingers curled loosely together.Her bare feet were pale against the dark floormat.She hadn’t asked for shoes.Hadn’t asked for a jacket.Had just gotten in the truck when I told her to and now, she was sitting there watching the fog roll past the windows, and I was driving us away from everything she knew with no destination and no plan beyond keeping her alive.

The weight of it settled across my shoulders as we reached the end of her street.Heavy.Solid.A weight that came with consequences, with chain reactions I couldn’t predict yet.Fifty thousand dollars gone.A client betrayed.A woman in my passenger seat who should have been a body in a morgue by morning, and instead was breathing, warm, alive beside me with flour still dusting the hem of her sleep shirt.

I checked the rearview one last time.The street disappeared behind us, swallowed by fog and distance.Her house was dark.The neighborhood was quiet.No one followed.

The photograph lay between us, facedown, and I knew without looking that her green eyes were staring at the upholstery, grainy and blurred and completely unaware of what had just happened to her.

I’d set a chain reaction in motion.A choice I couldn’t take back.A decision that would cost me, would cost the club, would ripple through lives I hadn’t considered when I took the contract three days ago.

And I’d do it again.Right now, in this truck, with the fog ahead and the quiet woman beside me, I’d make the same choice.

The weight settled.I adjusted my grip on the wheel.Drove on into the fog, toward whatever came next, with Hannah Morgan breathing beside me and the contract burning a hole in my jacket pocket and the club waiting at the end of a road I couldn’t see yet.

CHAPTER TWO

Hannah

Consciousness returned in pieces: first the bite of plastic around my wrists, then the rough wood of the chair beneath me, and finally the smell of pine sap and cold ash that filled my nose like a solid thing.I opened my eyes to a cabin I’d never seen before, and the man from my kitchen standing at the far end of the room with his back to me, pouring coffee like we were just two people sharing a morning.

My hands were secured behind the chair with white zip ties.Every shift of my weight sent the plastic digging deeper into my skin, and I’d already shifted too many times trying to get comfortable against wood that had never been meant for comfort.The chair was old, scarred, its arms worn smooth by other people’s elbows.My wrists throbbed where the plastic had bitten in.

The cabin was small -- I could only see one door -- rough-hewn log walls stained dark by years of woodsmoke.A single window with a sliding wooden shutter stood to my right, cracked open just enough to let in a pale wedge of early morning light that cut across the scarred table between us.A wood-burning stove hulked in the corner, its cast-iron door closed but a low fire crackling inside, painting the room in warm orange shadows that didn’t match the cold I felt in my bones.Two mismatched chairs at the table.Nothing on the walls.Nothing personal anywhere.

The man,Mustang, I’d hear him called later,stood with his back to me at a small counter built into the wall.His leather cut stretched across broad shoulders, the Wicked Mayhem MC patch visible on the back in crimson and black.Tattooed forearms moved with the practiced ease of someone who’d made coffee a thousand mornings in a thousand different places.A battered tin pot steamed in his hand.The smell of it cut through the pine and ash, rich and bitter, and my stomach twisted at the thought of food even as my mouth went dry.

I tested the zip ties immediately.Twisted my wrists against the plastic until the skin burned.Rocked the chair forward on its front legs, feeling the back rail dig into the plastic binding, hoping for a crack, a weak point, any give at all.Scraped the ties against the wood until my shoulders ached from the angle.Nothing gave.The plastic held, and the chair held, and I was exactly where he’d put me.

“Where am I?”My voice came out steadier than I expected.Flat.Direct.The same tone I used with difficult customers at the bakery, the one that saidI’m not backing down even if you are twice my size.

Mustang turned.Not fast.Nothing about him was fast.He moved like something large and deliberate, each motion carrying the full weight of its intention.Across the room, he found me, assessed me, catalogued me.A jagged scar ran along his jawline beneath a salt-and-pepper beard.Heavy silver rings, on both hands, caught the firelight.

He set a tin mug on the table between us.Didn’t cross to me.Didn’t offer it.Just placed it there, steam rising in a thin curl, and let his gaze settle on mine like a weight that intended to stay.

“Someone wants you dead,” he said.His voice was low, measured, each word carrying the same flat certainty.“Leaving you where you were would’ve been a death sentence.”

The words struck my chest and stayed there, heavy and cold.I’d known it from the moment he raised the gun in my kitchen, the way you know a storm is coming before the first drop falls—a shift in the air, a pressure change against your skin.But hearing it aloud made it real in a way the gun hadn’t.

“Who?”I asked.“Who wants me dead?”

Mustang didn’t answer.He turned back to the counter, picked up his own mug, and took a long drink.Steam fogged the lower half of his face for a moment before dissipating.

“Why?”I pressed.“What did I do?”

Nothing.Just the crack of the fire in the stove and the sound of him swallowing coffee.

“If you’re going to keep me here,if you’re going to tie me to a chair and not tell me why,then at least give me a reason that makes sense.I bake bread.I visit a children’s home twice a week.I wave to my neighbor.I don’t do things that get people killed.”

Mustang set his mug down.Those steel-gray eyes pinned mine with enough force to raise the hair on my arms.“Doesn’t matter what you did or didn’t do.Matters what someone thinks you saw.”

“I didn’t see anything.”

“Then you got unlucky.”One shoulder lifted in a half-shrug that wasn’t casual at all.“Happens.”