Page 8 of Mustang

I caught myself listening for it when the cabin went quiet.When she was outside gathering more herbs from along the back wall where they grew wild between the logs, or when she’d gone to bed and the only sound was the fire and the occasional creak of the roof settling.I’d find myself waiting for it, the way you wait for a clock to tick when the room’s been silent too long.

I didn’t offer help.Didn’t volunteer.But when she stood on her toes reaching for the second pot on the high shelf and couldn’t quite get it, I crossed the room and lifted it down without a word and set it on the counter beside her.She said thanks.I didn’t acknowledge it.

The handle on the skillet had been loose for as long as I’d owned it.One of the screws was stripped, and the handle wobbled when you picked it up hot, which was how you burned yourself if you weren’t careful.I’d learned to work around it.Grab the skillet with the dish towel, lift from the sides, avoid the handle altogether.She mentioned it once, offhand, stirring something at the stove.“This handle’s about to come off in my hand.”

The next morning, before she was up, I took my kit from the duffel by the door and found the right-sized screwdriver.Fixed it in five minutes flat, tightening the good screw and replacing the stripped one with a spare from the bottom of the kit.I set the skillet back on the shelf exactly where it had been, handle solid now, and was sitting at the table with my coffee when she came out of the bedroom.

She noticed within an hour.Picked up the skillet to heat it, felt the difference immediately — her hand paused mid-air, her fingers testing the handle’s new stability.She didn’t say anything.Just glanced at me across the table where I was pretending to read the same message for the third time, and I looked back at my coffee and took a drink that was too hot and didn’t flinch.

We ate together that night.Bean stew with tomatoes and the herbs from the windowsill, torn pieces of the bread she’d made, which was better than anything that had come out of this cabin in its entire existence.The fire was going in the stove, throwing orange light across the table, our bowls and the space between us that wasn’t empty in the way it had been before.Not full, either.Halfway between, charged, aware, like the air before a storm breaks, but warmer.

I tore my bread instead of cutting it.She’d torn hers, So, I did too, without thinking about why.The stew was thick, the beans soft, the tomatoes sweet against the salt.We ate without talking for the first few minutes, the only sounds the scrape of spoons against tin, the crack of the fire and the occasional pop from a log settling.

“You didn’t build this place,” she said.Not a question.A statement, delivered between bites, her eyes on her bowl.

I set my spoon down.“No.”

Silence.I picked up the spoon again, stirred the stew once, and heard myself add, “Club owns it.Has for twenty years.I use it when I need to.”

Two sentences.The most I’d volunteered since the day I walked through her back door with a gun.The words sat between us on the scarred table like a fragile thing I’d set down without meaning to.

She didn’t push.Didn’t ask who the club was or what I used the cabin for or why a motorcycle club owned a log cabin in the middle of nowhere.Just nodded once, almost to herself, and tore another piece of bread.

But she didn’t look away.Her green eyes stayed on mine across the table for a beat too long, and in the firelight, with the bread between us and the smell of woodsmoke and herbs filling the room, I couldn’t read what was in them.Not fear.Not gratitude.Something newer.Something that made the scar along my jaw tighten the way it did when I was holding back more than I should.

I looked down at my stew.Ate another spoonful.The beans were good.The bread was better.The silence between us had weight now, but it was a different weight than the one that had filled this cabin three days ago when she was bound to a chair and I was standing at the window pretending the woods outside were more interesting than the woman behind me.

This weight carried warmth in it.And warmth, in my experience, was where men started making mistakes that ended badly for everyone involved.

I finished my stew.She finished hers.We sat with empty bowls and the last of the bread between us, neither of us reaching for it while the fire burned down and the cabin kept us inside its rough-hewn walls, as if it had been waiting for this silence all along.

The coffee had gone cold an hour ago.I sat at the table with the tin mug between my palms, not drinking, just holding the cold metal to keep my hands occupied, and listened to the soft sound of her breathing from behind the closed door.

She’d gone to bed an hour after dinner.Taken the single blanket from the cot I’d set up for her, my cot, the one I usually slept on when I used this place, and closed the door with a soft click that might have been consideration or might have been exhaustion.Didn’t matter.The door was closed, and the cabin was quiet except for the occasional pop from the dying fire and the sound of her breathing, steady and deep, from the other side of three inches of pine.

I ran the numbers.The way I’d been running them every night since I drove her away from that house with the wilting flowers and the bakery apron.

Fifty thousand dollars.Cash, on delivery of proof she was dead.Proof I hadn’t delivered and wasn’t going to deliver.Fifty grand the club wouldn’t see, money that would have covered three months of overhead at the shop, a new roof for the clubhouse, and weapons we needed.Gone, because I’d walked into a kitchen and looked at a woman’s face and couldn’t do what I’d been hired to do.

The client.Connected enough to know the club’s work, to have the money, to have used us before.A man who wouldn’t take a failed contract lying down.A man who would eventually come looking, either for her or for me, and when he found us, because men like that always found you, the price would be higher than fifty grand.Would be blood, probably.My blood, or hers, or both.

The club.Mustang doesn’t make emotional decisions.Mustang weighs cost against gain and makes the call that keeps the brotherhood alive.Mustang doesn’t jeopardize twenty years of careful positioning because a baker with green eyes made him bread and hung herbs on his windowsill.

She leaves the moment the threat is gone.The moment I confirm the client has moved on, or been moved on, or decided she wasn’t worth the continued effort.She goes back to her house, her bakery, her children’s home, her neighbor with the paper bag of pastries on the porch.This cabin goes back to being what it was — a tool, a stopgap, a place I use when I need to and leave without looking back.

None of this changes anything.

The cabin disagreed.

It smelled like bread.Not the faint, lingering trace of food cooked hours ago, but the deep, settled smell of yeast and flour and heat that had worked its way into the log walls themselves, into the rough-hewn counter, into the fabric of the dish towel hanging from the oven handle.It smelled like woodsmoke too, but the woodsmoke had life underneath it now, a warmth that hadn’t been here before her.

Her apron was folded over the back of the second chair.She’d made it from one of the dish towels — cut a hole for her head, tied the corners around her waist with a bit of twine.Rough, practical improvisation born from needing to work and not having the right tools.She’d folded it neatly before bed, smoothed the fabric with her palms the way she smoothed dough, and left it draped across the chairback like she was coming back for it tomorrow.

She was.That was the problem.

The cracked mug was gone.I’d noticed it the second day — a hairline fracture running from rim to base, barely visible unless you held it to the light, but there.A crack that would split wide open the next time hot liquid hit it.During my last supply run, while she was sleeping, I’d swapped it for the sturdier one from the high shelf.Thicker tin, no cracks, a handle that didn’t burn your fingers.Set it on her side of the table without a word, positioned it exactly where the cracked one had been.

She’d noticed.Of course she’d noticed.Picked it up that morning, tested its weight, glanced at me with that same unreadable expression before pouring her coffee into it instead of saying anything.