Page 117 of Breaking His Exile

“They do.”

Brandt studied him. “You’re not going after him.”

It wasn’t a question. Evander didn’t treat it like one.

“No.”

“Good.” Brandt tucked the notebook into his jacket. “The federal case is airtight. Rainey’s testimony, the evidence from today, the club’s financial records that Mal was trying to protect—it’s enough for RICO. Enough to break the Sons as an organization. Mal running just means we indict him in absentia. He’ll surface. They always do.”

Evander looked past Brandt, toward the infirmary window where Rainey slept under Bear’s watch. Her blonde hair spread across the pillow. Her face was peaceful in a way it hadn’t been since the mountain. Since before the mountain.

“Thank you,” he said.

Brandt’s expression didn’t change. “Get some rest, Cole. You look like hell.”

He walked away. His boots crossed the yard toward his SUV, and the engine started, and the taillights vanished down the county road toward whatever federal apparatus waited in Missoula or Billings or wherever men like Brandt went when the shooting stopped.

Evander stayed on the steps. The cold bit through his Henley. His ribs ached. His side pulled. The cut on his arm from General Mayhem had reopened somewhere during the day and dried again, and he hadn’t cleaned that either.

He would, though. Later. When Rainey woke up and demanded it with that bright stubborn insistence that had drawn him from the first day on the mountain when she’d stood in his cabin doorway with blood on her hands and refused to be afraid.

He went inside. Closed the door. The fire warmed him. Tilly followed at his heel, and somewhere in the barn, a horse with a bad leg waited for morning, and somewhere in the infirmary, a woman he loved slept under clean sheets, and for the first time in eight years, Evander Cole had nowhere else he needed to be.

thirty-three

She found him on the porch steps. Alone.

The main house hummed with activity behind the closed door—Brandt’s measured voice asking questions, Walker coordinating, X and Jax somewhere cleaning weapons or drinking or both. The day had turned cold again, the kind of cold that sank past skin into bone, and River sat with his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands and his shoulders bowed under something Rainey recognized without needing to name it.

Evander stood at her side. He’d been there since Bear cleared the concussion—hovering, his dark eyes tracking every wince, his hand never more than six inches from her elbow. She loved him for it. She also needed him to stop.

“Go inside,” she said.

His jaw worked. “Rainey⁠—”

“I need to talk to him alone.”

He looked at River. At the hunched shape of him on the steps, the way the cold had reddened his ears and he hadn’t bothered to pull his hood up. Something passed across Evander’s face—calculation, concern, the particular wariness of a man who understood exactly what kind of conversation was about to happen and didn’t want to be the reason it went unsaid.

“Ten minutes,” he said. “Then I’m checking.”

She squeezed his hand. Once. Hard enough that he’d feel it through the bandages on her wrists. “Go.”

He went. The door closed behind him with a soft click that sounded, in the quiet, like the end of something.

Rainey crossed the porch. Sat beside her brother on the cold wooden step. Her ribs protested. Her temple throbbed where Hobbs had hit her, the swelling gone down but the bruise spreading in ugly yellows and purples across her left eye. She didn’t care.

River’s hands came away from his face. His eyes were red. Swollen. He’d been crying, or trying not to, and the effort had left tracks on his cheeks that the cold air had dried to tight lines.

He held something between his fingers. A folded piece of paper, creased and soft along the edges from handling. Rainey knew it before he extended it toward her—the note from her truck. The one she’d written three years ago, after their father’s funeral, and never sent because sending it meant admitting she’d wanted to.

“You found it,” she said.

“Truck search. After you went missing.” His voice came out scraped. “I didn’t open it.”

He placed it in her palm. His fingers brushed hers, quick, like he wasn’t sure he was allowed to touch her. The paper felt warm from his grip.

“You don’t have the right to read anything I’m not ready to give you,” River said. He’d rehearsed it. She could hear the shape of rehearsal in the words, the way they came out too clean, too measured, like he’d been carrying them since he found the note and waiting for a chance to return it intact.