Page 5 of Mustang

“To whom?To people like you?”

A beat of silence.Then, “Yeah.To people like me.”

I pushed harder.“Who’s the client?The one who hired you.Give me a name.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because names get people killed.”He said it the way someone might saythe sky is blueorwater is wet—not a warning, just a fact he’d learned through experience I didn’t want to imagine.

I opened my mouth to ask another question and caught myself.The silence between us stretched, elastic and taut, and I understood with sudden clarity that he wasn’t going to answer.Not because he was cruel or playing games.Because in his world, information was currency, and he wasn’t spending any more than he had to.

I let my gaze travel the room.Catalogued the exits the way I’d catalogue ingredients for a difficult recipe—methodical, precise, looking for what was missing.

Front door: heavy wood, reinforced with iron brackets, closed and likely locked.Too far from my chair to reach even if my hands were free.

Window: sliding wooden shutter, cracked about three inches.The glass behind it was thick, wavy with age.Even if I could get the shutter open,which I couldn’t, with my hands bound behind me,the window was too small to climb through.

Wood stove: hot, dangerous, useless as an exit.

Nothing else.No back door.No cellar hatch.Just four log walls, a roof, and a man drinking coffee on the other side of a scarred table.

I tested the zip ties one more time.Felt the plastic bite deeper into my wrists.Felt the chair rock uselessly beneath me.Felt the cold morning air from the cracked window slide across my bare feet and up the legs of the sleep shirt I’d been wearing when he took me from my kitchen, which felt like a lifetime ago.

My jaw tightened.The muscles in my neck went rigid.I could feel my pulse hammering in my throat, in my temples, in the places where the plastic cut into my skin, and beneath all of it was a single, crystalline thought:I am not getting out of this chair on my own.

Mustang watched me from across the room.Didn’t speak.Didn’t move.Just stood there with his coffee and his scar and those steel-gray eyes that missed nothing and waited for whatever I’d do next.

I did nothing.I sat in the chair with my wrists bound behind me and the early morning light cutting across the table between us, and I watched him watch me, and the questions I still had sat in my throat like stones I couldn’t swallow.

The morning stretched.Light strengthened through the cracked shutter, turning from pale gray to a warmer shade that caught the dust motes floating above the stove.I cycled through approaches like a radio scanning stations,demand, bargain, silence, repeat,and Mustang met each one with the same patient stillness, as if my voice were just another sound in a cabin full of them.

“Tell me who hired you.”

Nothing.

“I have money.Not fifty thousand, but—”

“Not about money.”

“Then what is it about?”

Silence.

The silence lasted longer each time.I’d fill it with questions until my throat felt raw, and then I’d stop, and the cabin would go quiet except for the crack of the fire and the sound of Mustang moving around doing things that needed doing, whether I was talking or not.

He fed the stove another log.Opened the cast-iron door with a gloved hand, tossed in a chunk of pine that caught with a hiss and a shower of sparks, closed the door with a metallic clank that echoed off the log walls.Checked the shutter latch—ran his thumb along the wooden slide, tested it’s give, nodded once to himself like he was confirming the fit.Picked up a battered cell phone from the table, scanned the screen with his brow furrowed, set it facedown again without making a call or sending a text.Each movement was deliberate, the ease of someone who’d done the same things in the same order for so long that the body didn’t need the brain’s permission anymore.

I watched his hands.

They were large.Scarred across the knuckles and along the backs, old wounds healed into pale ridges against tanned skin.Heavy silver rings adorned three fingers on each hand, not decorative, not really.Rings that doubled as weapons when necessary, that had probably doubled as weapons more than once.His nails were clean but cut short, practical, the hands of someone who used them for work that wasn’t gentle.

And they never reached for me.

Not once.Not when he set the coffee mug on the table.Not when he fed the stove.Not when he checked the shutter or picked up the phone or moved past my chair to get to the counter where the tin of crackers sat.He gave me a wide berth every time, his body angled away from mine, his hands occupied with whatever task was in front of him.As if touching me was a line he’d decided, somewhere between my kitchen and this cabin, that he wouldn’t cross.

The detail lodged in my chest like a splinter I couldn’t dig out.Small.Persistent.Working its way deeper every time I noticed it.