Page 51 of Breaking His Exile

He didn’t know how to respond without lying, so he let her go and turned to his dog.

“Tilly.” The dog was at his knee in an instant, rain sheeting off her black coat. He took her muzzle in his hand. “Take Rainey home. Guard her.”

Tilly’s intelligent eyes held his for a beat, then she turned and started herding Rainey away.

“Evander—”

“Follow Tilly. She knows where she’s going. Stay low to the rock, bar the door, and don’t open it for anyone but me.”

She went. Tilly went with her, a black shape sliding into the timber behind the rock face, and Evander watched only long enough to be sure the terrain had swallowed them.

Then he turned downhill, toward the man in the trees, and became the thing he’d spent eight years trying not to be.

thirteen

Evander moved downhill through the rain-wet forest and felt the old wiring click back into place. The rifle settled against his shoulder. His boots found the gaps between roots and loose rock without sound. His breath came shallow through his nose. The rain helped—muffled his footfalls, drove most creatures to cover, turned the mountain into a gray-green smear that blurred the edges of every shape.

He picked up the tracker’s trail fifty yards below the shelter. Clear sign, even in the rain: boot prints pressed deep into the mud of the game trail.

Evander crouched and studied the prints. The right was heel-heavy and splayed. A limp. Not pronounced—the man was compensating well—but he had a weakness in the right knee, something old enough that the body had learned to work around it. The rain had barely started filling the indents.

He was close.

Evander rose and followed.

The trail cut east along the slope, following the contour line, and he let it lead him a quarter mile before he broke left into the high timber. The trees grew thicker here, old-growth fir throwing a canopy that broke the rain into a fine mist. The ground underfoot was soft with decades of needle-fall, spongy and silent. He moved faster now, no longer matching the tracker’s pace. He needed to get ahead. Needed to find a position.

The trapper’s shelter sat tucked under where the slope bent sharply north. Evander had found it his first year on the mountain—a shallow lean-to built so long ago that moss had claimed its walls, and its roof was propped with lodgepole logs that had turned silver with age. Hunters used it in season. Nobody else came this high.

Smoke curled from a fire. Thin. Gray. The rain had driven the man to shelter, and he’d built a small fire to dry his gear.

Evander circled east and came down on the shelter from above. He dropped to the flat ground behind the shelter and brought the rifle up in one clean motion. The man sat on a log beside the fire, his back to the shelter’s entrance, a tin cup steaming between his tattooed hands. The rifle lay across his thighs, barrel down.

Evander stepped forward and pressed the rifle to the back of the man’s skull.

The man went still. His shoulders tightened under the wet fabric. Then, slowly, he set the tin cup on the stone beside the fire.

“Turn around.”

He turned, and Evander’s breath snagged in his chest.

A full beard, close-trimmed, dusted with gray at the chin. Eyes that shifted from dark to amber in the firelight.

Creed Calder.

Former Army Ranger. Former Valor Ridge resident, until two years ago when he put a man in the hospital, and Walker had no choice but to cut him loose. Evander had watched it happen from the ridge above the ranch, binoculars pressed to his eyes, the same way he watched everything that happened behind those gates.

The Sons of Sin had sent a man who knew Valor Ridge from the inside.

Ice slid through his veins, and he pressed the barrell tighter to Creed’s head. “What are you doing on my mountain, Calder?”

Creed shifted his weight on the log, seemingly unworried by the weapon. His right leg extended slightly, knee braced.

“Working.” He picked up the tin cup and drank. Steam rose past his beard. “You know how it is. Man’s gotta eat.”

“You’re tracking Rainey.”

Creed set the cup down. His eyes never left Evander’s. “I gotta say, I didn’t expect to find her with you. Last I heard, Evander Cole lived alone. No visitors. No exceptions. The guys at the Ridge talked about you sometimes. The man who wouldn’t stay.”