7. CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER SEVEN
Mustang
The door hit the wall hard when I shoved through it, my right hand braced against the frame to keep myself upright.
The left side of my flannel was torn along the seam, the fabric dark and heavy where blood had soaked through from ribs to hip, and the effort of closing the door behind me sent a line of fire across my side that I’d been ignoring since the second mile of the drive back.
The cabin was warm. Wood stove burning, the smell of onions and garlic, maybe, or the herbs she’d hung above the sink catching the afternoon light through the window.
Hannah was at the kitchen table with her back to the door, red hair twisted into a knot at the nape of her neck, her hands busy with the cutting board.
She turned at the sound of the door, wooden spoon in hand, and I watched her face do what faces do when they see blood—the eyes going wide, the mouth opening, the spoon frozen halfway between the board and wherever she’d been taking it.
“Don’t.” I got the word out before she could speak, my voice carrying the flat finality I used for things that weren’t up for discussion.
I moved past her toward the stove, gripping the edge of the counter with my right hand to steady myself, and the pain in my left side flared bright enough that my vision grayed at the edges.
“It’s nothing. Just a scratch. I’ve handled worse. ”
She set the spoon down. Didn’t say a word. Crossed the room from the table to the wood stove in three strides, her eyes never leaving the dark patch on my flannel, and when she reached for my arm, I stepped back before her fingers could make contact.
“I said it’s handled.”
She pulled the chair away from the table,the wooden one with the reinforced leg, the one I’d fixed while she slept,and set it in front of the fire with a scrape of wood against packed dirt that cut through the quiet cabin.
Then she turned to me, her green eyes steady on mine, and spoke in a voice I hadn’t heard from her before.
“Sit down.”
Flat. Even. No tremor, no upward lilt, no space for argument built into the edges of the words.
Two syllables laid between us with weight, and I recognized the tone because I’d used it myself a thousand times in situations where the person on the receiving end needed to understand that the conversation was over.
I sat.
The chair held firm. No wobble. The bracket beneath the leg did its job as I lowered myself slowly, my jaw tight, my left arm pressed against my ribs where the blood had started to dry and pull at the fabric.
Hannah was already moving through the cabin, opening cabinets, reaching for shelves, her movements quick and purposeful in a way that reminded me of how she handled dough—economical, no wasted motion.
The small first aid kit came out from under the sink, the one I kept there for situations exactly like this one.
A clean cloth from the drawer beside the stove.
The bottle of antiseptic she’d reorganized three days ago, moving it from the back of the bathroom shelf to the windowsill above the drying herbs where it would be visible, accessible, a practical adjustment I would have made myself if I’d thought about it.
She came back to the fire with everything gathered in her arms and crouched in front of me on the packed dirt floor, her knees pressing into the hard ground, the first aid kit open beside her thigh.
The firelight caught the copper in her hair where it had come loose from the knot, and the smell of the herbs from the windowsill,rosemary, thyme, the purple oregano,mixed with the sharper scent of the antiseptic as she uncapped it.
“Take the shirt off.”
I peeled it over my head slowly. The fabric stuck where the blood had dried, pulling at the skin beneath in a burn that ran from my ribs to my shoulder blade, and I heard myself suck a breath through my teeth before I could stop it.
The shirt came free with a sound like tape being ripped from skin, and I dropped it on the floor beside the chair and sat there in the firelight with my chest bare and my hands flat on my thighs and Hannah’s eyes on the damage.
Two cuts across my left ribs. Not deep—a knife, probably, or a blade that had caught me twice in quick succession while I was putting someone else on the ground.
The top one ran parallel to the bottom of my rib cage, about four inches long, the edges ragged where the blade had dragged.
The lower one was shorter, cleaner, a slice rather than a tear.
Beneath both, a bruise was spreading outward from my hip in a bloom of purple black that would be worse by morning, the tissue already swelling where the hit had connected with enough force to drive the air from my lungs.
My right knuckles were split along the middle three, the skin torn and crusted over with dried blood that had been there long enough to turn brown.
Hannah didn’t flinch. Didn’t gasp or step back or do any of the things a person who baked bread for a living might be expected to do when confronted with the geography of damage on a man’s body.
She soaked the cloth in antiseptic, wrung it once, and pressed it against the deepest cut without warning.
I went rigid. Every muscle in my body locked at once, my back arching off the chair, a sharp breath hissing through my teeth that sounded too loud in the quiet cabin.
The antiseptic burned cold and then hot, working its way into the cut with a precision that felt deliberate, punitive almost, and I braced both hands against the chair arms and stared at the far wall where the log joints met the ceiling and tried to think about anything except the woman kneeling between my knees with her hand pressed flat against my ribs.
She held steady. Didn’t pull back when I tensed, didn’t ease up on the pressure.
Just kept the cloth against the wound, her fingers spread wide across my skin, and after ten seconds the worst of the burn subsided into a duller ache I could breathe through if I focused on the breathing and not on the fact that her hair was brushing my bare arm every time she leaned forward to check the edge of the cut.
The fire popped. Sparks flew against the cast-iron door and died, and in the sudden flare of orange light I caught the color of her hair—not just red, not the flat copper it looked like in daylight, but warmer, layered, strands of amber and gold mixed through the deeper red where the flame caught them.
She was close enough that I could smell the soap she’d been using, herbal and faint beneath the sharper notes of antiseptic and blood, and her breathing had synchronized with mine without either of us directing it, her chest rising and falling in the same slow rhythm my own had fallen into once the initial sting had passed.
She lifted the cloth. Checked the cut, her fingers moving along the edges with a careful pressure that tested the depth, her brow furrowed in concentration the same way it furrowed when she was working dough.
The top cut was clean, superficial, likely to close on its own if I kept it clean.
The lower one was deeper, angling between two ribs where the muscle was thinner, a cut that could get infected if it wasn’t handled right and would leave a scar either way.
“What happened?” Her voice was quiet. Not demanding, not pushing—just asking, the question laid between us the same way she’d laid the chair in front of the fire, with a directness that expected nothing and accepted whatever came back.
“Loose ends.” I kept my eyes on the far wall. My hands were still flat on my thighs, my fingers pressed hard enough into the denim that I could feel the fabric creasing under my grip. “Nothing you need to worry about. It’s handled.”
She nodded once. Didn’t press. Didn’t ask for names or locations or the thousand details that lived in the space between loose ends and handled.
Just reached for the gauze from the first aid kit and began cutting strips with the scissors I kept in there for exactly this purpose, her movements measured and sure, and the silence that settled over us as she worked had weight but no edges, no sharpness, nothing to push against or deflect.
That was worse. Anger I could have handled.
Questions, demands, the familiar brand of female exasperation that usually followed when a man showed up bleeding and refused to explain why.
Those things had structure. They gave me a target to react to, contain, redirect, or shut down with the efficiency I’d spent twenty years perfecting.
This silence had none of that. It was just quiet, just the sound of the fire and the scissors cutting gauze and Hannah’s breathing and my own, and underneath it all the keen awareness of her kneeling between my knees with her hands on my skin and neither of us saying the things that actually needed saying because the cabin was too small for those words and the mountain outside was too big, and some truths, once spoken, couldn’t be taken back.
She applied the antibiotic cream she had removed from the first aid kit and then pressed the first strip of gauze across the lower cut. Her fingertips were warm against my ribs, steady, and I stared at the far wall and kept my hands flat on my thighs and did not reach for her.
Not yet.
Not here.
She pressed the last piece of tape across the gauze with her thumb, smoothing the adhesive down along the edge where it met skin, and sat back on her heels to check her work.
Our faces were close—closer than they’d been since the night in her kitchen when I’d pointed a gun at her and she’d offered me coffee instead of screaming, closer than either of us had allowed in the week since.