CHAPTER THREE #2
The handle on the skillet had been loose for as long as I’d owned it.
One of the screws was stripped, and the handle wobbled when you picked it up hot, which was how you burned yourself if you weren’t careful.
I’d learned to work around it. Grab the skillet with the dish towel, lift from the sides, avoid the handle altogether.
She mentioned it once, offhand, stirring something at the stove.
“This handle’s about to come off in my hand. ”
The next morning, before she was up, I took my kit from the duffel by the door and found the right-sized screwdriver.
Fixed it in five minutes flat, tightening the good screw and replacing the stripped one with a spare from the bottom of the kit.
I set the skillet back on the shelf exactly where it had been, handle solid now, and was sitting at the table with my coffee when she came out of the bedroom.
She noticed within an hour. Picked up the skillet to heat it, felt the difference immediately — her hand paused mid-air, her fingers testing the handle’s new stability.
She didn’t say anything. Just glanced at me across the table where I was pretending to read the same message for the third time, and I looked back at my coffee and took a drink that was too hot and didn’t flinch.
We ate together that night. Bean stew with tomatoes and the herbs from the windowsill, torn pieces of the bread she’d made, which was better than anything that had come out of this cabin in its entire existence.
The fire was going in the stove, throwing orange light across the table, our bowls and the space between us that wasn’t empty in the way it had been before.
Not full, either. Halfway between, charged, aware, like the air before a storm breaks, but warmer.
I tore my bread instead of cutting it. She’d torn hers, So, I did too, without thinking about why.
The stew was thick, the beans soft, the tomatoes sweet against the salt.
We ate without talking for the first few minutes, the only sounds the scrape of spoons against tin, the crack of the fire and the occasional pop from a log settling.
“You didn’t build this place,” she said. Not a question. A statement, delivered between bites, her eyes on her bowl.
I set my spoon down. “No.”
Silence. I picked up the spoon again, stirred the stew once, and heard myself add, “Club owns it. Has for twenty years. I use it when I need to.”
Two sentences. The most I’d volunteered since the day I walked through her back door with a gun. The words sat between us on the scarred table like a fragile thing I’d set down without meaning to.
She didn’t push. Didn’t ask who the club was or what I used the cabin for or why a motorcycle club owned a log cabin in the middle of nowhere. Just nodded once, almost to herself, and tore another piece of bread.
But she didn’t look away. Her green eyes stayed on mine across the table for a beat too long, and in the firelight, with the bread between us and the smell of woodsmoke and herbs filling the room, I couldn’t read what was in them.
Not fear. Not gratitude. Something newer.
Something that made the scar along my jaw tighten the way it did when I was holding back more than I should.
I looked down at my stew. Ate another spoonful.
The beans were good. The bread was better.
The silence between us had weight now, but it was a different weight than the one that had filled this cabin three days ago when she was bound to a chair and I was standing at the window pretending the woods outside were more interesting than the woman behind me.
This weight carried warmth in it. And warmth, in my experience, was where men started making mistakes that ended badly for everyone involved.
I finished my stew. She finished hers. We sat with empty bowls and the last of the bread between us, neither of us reaching for it while the fire burned down and the cabin kept us inside its rough-hewn walls, as if it had been waiting for this silence all along.
The coffee had gone cold an hour ago. I sat at the table with the tin mug between my palms, not drinking, just holding the cold metal to keep my hands occupied, and listened to the soft sound of her breathing from behind the closed door.
She’d gone to bed an hour after dinner. Taken the single blanket from the cot I’d set up for her, my cot, the one I usually slept on when I used this place, and closed the door with a soft click that might have been consideration or might have been exhaustion.
Didn’t matter. The door was closed, and the cabin was quiet except for the occasional pop from the dying fire and the sound of her breathing, steady and deep, from the other side of three inches of pine.
I ran the numbers. The way I’d been running them every night since I drove her away from that house with the wilting flowers and the bakery apron.
Fifty thousand dollars. Cash, on delivery of proof she was dead.
Proof I hadn’t delivered and wasn’t going to deliver.
Fifty grand the club wouldn’t see, money that would have covered three months of overhead at the shop, a new roof for the clubhouse, and weapons we needed.
Gone, because I’d walked into a kitchen and looked at a woman’s face and couldn’t do what I’d been hired to do.
The client. Connected enough to know the club’s work, to have the money, to have used us before.
A man who wouldn’t take a failed contract lying down.
A man who would eventually come looking, either for her or for me, and when he found us, because men like that always found you, the price would be higher than fifty grand.
Would be blood, probably. My blood, or hers, or both.
The club. Mustang doesn’t make emotional decisions. Mustang weighs cost against gain and makes the call that keeps the brotherhood alive. Mustang doesn’t jeopardize twenty years of careful positioning because a baker with green eyes made him bread and hung herbs on his windowsill.