9. CHAPTER NINE #2
Decker Holt fit into it now too. The black Tahoe outside Hannah’s bakery, the green sedan with Ohio plates, the distribution corridor forty miles south of Pine Creek: not the threat, just cover.
Blackwater had leaned on Holt’s network to run local surveillance without putting their own people on the ground, a rented set of eyes far enough removed from anything that could be traced back to them.
I’d spent thirteen days chasing a man who’d never been in charge of anything. Small fish, borrowed for the day.
I studied the spreadsheet. The numbers told a story I’d seen before, just never from this side of the equation. Client hires contractor. Contractor hires club. Club provides the muscle. And when the muscle completes the job, the contractor ensures there’s no muscle left to talk about it.
Hannah sat across from us, her hands wrapped around her mug, steam long gone.
She wasn’t looking at the screen. Wasn’t reading the financial traces or the contract language or any of the details Ace had laid out with surgical precision.
She was watching my face. Her green eyes moved across my features the way they had for thirteen days — reading, assessing, the same careful attention she’d given everything in this cabin from the moment I lowered the gun in her kitchen.
I glanced up and caught her gaze. She held it, steady as always. My chair scraped half an inch closer before I’d decided to move it. Close enough that my shoulder nearly brushed hers.
I kept the conversation moving. Eyes on Ace’s screen. Voice level. But the chair stayed where it was.
Ace noticed. His gaze dipped to the narrowed gap between our chairs, returned to the screen, and stayed there. That was acknowledgment enough.
He closed the financial trace and pulled up a third file.
“I’ll use my military contacts to run Blackwater through a federal database I still have back-channel access to.
Socket can sweep our communications for any secondary surveillance on this location — if the contractor’s smart, they’ve got eyes on the club’s channels, waiting for confirmation you completed the job.
” His fingers moved across the keyboard, pulling up a map of the area surrounding the cabin.
“We need a proof-of-death package. Photos, credible evidence strong enough to buy time before they send someone to verify.”
I knew what that meant. Fabricated evidence.
Staged photographs. Work Socket was good at when he wasn’t fixing engines or running comms. We’d done it before for other jobs, other brothers who needed cover.
Never for a case like this — never for a president who’d walked away from a contract and brought the target home instead.
“The package buys us a week, maybe two,” Ace said. “After that, they’ll want verification. Either they send someone to check the body, or they assume you’re compromised and come for both of you.”
Both of you. Hannah’s hands tightened around her mug. I felt her breath beside me, steady and controlled, the same measured rhythm she’d maintained through everything I’d thrown at her since that first night.
I studied the map on Ace’s screen. The cabin sat as a pin in a sea of green, surrounded by trees, gravel roads, and isolation that had always been an asset. Now it felt less like a fortress and more like the only ground we had left.
For the first time since I’d pulled Hannah from her kitchen, the path forward had a shape. Not safety. Not clarity. A plan. Concrete, ugly, and possible. The burden didn’t lift, but it was no longer mine alone.
Ace leaned back. The three of us crowded around a scarred table with cold coffee and a plan that might keep us alive long enough to need another one.
“Socket’s standing by,” Ace said. “I’ll call him once we’re done here.”
I nodded once. The plan was there. So was Hannah, close enough now that moving away would have been a choice.
Ace stepped outside with his phone, the door closing behind him with its usual soft click. The cabin went quiet for the first time all morning — no laughter, no keyboard sounds, just the low crack of the fire and Hannah gathering plates from the table.
I stayed where I was. The contract file was still open on the laptop screen, the grainy photograph of Hannah staring back at me from thirteen days and a lifetime ago.
I should have closed it. Should have stood up, helped with the dishes, done any of the things a man does when he’s sitting at a table with nothing useful left to contribute. Instead, I watched her move.
She stacked the plates without clattering them.
One atop the other, edges aligned, the way someone stacks things when they’ve done it a thousand times in a space smaller than it should be.
She carried them to the sink, the deep basin with the hand pump I’d reinforced last week when the handle started sticking, and set them down with a care that made no sound.
The dish towel was in her hand before the first plate hit the water, and she wiped down the counter in one clean pass, shoulder to elbow, the flour from her cheekbone long since brushed away but the ghost of it still there in the way she moved, deliberate, thorough, nothing wasted.
I’d watched her do this for thirteen days.
Stood in corners of the room, sat at this table, pretended to read messages while tracking the rhythm of her hands through the kitchen.
Bread mattered to her. Clean counters mattered.
Coffee offered at midnight with a gun pointed at her chest mattered.
I had spent thirteen days noticing and saying nothing.
She turned back toward the table. Reached for my mug, her fingers closing around the tin where the coffee had gone cold hours ago.
I caught her wrist.
Not hard. Not a grab. Just my hand around her forearm, enough pressure to stop her movement and nothing more. She went still, not afraid, not tense — simply registering the change before her mind caught up.
She looked down at my hand on her wrist—the same wrist I’d bound with a zip tie thirteen days ago in a kitchen that smelled like bread and coffee. Then her eyes found mine, and the question in them was the same one she’d been asking since the first night: what now?
I didn’t have a speech prepared. I’d spent forty-some years saying things with actions because actions were cleaner. Words made you stand in front of what you meant.
“I love you.”
The words came out rough. No ceremony. No lead-up. My voice didn’t shake or rise. Saying it changed nothing about whether it was true.
Hannah set the mug back on the table. Her fingers turned over in my grip, palm meeting mine. She didn’t pull away. Her skin was warm, dry from the dishwater, and I could feel the fine ridges of old burns along the edge of her hand.
She searched my face. The set of my jaw. The line of my mouth. The scar along my cheek that pulled tight when I held something back. She was deciding whether to believe a man who’d walked through her back door with a gun.
Then she said it back.
Quiet. Certain. No performance. Just the words, direct and honest, with everything they meant behind them.
My thumb passed once across her knuckles, and something in my chest settled into place.
The sound of boots on the porch steps cut through the quiet.
Ace. Coming back from his call, the measured tread of a man who moved the same way whether anyone was watching or not.
I released her hand. Straightened in my chair, shoulders squaring, the president coming back online because the VP was at the door and the room needed to look like a war room again instead of a confession.
But the change showed. My shoulders eased. My jaw unclenched. Hannah carried the mug to the sink without looking at me, and what had just happened stayed in the room: quiet, real, and impossible to undo.
The door opened. Ace came through with his phone in his pocket and gave the room one fast sweep.
This time, what he saw made him pause. His gaze moved from me to Hannah at the sink, then back, and whatever he read in the air, he had the decency to leave it alone.
No comment. No smirk. No reference to the laugh that had rattled the windows an hour earlier.
He crossed to the table, sat down, and opened the laptop.
“Alright,” he said, fingers already moving across the keys. “Here’s what I found.”
The screen lit up, blue glow spilling across the scarred wood and the sliver of space between our chairs. Hannah stayed at the sink, her back to us, water running over the plates. I watched the curve of her shoulder under my henley while what I’d said settled where it belonged.
Ace opened a new document and began talking.
I listened. Behind me, Hannah’s hands moved through the dishwater.
Outside the sealed window, fog gripped the mountain, and for the first time since I’d driven away from her house with the contract burning in my pocket, I knew exactly what I was fighting for.