11. CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Mustang
Hannah was still wearing my jacket. The sleeves hung past her fingertips, the collar carried my scent, and the dried herbs pressed against her ribs in the inside pocket kept the mountain cabin with her even as Screwball refilled her coffee mug at the bar and Socket swore loudly at something under the fluorescent lights of the garage bay.
The clubhouse had settled around me the way a strange room eventually does when you stand in it long enough — the initial overwhelm giving way to individual details.
The pool table’s green felt, worn thin at the corners.
The row of patches behind the bar, crimson and black, mounted in frames that caught the overhead light.
Men moving through the space with the easy confidence of people who’d built it and knew every inch.
I’d been here maybe an hour. Maybe less.
Time moved differently in rooms where nobody bothered with clocks.
Then the door to the back hallway swung open and Ace came through it with his phone in his hand and his face set in a way that made Screwball’s next joke die halfway through the sentence.
“War room,” Ace said, not to anyone in particular, but the words carried across the common area and landed exactly where they were supposed to.
Socket set his wrench down with a clank that echoed.
Torque straightened from whatever he’d been working on near the garage door.
Screwball’s hand went still on the bar rail.
Mustang was already moving. He’d been standing beside me, close enough that our shoulders touched, and then he wasn’t.
He was crossing the room with that unhurried stride that covered ground faster than it had any right to, his hand coming to rest on the small of my back in a gesture that wasn’t a question.
“Come on,” he said.
The war room was at the end of a corridor I hadn’t known existed.
Windowless, concrete walls painted a dull gray that absorbed sound instead of reflecting it, the air thick with the stale feeling of rooms that didn’t get opened often enough.
A single overhead bulb hung from an exposed wire, casting the space in a harsh, unforgiving light that turned everything the color of old bone.
A corkboard dominated the far wall, already pinned with surveillance photographs, handwritten notes on index cards, strings connecting names to dates in a pattern that made my stomach tighten when I looked at it for too long.
A scarred wooden table sat in the center.
Ace was already pulling out a chair, his laptop open and glowing blue against the gray.
Socket followed with an armful of manila folders, a printed ledger, and a dossier labeled in black marker: Hargrove/Deluca — Case File 7.
He dropped it all on the table with a sound like a burden being set down after too long.
I stood near the doorway. Mustang’s hand stayed on my lower back, not pushing, just present, and I understood without being told that I was supposed to be here. That whatever was about to happen in this room was happening because of me, and running from it wasn’t an option even if I’d wanted to.
Socket tapped a photograph. Grainy, shot from a distance, three men standing outside a downtown parking garage under a streetlight that washed everything in sodium yellow.
The timestamp in the corner read 11:47 PM, three weeks ago.
The night I’d closed the bakery late. The night I’d cut through the parking garage on my way home because the sidewalk was under construction and the detour signs had blown over in the wind.
“That’s Deluca,” Socket said, his finger landing on a broad-shouldered man in a camel coat. “Hargrove beside him. And this one,” his finger moved to the third figure, thinner, with a narrow face partially obscured by the shadow of the garage entrance “,we’re calling Priest. For now.”
I recognized the parking garage. The concrete pillars.
The exit stairwell where I’d pressed myself against the wall and held my breath while a man I couldn’t see clearly put two rounds into another man’s chest thirty feet away.
The sound had been wrong — not the sharp crack of movie gunshots but something flatter, wetter, the kind of sound that carried in concrete spaces and didn’t let go.
Mustang’s hand tightened against my back. Not enough to hurt. Enough to say he knew what I was seeing.
Ace traced his finger across the printed ledger.
Columns of numbers, dates, routing codes highlighted in yellow marker.
His voice was low and measured, the cadence of someone reading facts he’d already memorized.
“Wire transfers. Three of them, over the past month, routed through a shell company called Meridian Holdings. Meridian’s registered to a holding company in Delaware, which is owned by a trust fund that traces back to City Councilman Elias Reeves. ”
The name changed the air in the room. I knew it — everyone knew it.
Reeves had been in the local papers for years, always photographed at charity galas with his hand on some donor’s shoulder, his smile the polished kind that suggested the person behind it had never worried about money in their life.
“Reeves has ties to organized crime through his construction contracts,” Ace continued. “We’ve known that. What we didn’t know was that he’s been laundering money through Meridian for the better part of a decade, and Meridian’s been paying Hargrove for wet work.”
Wet work. The term sat in the air between us, clinical and terrible, and I felt Mustang’s hand shift against my back — his thumb moving once across the canvas of his jacket where it covered my spine, a gesture so small I almost missed it.
Socket pulled another photograph from the stack.
Closer, clearer, the same thin man, Priest, caught from a different angle as he entered the parking garage.
The timestamp was eleven minutes before the first photo.
“Facial recognition got a hit. Priest is ex-military, dishonorable discharge, three confirmed kills as a contractor in the Middle East. He’s the triggerman.
The one who pulled the trigger in that garage. ”
Mustang had been standing with his arms crossed, jaw set, absorbing it all with the stillness of a man who processed information by letting it settle into place before he moved.
Now he uncrossed his arms and planted both fists on the scarred wood of the table, his knuckles white where they pressed against the grain.
“She saw a hit on a federal informant,” he said. His voice was flat, final, the kind of certainty that didn’t leave room for discussion. “That’s why they want her buried. Not because she saw something. Because she saw the wrong thing at the wrong time, and the wrong people noticed.”
The room held his words. Ace leaned back in his chair, his steel-blue eyes moving from Mustang to the corkboard and back, and something in his expression shifted — not concern, exactly. The look of a man recalculating odds he’d already run twice.
“These aren’t street guys, Mustang,” Ace said. “They’ve got reach. Reeves has connections in the DA’s office, in the police department. If they’re willing to send a contractor after a baker who saw something she shouldn’t have, they’re willing to go through us to get to her.”
Mustang didn’t flinch. Didn’t shift his weight. Just held Ace’s gaze across the table with an intensity that made the air between them feel charged, and when he spoke again, his voice was quieter but no less certain.
“Then we move faster than they do.”
Socket’s laptop chimed. A soft, insistent ping that cut through the silence, and his hands moved across the keyboard with a speed that belied their size. The screen filled with a map: satellite view, streets rendered in pale gray, a pulsing red dot near the center.
“One of their phones just went active,” Socket said. His voice had dropped to something dangerous. “Two miles from the shop on Caldwell.”
The shop. The motorcycle repair and customization business Mustang had mentioned once, in passing, at the cabin. The legitimate front. The place where the club’s income came from when the gun running was on hold.
The three men at the table went still at the same moment.
Not the freeze of fear — the absolute cessation of movement that happened when trained bodies recognized a threat and calculated response time in fractions of a second.
Ace’s hand was already on his phone. Socket’s fingers hovered over the keyboard, waiting for the next command.
Mustang’s jaw tightened until the scar along it pulled white against his stubble.
I stood in the doorway with Mustang’s hand on my back and the dried herbs pressed against my ribs and the understanding that whatever came next had been set in motion the moment I’d cut through that parking garage three weeks ago, and the men in this room were about to move because of it.
The overhead bulb hummed. Outside, beyond the concrete walls, the compound held its breath.
Mustang’s phone buzzed against the scarred wood of the war room table.
He picked it up, looked at the screen, and whatever he saw there turned his face to something I hadn’t seen before — not anger, not fear, something colder and more focused, the look of a man whose body had already started moving before his brain finished processing the information.