Page 33 of Breaking His Exile

Three days.

Three more days of this—the four walls, the woodstove, the growing tension between them that she’d been trying very hard not to name. Three more days of watching him sleep on the floor, of waking to coffee, of fighting the urge to touch him just to see what would happen.

She sat down at the table. The map was still spread across it, held down at the corners by a tin of coffee, a box of shells, and a smooth river stone Evander used as a paperweight.

“So what do we do if the Sons find us while we’re stuck here?”

He considered the question for what felt like a long time. The only sound was the rain, constant and heavy, and the occasional pop of sap from the wood stove.

“Same thing we do if they find us anywhere.” He leaned against the counter, arms crossed, his gaze steady on hers. “We survive.”

He said “survive” like it was simple, like he’d been doing it so long he’d forgotten there was any other option.

Like he’d forgotten there was more to life than surviving it.

“Has it ever been this bad?” she asked. “The rain. The flooding.”

“Last spring.”

He didn’t offer more, but she was getting used to his tells now and pieced it together. “Is that why you don’t live next to Valor Ridge anymore?”

His gaze snapped to her.

“You said you had a cabin there you lived in for eight years,” she reminded.

He picked up his mug, drank the last of his coffee, and set it in the basin with a clink. “Yeah.”

She waited. The rain filled the silence, but she waited through it, and after a long moment he spoke again.

“We had a late thaw, a warm spring, and then a week of solid rain. The snowpack came off the high country all at once. Creeks jumped their banks. Rivers flooded. Half the county got hit, but the worst damage was in the low canyons.” He paused, and when he spoke again, his voice had gone flat, the way it did when he was talking about something he didn’t want to feel. “I was living at the old cabin. The one near Valor Ridge.”

“And it flooded,” she finished when he stopped.

“The creek was a couple hundred feet away. With normal spring runoff, it never came within fifty feet of the cabin. This spring it came over its banks and ate the ground out from under the cabin’s southwest corner. Took half the foundation with it.”

She tried to picture it. The cabin she sat in now was solid, dry, well-built. The thought of water tearing at the ground beneath it, undermining the very thing that kept it upright, made her stomach clench.

“Could you see it happening?” she asked. “Was there warning?”

“Some. The water came up fast, but I had time to move most of my gear to high ground.” He paused. “Tilly and I watched it go under.”

The flatness of the words betrayed him. Eight years of work, of solitude, of a life built by hand, and he’d stood in the rain and watched it disappear under floodwaters.

“Where did you go?”

He gave a narrow-eyed look, and she realized what a dumb question that was. There was only one place he could’ve gone.

“Valor Ridge,” she answered herself. “Bet Sable loved that.”

A faint smile touched his lips. “She wasn’t thrilled.”

“The cabin wasn’t salvageable?”

“I could’ve rebuilt.”

“But…?” she prompted.

God, she needed a crowbar for this conversation.