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 said I’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.”
“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 say the sky is blue or water 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.
My stomach growled. Loud. Empty, cavernous, the sound carried across quiet rooms and announced itself to everyone present whether you wanted it to or not.