CHAPTER TWO #2
Mustang heard it. Of course he heard it. Those steel-gray eyes didn’t miss anything, including the way heat climbed my neck and settled in my cheeks as the sound echoed off the log walls.
He didn’t comment. Didn’t smirk or make a joke or use it as leverage.
He just crossed to the counter, opened a tin of saltine crackers I hadn’t noticed before, and set it on the arm of my chair within easy reach of my bound hands.
Then he stepped back. Returned to his side of the room.
Picked up his coffee mug and drank from it like he’d done nothing worth noting.
I stared at the crackers. Plain saltines in a red-and-white tin, the kind you could buy at any gas station in America.
They sat on the arm of the chair, close enough that I could reach them if I twisted my wrists just so, and the fact that they were there at all,that he’d put them there without being asked, without making a production of it,felt like a concession I wasn’t ready to make.
My stomach growled again, louder.
I ate the crackers one at a time, my fingers fumbling behind me where the zip ties limited my reach.
Crumbs fell into my lap and onto the floor.
The salt hit my tongue, and hunger overruled pride with embarrassing speed.
I ate until the tin was half-empty, and Mustang never looked over, never acknowledged it, just let me have the dignity of eating in silence if not the dignity of eating with free hands.
When the last cracker was gone, I set the tin back on the arm of the chair and wiped my mouth against my shoulder because my hands were still bound and what else was I supposed to do.
“Are you going to hurt me?”
The question came out flat. Direct. No tremor, no upward lilt at the end that would make it a plea instead of a demand. Just five words laid between us on the scarred table like a challenge he could pick up or leave alone.
Mustang set his mug down. Turned to face me fully, and for the first time since we’d arrived in this cabin, he gave me his complete attention—not the sidelong assessment, not the casual monitoring, but the full weight of those steel-gray eyes fixed on mine with an intensity that made the air between us feel thinner.
“No.”
One word. No elaboration. No qualifiers, no it depends or not if you cooperate. Just no, delivered with the same unbothered calm he used for everything else, as if the question had been about the weather and his answer was just as immutable.
I searched his face for the lie. Watched for the twitch at the corner of his mouth, the shift in his gaze, the micro-expression that would tell me he was saying what I needed to hear instead of what was true.
His face gave me nothing. The scar along his jawline caught the firelight, pale against his beard, and he held my gaze without blinking, without wavering, without any of the tells I’d learned to spot in twenty-six years of dealing with people who weren’t always honest.
He wasn’t lying.
The knowledge settled into me slowly, like a stone sinking through water. Not relief, not exactly. A more complicated recalibration, a shifting of the pieces I’d assembled in my head about the man who’d taken me from my kitchen at midnight with a gun and zip ties and no explanation I could use.
Time passed. The fire burned lower. Someone had stacked firewood beside the stove,pine, split clean, fast-catching and hot-burning,but Mustang didn’t add another log.
The temperature in the cabin dropped degree by degree, the warmth leaching from the air as the embers glowed orange behind the cast-iron door.
I hadn’t realized I was shivering until I noticed Mustang looking at my bare feet. My sleep shirt reached past my knees but did nothing for the cold that had settled into the cabin, into the chair, into the bones of my feet where they pressed against the hard-packed dirt floor.
He crossed to the chair where a folded plaid blanket was draped over the back—had been there the whole time, I realized, and I’d been too busy cataloguing exits and testing restraints to notice it.
He shook it out with a single snap of his wrists that sent dust motes spinning in the firelight, then laid it across my lap and legs without asking permission and without making it a moment.
He adjusted the edges, tucking the blanket around my feet where they touched the floor, and then he was gone, back to his side of the room, picking up his mug like he’d done nothing worth commenting on.
The blanket was scratchy wool, red and black plaid, smelled like woodsmoke and a faint masculine trace that might have been his cologne or might have been the cabin itself.
It was warm. Not heated-warm, but wool-warm, holding body heat, and within minutes my shivering had stopped, and my feet had gone from numb to almost comfortable.
I lowered my gaze to the blanket. Then back to Mustang, who was standing at the window with his back to me, one hand braced against the log wall, staring out through the cracked shutter at whatever lay beyond this cabin—woods, probably, or more woods, or a road that led back to a world where people like me didn’t get taken from their kitchens by men with guns.
I said nothing. What was there to say? Thank you for the blanket you gave me after you tied me to a chair? The words wouldn’t form, wouldn’t line up in any order that made sense given everything else between us.
So, I sat. Wrists bound behind me, blanket across my knees, fire burning low in the stove, and watched Mustang’s silhouette against the pale light from the window.
Broad shoulders under the leather cut. Salt-and-pepper hair catching what little light made it through the shutter.
One hand still braced against the wall, fingers splayed, those heavy silver rings gleaming dully in the dimness.
The contradiction sat in my chest where the splinter had been, grown larger now, too big to ignore: the man who had taken me was the same man making sure I didn’t go cold.
The hands that had bound my wrists were the same hands that had laid a blanket across my lap without being asked.
The voice that had refused every question was the same voice that had said No with a certainty I couldn’t disbelieve.
I didn’t understand it. Couldn’t reconcile it. Couldn’t fit the pieces together into a picture that made sense.
So, I didn’t try. I sat in the chair with the blanket warming my legs and the zip ties biting into my wrists and the fire burning down to embers, and I watched him watch whatever was beyond that window, and I waited for whatever came next.