CHAPTER ONE #2
A hard lock tightened in my chest. A catch. A hitch. A feeling I hadn’t let myself have in years because feelings got men killed in my line of work, and I’d been doing this too long to start making exceptions now.
But the gun was heavy in my hand. Heavier than it should have been. Heavier than it had been when I’d cleared the room thirty seconds ago.
I lowered it. Not all the way to my side – just enough that the barrel wasn’t pointed at her anymore. Just enough that the air in the room changed, thinned, became breathable for both of us.
“Sit down,” I said.
She did. Pulled a kitchen chair out from under the table and sat in it, drawing her knees up to her chest, bare feet on the edge of the seat. Her sleep shirt rumpled around her thighs. She didn’t take her eyes off me. Didn’t glance at the gun. Didn’t glance at the door.
Just watched me. Green eyes, steady now that the trembling had stopped, waiting to see what came next.
I stood there with the gun at my side and the coffee steaming on the counter and the half-finished loaf of bread wrapped in its towel, and I tried to figure out what the hell I was going to do.
The job was clear. The contract was signed. Fifty thousand dollars cash on delivery, and the delivery was supposed to be proof that Hannah Morgan wouldn’t be identifying anyone, ever again.
I’d walked through her back door with a gun and three days of surveillance notes and the cold certainty of a man who’d done this before and would do it again.
Now I was standing in her kitchen watching her watch me, and the coffee smelled good, and the bread smelled better, and the range hood light made everything seem warmer than it had any right to be at midnight with a gun in the room.
She hadn’t asked why I was there. Hadn’t asked who I was. Had just offered me coffee and sat down when I told her to, and now she was waiting, knees pulled to her chest, and I was the one who didn’t know what came next.
The coffee maker clicked off. The last drops fell into the pot. Steam rose in a thin curl toward the ceiling.
I holstered the gun. The weight of it settled against my hip where it belonged, and a decision settled with it – a choice I hadn’t known I was making until it was made.
She kept watching me with those green eyes, and in the yellow light, with her red hair and her bare feet and the flour on the counter behind her, she was exactly what she was: a baker who visited children and waved to her neighbor and had no idea why someone with a gun had just walked through her back door.
I knew why. The client knew why. The contract knew why.
But standing in that kitchen, with the smell of coffee and bread and herbs from the garden outside, none of those reasons mattered the way they should have.
The job I came to do was one I could not finish. Not here. Not tonight. Not with her sitting in that chair watching me like she was still deciding whether I was dangerous or just lost.
I was both. I’d been both for longer than she’d been alive.
And I was going to have to tell her why.
I made the decision the way I made all decisions. No debate. No second-guessing. Just the facts arranged in the right order, and my body moving before my brain had finished catching up.
“You’re coming with me,” I said.
Hannah didn’t blink. Her knees were still pulled to her chest, feet bare on the kitchen chair, and she looked smaller like that, younger, though I knew from the file she was twenty-six. Old enough to know better. Young enough that it still shouldn’t have mattered.
“Someone wants you dead,” I said. “Staying in this house tonight means you don’t wake up tomorrow.”
She swallowed. I watched her throat move. “Who?”
“Don’t have time to explain it.”
“Are you going to hurt me?”
The question hung between us. Direct. Unflinching. The same steadiness she’d shown when she offered me coffee, now turned toward the only thing that mattered.
“No.”
I said it before I’d decided to say it. The word came out clean, certain, and I meant it in a way that surprised the hell out of me. Not the way you mean an answer when you’re lying to keep someone calm. The way you mean a promise when it’s true, and you’re only just realizing it.
Her eyes locked on mine. Searching. I let her look.
I had nothing to hide in that moment except the fact that ten minutes ago, I’d walked through her door to kill her, and now I was standing in her kitchen telling her I wouldn’t hurt her, and both things were true in ways that didn’t make sense together.
I reached into my jacket pocket and pulled out a zip tie. Plastic, white, available anywhere. I’d carried a dozen of them for years. Useful things.
“Hold out your wrists.”
She did. No hesitation. Palms up, together, waiting.
I looped the tie around both wrists and pulled it snug – not tight enough to cut, not loose enough to slip. Enough to show whoever might be watching that she was restrained, if they were watching. Enough to keep her from doing anything stupid if panic set in later.
It wouldn’t. I could already tell. The set of her shoulders, the way she’d accepted the binding without a fight – she was scared, but she was thinking. Assessing. The same careful watchfulness she’d shown since I raised the gun.
I guided her up from the chair with one hand at her shoulder. Her skin was warm through the thin cotton of the sleep shirt. She stood, steady on her bare feet, and didn’t pull away from my touch.
“Through the back,” I said.
We walked through the kitchen, past the coffee maker and the half-finished loaf, through the back door I’d left open. The night air hit us, cool and damp with the promise of morning fog. Her herb garden smelled stronger out here, rosemary and thyme sharp in the darkness.
She didn’t scream. Didn’t call out. Didn’t do any of the things a person might do when a stranger with a gun guides them out of their house at midnight with their wrists bound.
At the gate, she paused. Glanced back at the house once, quick, like she was memorizing it. Then she turned to me, and her voice came out quiet, so quiet I almost missed it under the sound of the distant highway.
“Where are you taking me?”
I didn’t answer. Couldn’t answer, because the truth was, I didn’t know yet. Somewhere safe. Somewhere the client wouldn’t look. A place that would cost me fifty thousand dollars and possibly a lot more if the client decided I’d crossed a line.
I guided her through the gate and across the yard to where the truck waited at the curb. Engine running. Headlights off. The street was empty, fog hanging low between the houses, turning the porch lights into blurred halos.
I opened the passenger door. Helped her in – my hand at her elbow, steadying – and she settled into the seat with her bound hands in her lap, bare feet on the floormat.
She didn’t turn towards me. Didn’t glance at the street.
Just stared straight ahead through the windshield at the fog and the dark and whatever was coming next.
I closed her door. Circled to the driver’s side. Got in. The photograph was still there on the seat between us, facedown where I’d left it hours ago. Her grainy image pressed against the upholstery, unseen.
I put the truck in drive and pulled away from the curb.
Headlights on, cutting twin beams through the fog.
Low-hanging, thick, the fog turned familiar streets foreign.
I kept both hands on the wheel. Ten and two.
Eyes moving between the road and the mirrors, checking for headlights that shouldn’t be there, for movement that didn’t belong.
Nothing. Empty street behind us. Empty street ahead. The neighborhood slept on, unaware that the woman in the house with the wilting flowers and the bakery apron was gone, driven away by a man with a gun and a change of heart he still didn’t fully understand.
Hannah sat beside me, silent. Her bound hands rested in her lap, fingers curled loosely together.
Her bare feet were pale against the dark floormat.
She hadn’t asked for shoes. Hadn’t asked for a jacket.
Had just gotten in the truck when I told her to and now, she was sitting there watching the fog roll past the windows, and I was driving us away from everything she knew with no destination and no plan beyond keeping her alive.
The weight of it settled across my shoulders as we reached the end of her street.
Heavy. Solid. A weight that came with consequences, with chain reactions I couldn’t predict yet.
Fifty thousand dollars gone. A client betrayed.
A woman in my passenger seat who should have been a body in a morgue by morning, and instead was breathing, warm, alive beside me with flour still dusting the hem of her sleep shirt.
I checked the rearview one last time. The street disappeared behind us, swallowed by fog and distance. Her house was dark. The neighborhood was quiet. No one followed.
The photograph lay between us, facedown, and I knew without looking that her green eyes were staring at the upholstery, grainy and blurred and completely unaware of what had just happened to her.
I’d set a chain reaction in motion. A choice I couldn’t take back. A decision that would cost me, would cost the club, would ripple through lives I hadn’t considered when I took the contract three days ago.
And I’d do it again. Right now, in this truck, with the fog ahead and the quiet woman beside me, I’d make the same choice.
The weight settled. I adjusted my grip on the wheel. Drove on into the fog, toward whatever came next, with Hannah Morgan breathing beside me and the contract burning a hole in my jacket pocket and the club waiting at the end of a road I couldn’t see yet.