Page 9 of Mustang

I looked at it now.It sat empty on the table across from me, catching the dull orange glow of the embers through the stove’s grate.A mug.Just a mug.An object that shouldn’t matter at all.

I picked up my phone.

The encrypted thread was where I’d left it.Three new messages since this afternoon, each more insistent than the last.The latest one, time-stamped two hours ago:Need confirmation.Status report or I assume failure and proceed accordingly.

Proceed accordingly.Meaning he’d send someone else.Meaning the clock I’d been pretending didn’t exist was ticking, and every day I kept her in this cabin was a day closer to someone finding us who wouldn’t have the same problem I’d had in her kitchen.

I set the phone on the table.The screen went dark.My reflection disappeared, and all that was left was the cold mug between my palms, the smell of bread, the sound of her breathing from behind the door and the weight of an unanswered message sitting on the scarred wood like a physical thing with mass and temperature and intention.

Fifty thousand dollars.A contract broken.A client betrayed.A club that needed the money and the stability and the cold calculation its president was supposed to provide.

On the other side of the door, a woman who baked bread, visited children, and waved to her neighbor was sleeping in my cot under my blanket.The cabin smelled like bread and herbs instead of emptiness.I sat at a table I’d sat at a hundred times and saw the room differently because she’d hung herbs on the windowsill, fixed a meal, and hummed while she worked.None of it changed anything except everything.

My jaw tightened.The scar along it pulled against the stubble, a familiar ache that came when I was holding two opposing truths and couldn’t find the space between them.The message demanded an answer.Hannah Morgan demanded nothing, and that was worse.

I stared at the ceiling.The exposed beams caught the firelight, shadows moving across the rough wood in patterns that had been the same for twenty years and looked different tonight because I was different tonight, sitting in a cabin that wasn’t just a cabin anymore with a cold cup of coffee and a phone full of messages and a woman breathing on the other side of a door I couldn’t bring myself to open.

The two pulls worked against each other in my chest, steady and relentless, like tides moving in opposite directions with the same shore caught between them.Duty on one side.A nameless pull on the other.Neither yielding.Neither strong enough to win.

I picked up the cold coffee and drank it anyway.Set the mug down with a click that sounded too loud in the quiet cabin.Hannah’s breathing didn’t change.The fire popped once more and fell silent, and the herbs on the windowsill caught the last of the light, green and alive against the glass.I sat there until the cold was in my bones and the accounting was done, and the numbers still didn’t add up the way they were supposed to.

CHAPTER FOUR

Hannah

The gray came first.Not light, not yet—just the slow leaching of darkness from the corners of the cabin, turning the log walls from black to a softer shade, a color that didn’t have a name because nobody was awake to name it.I lay on the cot with my eyes open, watching the ceiling beams materialize overhead one by one like ghosts deciding whether to stay.

The sound came next.Soft.Muted.A blade scraping against wood, then a pause, then the scrape again, rhythmic and low.Not the fire—the stove was cold.I could feel the morning chill working its way through the flannel shirt I’d borrowed from Mustang’s duffel three nights ago and hadn’t given back.The sleeves hung past my fingertips.The collar smelled like him: pine sap and gun oil and an unnamed warmth underneath.

I sat up.The cot creaked.The sound from the main room didn’t stop.

He was crouched near the far wall when I pushed open the bedroom door, his back to me, shoulders hunched under the leather cut he hadn’t taken off before bed.One hand braced against the log, the other working a putty knife along the base of the window frame where a thin sliver of darkness had been letting in cold air since we got here.Weatherstripping.Gray foam tape, the kind you buy in ten-foot rolls at hardware stores, pressed into the gap with the flat edge of the knife.His knuckles were white where he gripped the handle, the silver rings catching what little light filtered through the cracked shutter.

I didn’t announce myself.Didn’t clear my throat or say good morning.Just stood in the doorway with the flannel hanging off one shoulder and my bare feet cold against the packed dirt and watched his hands.

They were not gentle hands.Scarred across the backs, the skin thickened and callused, old wounds healed into pale ridges that mapped a history I didn’t want to imagine.The silver rings sat heavy on three fingers of his right hand, not decoration, but metal that left marks when it connected with an unwilling target.But the way he worked the putty knife along the gap was different entirely.Slow.Careful.The blade edge following the contour of the log with a precision built from patience, not force.Each inch of tape pressed flush against the wood, no bubbles, no wrinkles, the seam disappearing under his thumb as he smoothed it into place.

He finished the section.Sat back on his heels, inspected his work with those steel-gray eyes that missed nothing, then reached for the roll and cut another strip with the pocketknife he pulled from his boot.The blade flashed once in the gray light, then went to work again, silent, methodical, the scrape of metal on wood the only sound in the cabin besides my breathing and his.

I could have spoken.Could have mentioned the cold air, or the fact that he was fixing a problem I’d complained about exactly once, two days ago, in passing, while shivering over my coffee.He hadn’t responded then.Hadn’t nodded or acknowledged or given any indication he’d heard me at all.Now he was on his knees at five in the morning with weatherstripping and a putty knife, sealing the gap because he’d noticed it was there and decided it needed fixing, and the fact that he hadn’t mentioned it,hadn’t made it a thing, hadn’t waited for gratitude or recognition,lodged in my chest like a bite I couldn’t swallow.

He moved to the kitchen without looking at me.Crossed the room in three strides, reached for the screwdriver on the shelf above the sink, and addressed the cabinet hinge that had been drooping since day one.Two turns of the screw.Tight.Secure.The door sat flush against the frame when he closed it, the whine of the loose hinge gone as if it had never existed.He set the screwdriver down, reached for the coffee tin, measured grounds into the pot with the same easy economy, and set it on the propane burner.Lit the flame with a match struck against his thumbnail.The hiss of gas, then the blue glow, then the first gurgle from the pot, and he was already moving toward the door, pulling his cut straight, checking his phone with his brow furrowed the way it always was when he looked at that screen.

I stayed in the doorway.My hair was loose and tangled from sleep, falling over my shoulders in a mess of red that caught the growing light from the window.The flannel hung open at the collar.My feet were freezing.None of that seemed important compared to watching the way he moved through this space—like the cabin was an extension of his body, each problem already known to his hands before his brain had to think about it.

Later, after the coffee had brewed and I’d drunk mine standing at the counter because sitting felt too much like admitting I was comfortable, I found the chair.

The wooden chair near the table.The one with the wobble, the leg that had been loose since I’d first tested it days ago, rocking slightly whenever I put weight on the right side.I hadn’t mentioned it.Hadn’t complained.Had just learned to sit carefully, to distribute my weight, to accept the subtle instability as part of the cabin’s landscape the way I’d accepted the cold and the canned food and the man with the gun who’d brought me here.

The wobble was gone.

I ran my fingers along the underside of the leg where it met the seat.Metal.A bracket—simple, steel, used to reinforce joints in furniture that’s seen too many years.Wood glue had seeped around the edges, dried clear overnight, holding the bracket flush against the wood.The repair was clean.Professional.A fix that wouldn’t be visible unless you were looking for it, which I was, because the chair felt different under my palm—solid, rooted, the way things are supposed to feel.

I looked across the room.

Mustang stood near the door with his back to me, pulling on his cut to adjust the fit across his shoulders with that same deliberate motion I’d watched a dozen times now.His phone was in his hand, screen lit, thumb scrolling through whatever messages had come in while the coffee brewed.He didn’t turn.Didn’t acknowledge the chair, or me standing beside it with my fingers on the bracket he’d installed while I slept.Didn’t offer an explanation or wait for thanks or make a production out of the fact that he’d fixed a problem I hadn’t even asked him to fix.

The contradiction hit me square in the chest, harder than it had any right to.