12. CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER TWELVE
Hannah
The room smelled like him. Gun oil and leather and something underneath that was just skin, just Mustang, the scent of a man who’d been moving through the world the same way for so long that his body had stopped bothering to announce itself.
I stood just inside the bolted door with the cold concrete under my boots and took it in — the single bed, unmade, sheets rumpled the way sheets get when a man sleeps in them alone and doesn’t care how they look.
A scarred wooden dresser against the far wall, its surface bare except for a handgun resting on top, barrel pointed at the wall, grip angled toward the door.
The overhead bulb cast everything in dim yellow light that turned the concrete walls the color of old bone and made the shadows in the corners feel deeper than they were.
His cut hung on a hook behind the door. The leather was dark with dew or sweat or blood — in that light, I couldn’t tell which, and maybe it didn’t matter.
The patches caught the bulb’s glow in dull crimson: Wicked Mayhem MC across the shoulders, President below that, the rank he’d earned through whatever twenty years in this life had cost him.
I could still smell the pine from the mountain cabin on my clothes, underneath the sharper scent of cordite that had worked its way into the canvas of his jacket during the firefight.
The dried herbs pressed against my ribs in the inside pocket, rosemary and thyme and the purple oregano, brittle now but still holding their smell.
Radio chatter bled under the door. Muffled, urgent, voices I didn’t recognize cutting across each other in the clipped rhythm of men coordinating something that couldn’t wait.
Coordinates. Timestamps. Something about a perimeter sweep.
Then a burst of distant gunfire cracked through the night — sharp, flat, the sound carrying across open ground before the compound walls swallowed it.
My body knew that sound now. My body had decided, sometime in the past hour, that the appropriate response to gunfire was not to flinch but to listen, to count the shots, to calculate distance the way Mustang calculated everything.
Three rounds. East side of the property. Farther away than the first volley.
Mustang crossed to the door and threw the deadbolt.
The mechanism engaged with a solid clunk that echoed off the concrete.
He moved to the single narrow window, high-set, reinforced glass, the kind that wouldn’t break without effort, and scanned the dark yard below with that flat, calculating gaze I’d watched a hundred times now.
His jaw was set. The scar along it pulled tight against the stubble, a pale line in the yellow light.
Whatever he saw down there satisfied him, or didn’t dissatisfy him enough to act on it, because he pulled the heavy curtain across the window with a single tug and turned back to face the room.
I sat on the edge of the bed. The frame creaked under my weight, springs complaining the way springs do in beds that weren’t built for comfort.
My red hair fell loose around my shoulders, tangled from the run through the clubhouse, from Ace’s hand on my arm guiding me toward the war room, from whatever had happened in the thirty minutes between the first gunshot and this bolted door.
There was a smear of ash on my forearm, gray black against skin, and I hadn’t noticed it until now.
Probably from the shop. The front window exploding, glass and smoke and the acrid smell of something burning that wasn’t supposed to burn.
Mustang stood near the dresser. One hand rested on the grip of the handgun without picking it up, his fingers curled around the textured polymer the way a man’s hand rests on something familiar.
His black t-shirt was thin enough that I could see the bruise forming along his ribs — purple blooming under the skin, dark at the center, fading to something greener at the edges.
He’d taken a hit. Not a bullet. Something blunt.
A rifle stock, maybe, or someone’s boot.
He hadn’t mentioned it. Hadn’t winced when Ace wrapped Loch’s arm or when Socket cursed over the prospect’s shoulder.
Had just kept moving, the way he kept moving through everything, and now the bruise was there, and he was standing in his private room with a gun under his hand and his eyes on me, and neither of us was speaking.
The radio chatter continued. Muffled, insistent, the sound of a world that wouldn’t stop demanding things just because we’d closed a door.
Another distant crack, single shot this time, isolated, the kind a sentry fires to check a shadow.
Mustang’s expression didn’t change. His hand stayed on the gun.
His eyes held mine across the room, and the silence between us felt stolen, finite, the way certain silences do when you know exactly how much time you have before something else happens.
I stood up.
The concrete was cold through the soles of the boots he’d bought me in Pine Creek.
I crossed the distance between us in three steps, not rushed, not hesitant, just moving the way my body had decided to move, and pressed my palm flat against his chest over the bruised ribs.
His skin was warm through the thin cotton.
I could feel his heartbeat under my hand, steady and unhurried, the rhythm of a man whose body had calibrated itself to violence so thoroughly that even now, with a bruise darkening along his side and gunfire in the distance, his heart didn’t see the point in racing.
Mustang covered my hand with his. His tattooed fingers wrapped around mine, callused and warm, the silver rings cool against my knuckles where they pressed into skin.
He held my hand against his chest the way a man holds something he’s decided not to let go of, and I tipped my face up to look at him.
“I’m not scared,” I said. The words came out quieter than I’d meant them to, but they held. “Not of tomorrow. Not of any of it.”
His jaw worked once. The scar pulled. His voice, when it came, was low and rough, the texture it got when he was holding something back that wanted out. “You should be.”
I shook my head. Not arguing. Just answering. “I’m choosing this. I’m choosing you.”
Something broke in his face. Not collapse — release, the way a door gives when the lock finally yields.
His hands came up to cup my jaw, both of them, his thumbs tracing the line of my cheekbones with a gentleness that belonged to a different man than the one who’d walked through my back door with a gun.
His palms were warm against my skin. I could feel the ridges of old scar tissue along the edge of his right hand where it curved around my jaw, and I leaned into the touch because leaning was the only honest response I had left.
He kissed me.
Slow, at first. Careful. The way a man kisses something he’s afraid to break, testing the weight of it, learning the shape.
His mouth was warm and certain against mine, and I felt his breath catch, just once, a fractional hitch, before his control settled back into place.
Then deeper. His fingers slid into my hair, curled around the back of my neck, held me there with a steadiness that had nothing to do with force and everything to do with the way Mustang committed to things.
Once decided, fully. No take-backs. No half-measures.
I kissed him back. My hands found his shoulders, the solid warmth of him under the thin cotton, the ink beneath my palms — tribal patterns, dark and raised, mapping a history I was only beginning to understand.
The radio chatter continued under the door, muffled and urgent, and somewhere outside the compound walls, the distant gunfire had gone quiet.
The room held us. The bed frame creaked when his weight shifted closer, when my back met the edge of the dresser and the handgun sat inches from my hip, cold metal against warm skin, and I didn’t care about either one because his mouth was on mine and his hands were in my hair and for the first time since the mountain cabin, since the herbs on the windowsill, since the moment I’d watched him fix a chair leg without being asked, the space between wanting and having collapsed into nothing at all.
He pulled back from the kiss. Just enough that his mouth left mine but his hands stayed on my jaw, his thumbs tracing the line of my cheekbones the way they had a minute ago, and his eyes, steel-gray, flat, the shade they got when he was making absolutely sure of something, searched my face like he was reading terrain.
The overhead bulb cast his features in yellow light, turning the scar along his jaw into something pale and raised, a geography I’d been learning for days without touching it.
His breath was warm against my lips. Close enough that I could count the individual beats of silence between us, and in each one, the question hung unspoken: last chance.
Change your mind now or don’t change it at all.
I reached for the hem of his black t-shirt instead of stepping away.