Page 25 of Breaking His Exile

“Why don’t you have a barn?”

“Sable doesn’t like barns.”

“Then why didn’t you kill it?” She nodded toward the window, the clearing, the tree line beyond it. “You told me you were a sniper. I’m sure you made shots from a lot farther than that, but you missed. Twice.”

“I’m rusty.”

“No, you’re not.”

He didn’t answer right away, and the not-answering was its own answer.

“You didn’t want to kill it.”

“I wanted it gone.” He reached behind the door for a jacket. “Killing it wasn’t the fastest way to do that. A dead lion in the yard draws every scavenger on the mountain and tells anyone who finds it that somebody’s living up here worth avoiding.” He shrugged the jacket on. “Two shots in the dirt and it leaves thinking the ground’s not worth the trouble.”

It was a practical answer.

It also wasn’t the whole truth, and they both knew it. She’d watched his face when he’d fired—both times, wide, into tree and dirt—and there’d been no hesitation in it, no bad aim. A man didn’t miss like that by accident. He missed like that when some part of him didn’t want the thing in his sights to die.

“Okay.” She set the guitar aside. “I’m coming with you.”

He swung back to face her. “No.”

“Yes.” She crossed her arms. “Rule number whatever. You don’t leave without telling me. Well, you’re telling me, and I’m telling you I’m coming.”

“Your ribs⁠—”

“Are cracked, not shattered. I can walk. I can watch your back. I can stand still and be quiet, which is more than most people can do.” She held his stare. “You said it yourself. Two days. That means two days of me being here, and I’m not spending them staring at these four walls while you disappear into the trees every time something needs doing.”

Something moved across his face—frustration, maybe, or the ghost of the argument he wasn’t going to win—and then it was gone, replaced by that flat, assessing look she was starting to recognize as Evander Cole making a calculation he didn’t like the answer to.

“Fine.” He reached behind the door and took down a rifle—a different one, shorter, with a scope—and checked the action. “Stay behind me. Step where I step. If I stop, you stop. If I signal quiet, you go quiet. No exceptions.”

“Deal.”

He slung the rifle and grabbed a jacket from the hook. Tilly was already at the door, ears forward, tail low and alert. Rainey pulled on her boots and followed them out into the clearing.

The woods here were thick and swallowed them fast.

Evander set a pace that was just slow enough to tell her he’d shortened his stride on purpose, though he’d never admit it. The ground underfoot was soft with needle-fall, springy and quiet. Pine trunks rose on all sides, close enough that she could reach out and touch the rough bark. The air was cooler here, carrying the green smell of sap and fungus and something darker underneath—soil, old leaves, the mustiness of a forest that didn’t get many visitors.

Evander stopped twenty yards in. Crouched. His fingers brushed the ground where the needle-fall was disturbed, pressed into a shallow depression the size of her palm.

“Here,” he said. “Forepaw. Adult female, based on the size. Headed east.” He traced the direction with two fingers. “See how the needles are pushed forward? She was moving with purpose. Not stalking. Traveling.”

Rainey crouched beside him. Her ribs complained and she ignored them. The track looked like nothing to her—a dent in the pine litter, maybe, or the kind of mark a falling branch might leave. But Evander saw a story in it. She could tell by the way his eyes moved, reading the ground the way she read a room full of strangers—scanning for threats, for exits, for the one detail that didn’t belong.

They moved deeper. Evander pointed out signs she would have missed completely: a broken fern frond, its stem snapped at knee height. A scrape on a pine trunk where something had marked territory. The way the wind moved through the canopy, carrying scent from the ridge above them. He spoke in that same practical voice, nothing wasted, each observation clean and specific. This is how you read a mountainside. This is how you know what lives here.

And he would tell her any of it. She realized that as they climbed. He would share every piece of knowledge about these woods, every skill, every warning. He would teach her to track a mountain lion and build a fire and read the weather in the clouds. He would give her tools, labor, protection, care.

What he wouldn’t give her was himself.

The question about Valor Ridge sat between them, unanswered. The story of the two nights. The thing that had sent him into these woods for eight years. She could ask it again right now, and he would find a reason not to hear her.

They crested a small rise and Evander held up a hand. Stopped. Tilly went still beside him, her nose working the air. Rainey held her breath.

Nothing moved. A jay called somewhere to the west. Wind moved through high branches. Nothing larger.