Page 101 of Breaking His Exile

Evander had done a number on him, and she inwardly smirked at that. Good.

He stood with one shoulder against the SUV’s hood, arms crossed, his dark hair falling across his face. He looked up as they approached. His gaze moved from Gemma to Rainey to Tilly, and something in his expression shifted. His eyes narrowed. The line of his mouth tightened.

Then his face went blank again. Mask reset. He pushed off the hood and straightened.

Gemma stopped Rainey ten yards from the vehicles. “Here we are.”

Hobbs stepped forward. He didn’t hurry. He never hurried. “Ms. Beckett. Been a while.”

His voice was low. Almost gentle. Rainey had heard that gentleness before, in the clubhouse, right before he walked past her toward Roy Bishoff’s body.

“Gemma,” Hobbs said. “Good work.”

Gemma grinned. “Thank you. You’ll tell Mal?”

“You can tell him yourself. He’s on his way.” He turned back to Rainey. “You’ve been difficult to find, Ms. Beckett. Your friend Mr. Cole has quite the talent for evasion. But everyone comes home eventually.” He gestured toward the SUV. “We’ll be taking you somewhere quiet until Mal decides what happens next. I suggest you cooperate. It goes easier.”

Rainey didn’t move. The cold had worked into her bones. Her fingers were numb. Her lungs hurt with each breath.

Behind her, Gemma said, “In the vehicle. Now.”

Rainey turned. Gemma stood with the gun leveled at her chest, her expression composed, her finger now inside the trigger guard. The warmth was gone. What remained was clean, professional focus.

Tilly lowered her head.

The growl started low. Deep. A sound that seemed to rise from somewhere beneath the frozen ground, vibrating through the dog’s chest and into the morning air. Her lips pulled back. Her teeth showed white against the black of her gums.

Gemma’s eyes flicked to the dog. The gun didn’t waver.

“Call her off,” Gemma said. “Now.”

Rainey looked at Tilly. The dog’s hackles stood ridge-backed along her spine. Her front paws had dug into the gravel. Every line of her massive body had gathered into something coiled and lethal.

She wasn’t Rainey’s to call off.

She was Evander’s.

And Evander had told her to watch.

twenty-eight

The track to the cabin had changed. Evander noticed it in the first quarter-mile – the ruts deeper than he remembered, the low branches he’d trimmed back at the first spring thaw now hanging across the path at windshield height. A week away and the mountain had already started reclaiming the ground he’d carved out of it. He drove the ranch truck through the gaps. He knew the terrain by muscle, and tried not to think about the last time he’d come up this road with Rainey in the passenger seat.

The cabin came into view through the pines. He parked the truck where he always parked it, killed the engine, and sat for a minute with his hands on the wheel.

It looked smaller. That was the first wrong thing. The walls were peppered with bullets. Part of the roof had collapsed.

But it was standing.

The fire hadn’t done as much damage as he feared. Hobbs or Creed must have doused the fire for fear it would alert the authorities. Fire in the mountains in July always drew attention.

He got out of the truck. His ribs protested the climb to the porch, and he ignored them.

He pushed the door open and stepped inside. The silence hit him like a punch, knocking the air from his lungs.

Rainey’s guitar still sat in the corner, miraculously unharmed. But she wasn’t here to play it. Tilly wasn’t here to pad across the floorboards to sniff his boots. No scent of Rainey lingering in the bedding, no half-empty mug on the table, no notebook open on the chair with lines crossed out and rewritten. Just his cabin. A little beat up, but it was the same as it had been for years before a blonde woman with a septum piercing and cigarette burns on her arms had walked into it and stayed a week and left him different.

He dropped his pack on the table and went to the woodstove. Started a fire because the cabin was cold and he needed the work of it, the methodical layering of kindling and paper and the first split logs. The flame caught. He closed the door and stood with his palms to the iron, feeling the heat seep into skin gone numb on the drive up.