Page 102 of Breaking His Exile

Something moved outside.

He went still. Hand to the knife at his belt, eyes on the window. The sound came again – a shift, a weight settling, the soft exhale of a large animal standing on pine needles.

He knew that sound.

Evander crossed to the door and pulled it open. Sable stood at the tree line thirty yards from the cabin, her dark coat dull with sweat and dust, her left hind leg cocked at an angle that tightened his chest. She lifted her head when she saw him. Made a low, rough sound that wasn’t quite a whinny and wasn’t quite relief.

“Hey, girl.”

He approached slowly. She let him. No sidestep, no ear-flattening wariness – just the steady, exhausted regard of an animal that had run until it couldn’t run anymore and had come, against every reasonable expectation, home.

He reached her. Put a hand on her neck. She leaned into it. Her coat was cold under his palm. She’d been out all night, maybe longer. The leg was the problem – torn muscle high in the haunch, swelling already setting in, the kind of injury that would take weeks to mend if it mended clean at all. No bullet wound, thankfully. Creed hadn’t shot her. The stake had been the trap, not the punishment. He’d walked a lame horse down a mountain and staked her in the open as bait, and she’d torn herself free and found her way back here through the dark because Sable had never done anything the easy way in her life.

“Stubborn,” he said. She blew warm breath against his jacket.

He led her to the lean-to behind the cabin, talking low the whole way – nothing with meaning, just the sound of a voice, something to orient her. She followed with the three-legged lurch of a horse in real pain, and each step cost her something he could read in the set of her ears and the tension along her spine. He got her into the shelter, filled the water trough from the rain barrel. She drank long and hard.

He cleaned the leg. Cold water from the stream, a cloth, his hands working the swollen tissue. Sable stood still for it. She’d always stood for it. There was a trust between them that had nothing to do with dominance and everything to do with the fact that he had never once given her a reason to doubt his hands.

When he finished, he pressed his forehead to hers and stayed there a long moment. Her breath warmed his face. Her forelock tickled his brow. He could feel the rapid, shallow pulse where the great vessels ran under her jaw.

She’d come back. Against odds. Against sense. She had come back.

“You’re okay now, sweetheart,” he whispered. “You’re okay.”

He left her with hay and water and the promise he’d check again in an hour, and he went to the woodpile and took up the axe.

The work was what he needed. Always had been. Physical labor occupied the body and quieted the mind, or at least gave the mind something narrow to focus on besides the things it wanted to revisit. He split wood he’d need to rebuild. Started with the rounds he’d cut in April, maple and pine and the occasional birch, and worked through them with a rhythm that ignored the protest from his ribs and the pull of the stitches in his side. The axe bit. Wood cracked. Splinters flew. His hands grew raw and then numb and then raw again, and he kept going because stopping meant thinking and thinking meant Boone’s blood on his knuckles and Creed standing on that ridge with a rifle and the flat certainty that he had been right all along – everyone was safer the farther they stayed from him.

The pile grew. He stacked as he split, building a wall of cut wood along the east side of the cabin where the morning sun would dry it. His breath came hard. Sweat froze on his temples. The concussion Bear had warned him about made the edges of his vision pulse faintly with each impact, and he welcomed that too. Pain was information. Pain was useful.

He worked until his arms shook. Until the blisters on his palms broke and sealed and broke again. Until the sun climbed high enough to melt the frost from the roof and send water dripping in a steady percussion from the eaves. He worked until there was nothing left to split, and then he cleared the deadfall from around the cabin perimeter, dragging branches into a burn pile he had no intention of lighting, and when that was done he started on the gutter, reattaching the section the wind had torn loose, hammering the brackets into place with more force than the job required.

The satellite phone he’d taken from the ranch rang inside the cabin. He couldn’t say why he’d taken it. He didn’t want to be reached.

He ignored it. Whoever it was – Walker, probably, or Brandt with an update on Creed, or River with whatever half-formed concern had occurred to him – could wait. The work wasn’t finished. The work was never finished.

The ringing stopped.

He started to take a relieved breath, but an engine sounded outside.

Fuck.

He turned. Through the window, Greta’s red Jeep was pulling into the clearing, navigating the ruts easily. She parked beside the ranch truck, killed the engine, and sat for a moment behind the wheel like she was composing herself. Then she got out.

She had a thermos in one hand and a paper bag in the other. She crossed to the porch without looking at him, climbed the steps, and set both items on the rail. Then she turned and took him in – the sweat, the blood on his knuckles, the way he was standing in the doorway with a satellite phone clutched in one fist and his whole body oriented toward the east like he was already halfway gone.

“Walker called,” she said.

Evander didn’t move.

Greta unscrewed the thermos. Poured coffee into the cap. Handed it to him. He took it automatically. The warmth burned his palms. He didn’t drink.

“Boone’s alive,” she said. “Pissed as hell, but alive. Took the round high in the shoulder. Clean through-and-through. No major vessels, no bone involvement. Bear says he’ll have full range of motion inside a month if he stops trying to get out of bed every ten minutes.” She took a sip from the thermos itself. “Which he won’t.”

The coffee sat in Evander’s hand. Steam rose from it into the cold air.

“He’s furious you left,” Greta continued. Her voice had that particular evenness it took on when she was delivering information she knew would land hard and had decided not to cushion. “Says you used his blood as an excuse. His words, not mine.”