8. CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER EIGHT
Hannah
The fire had been burning for hours by the time I found the words.
Not the blue flame under the skillet where I’d cooked dinner—the wood stove in the main room, throwing orange light across the log walls whenever a draft slipped through the gaps Mustang hadn’t sealed.
He sat in the battered armchair, ribs bandaged beneath his shirt, the gauze pulling tight with each breath.
Across the scarred table, the burner phone lay like evidence neither of us knew how to claim.
It had buzzed once an hour ago. Mustang had checked the message and set the phone back without responding.
Twenty-four hours. Less, now. The client was getting nervous, which meant someone above him was getting nervous, which meant the lie about mountain terrain and frost lines had about a day left before it collapsed.
He set his mug beside it. The tin hit wood with a soft clack that sounded too loud. My gaze flicked there, then back to the fire, where a settling log sent orange sparks against the cast-iron door. My fingers tightened around my own mug just enough to turn the skin pale across my knuckles.
“This wasn’t random.” Mustang’s voice came out flat and clipped, the way it did when he was delivering a truth that cost him something.
He kept his eyes on the fire, on the sparks, on anything that wasn’t my face.
“The contract on your life. It wasn’t because you saw something you weren’t supposed to see.
It was because you saw a specific murder. ”
I didn’t move. Didn’t speak. Steam rose from the mug between my palms, and I listened with every part of me gone still.
“Downtown parking garage. Three weeks ago, the night you closed the bakery late and cut through because the sidewalk was torn up.” He paused, one hand shifting near his ribs as if the bandage pulled when he breathed. “There was a murder. You were there for it.”
His jaw tightened. The scar along it pulled against the stubble. Then his gaze dropped to the table, to the burner phone, to the space between us that had been filling with something neither of us had named since the moment I kissed him by the fire, and he told me to wait.
My knuckles went white.
It happened in pieces, as if my body belonged to someone else.
The tendons in my hands stood out beneath the skin.
The mug tilted forward, steam still rising, the liquid inside barely moving.
My breath turned shallow and quick. I wasn’t looking at him anymore, or the fire.
My gaze fixed on some middle distance between the table and the far wall, and whatever I saw there wasn’t in this cabin.
Wasn’t on this mountain. Wasn’t anywhere Mustang could reach.
The fire popped. A draft from somewhere,not the sealed window, somewhere higher, near the roof joint or the doorframe,sent the flame sideways.
Shadows jumped across the log walls, old patterns made strange by the fact that I was here, breathing shallowly around a memory I had worked so hard not to remember.
Mustang waited. He didn’t speak, didn’t reach across the table. He just sat in the armchair with bandaged ribs and split knuckles, hands flat on his thighs, giving me time to return to the room.
The memory surfaced in pieces. The smell of exhaust and old concrete.
The parking garage at closing time, the sidewalk torn up outside so I’d cut through instead, my footsteps echoing off the pillars.
Two men near the exit stairwell. One taller, one thinner, both speaking low enough that the words blurred into the concrete and the hum of a dying fluorescent tube.
The stifled crack of a gunshot. Not loud.
Not movie-loud. A flat, ugly sound that made my whole body seize.
A body folding against the stairwell wall.
My breath caught, stopped, then released in a slow exhale that trembled at the edges.
Then the thin man turned. His eyes found mine across the garage, and the world narrowed to the space between us.
I set the mug down carefully, as if I were carrying too many things and couldn’t afford to drop any of them.
Tin met wood. Steam rose. My hands flattened on either side of it, fingers spread, the grain disappearing beneath my palms as I leaned into the table like it was the only thing holding me upright.
I faced Mustang.
Firelight caught the steel-gray of his eyes and the hard line of his jaw.
I felt steadier than I should have, like the worst thing had already walked through me and left me standing.
My mouth was set. My jaw ached from clenching.
For one second I remembered the woman from before,the baker in the photograph, smiling at someone who wasn’t him, unaware that her life had already tilted toward this room,and then I blinked, and I was just me again, sitting across a scarred table in a mountain cabin with my hands flat on the wood and Mustang watching me like the distance between us was both too small and too vast to cross.
“I remember.” Her voice was quiet. Even. No tremor, no upward lilt, nothing but the flat certainty of a fact being stated. “All of it.”
Quiet followed. Not the hostile quiet of the first days, or the tentative quiet of the mornings after. This was what happened when a buried truth came into the light and left both of you staring at it.
The fire popped. Sparks flew. The draft found another gap and sent the flame sideways again, and shadows moved across Mustang’s face in patterns that made him look older, harder, and almost unbearably tired.
“Why didn’t you finish the job?”
The question sat there, clean and unadorned. After everything,the gun in my kitchen, the zip ties, the cabin, the kiss by the fire,I needed to know why I was still alive.
He picked up his mug. The coffee had gone cold; mine had too. He drank anyway, as if the act gave his hands something to do and bought his mouth another second.
Whatever answer he carried showed in fragments: the set of his shoulders, the way his gaze refused to settle, the tightening of his fingers around the tin before he put it down.
Decker Holt. The green sedan. The client who wasn’t just a client.
The club that needed money. The contract he had broken.
He hadn’t told me everything, but enough of the shape had emerged for me to understand I had not been spared for a simple reason.
He set it down. Mine sat still beside my hands. His had never looked warm to begin with.
“Because you offered me coffee.”
The words came out rough. Unpracticed. Each syllable carried gravel, as if his voice hadn’t been built for this kind of truth.
He didn’t elaborate. Didn’t explain about the gun in his hand or the zip ties in his pocket or the way I must have looked across my kitchen counter—not with bravery, exactly, but with the quiet resignation of someone who had decided panic would not save her.
He didn’t tell me what the coffee meant to him.
Maybe he couldn’t. Maybe the words for it didn’t exist in the language he spoke.
Four words for a decision that had cost him fifty thousand dollars and might cost him more before this was done. They should have sounded too small for the shape of what had happened between us. Somehow, they didn’t.
I didn’t answer. Didn’t nod or shake my head or offer him the kind of understanding people reach for when the truth is too small to explain the damage around it.
I just sat with my hands flat on the table, my eyes steady on his, while the fire burned behind us and the room held a different kind of quiet.
I reached across the table with the same care I used for dough, stew, the wooden spoon against the cast-iron skillet, and rested my fingertips on his scarred knuckles beside the cold mug.
Warm. Dry. The contact lasted three seconds, maybe four.
No draft. No pop from the fire. Just my skin against his, my fingertips tracing the ridges of old wounds that mapped a history I didn’t know and probably shouldn’t.
I pulled back. My hand returned to my side of the table beside my mug, but I kept my eyes on him. Waiting, patient and steady, no longer sure whether waiting was fear or faith.
His hand stayed where I’d left it. The warmth of my touch seemed to linger there, though maybe I only wanted it to. He didn’t move. Didn’t reach for me. Didn’t do any of the things the charged quiet between us seemed to invite, and that restraint told me as much as any answer he could have given.
A log settled, sending orange sparks against the grate. The flame leapt once, then steadied. Woodsmoke, dried herbs, and the fragile warmth of two people breathing the same air filled the cabin.
The burner phone remained unused. Unanswered.
Twenty-four hours, less now, and beyond the tree line the mountain kept its secrets while Mustang kept his.
For tonight, with the fire going and his hand still where I’d touched it, the client could wait.
The lies and truths and fifty thousand dollars could wait until morning, when the light through the cracked shutter would remind us both that this cabin was a hiding place, no matter how much it had started to feel like home.
I left my hand where it was. He left his where it was. The distance across the scarred table held exactly what it needed to, and for now, that was enough.