Page 62 of Breaking His Exile

“You okay?” Rainey asked, her mouth close to his ear, her breath warm against the cold spray.

“No,” he said. “But I’m moving.”

She laughed in a surprised burst of sound that disappeared in the water’s noise. “That’s the most honest thing you’ve ever said to me.”

They gained the far bank and kept walking. The logging road showed through the undergrowth: two ruts of packed earth, overgrown with grass and saplings, but passable. His legs shook. His vision narrowed at the edges, gray creeping in when he pushed too hard. Rainey matched his pace without comment, her shoulder brushing his when the road narrowed, her hand finding his at intervals, brief touches that anchored him.

By mid-afternoon, they could see the ridge that marked Valor Ridge’s western boundary. The land changed—fences, cleared pastures, the distant shape of barn roofs. Evander stopped where the road crested a rise and looked down at what he’d spent eight years refusing to call home.

But it was.

It always had been.

Rainey stood beside him, breathing hard, her face streaked with dirt and sweat and creek water. She didn’t speak. She was waiting, he realized, for him to be ready.

He thought of Nate Holloway, binoculars up, asking if he was sure.

He thought of River Beckett, young and reckless, asking the same.

He thought of Rainey, last night in the cabin, telling him he didn’t need to keep punishing himself for his bad decisions.

“I’m not sure about this,” he said aloud.

Rainey squeezed his hand. “That’s allowed.”

He drew a fortifying breath, and they started down the hill toward the gate.

seventeen

Jax looked like a man about to face a firing squad. That was the only way X could describe his face when Nessie came around the corner of the barn with Oliver at her side and Echo, his Australian shepherd, following with a basket in her mouth.

He was shaking. Barely — a tremor in his hands that he stilled by clasping them in front of him — but X had known Jaxon Thorne long enough to know the man didn’t shake. His old SEAL teammates—two of whom were in the crowd—had nicknamed him Steady, because the man was usually a rock.

But Jax was shaking now.

Nessie had done something with her hair, soft waves in an updo sprinkled with flowers—Mariah’s handiwork, no doubt. She wore a dress that was exactly her—a pale pink silk sheath that moved like liquid. She came up the makeshift aisle with Oliver’s hand in hers, smiling, eyes locked on the man at the end of it. Oliver walked with the gravity of a boy who understood this mattered. Tate sat in the audience beside Mariah, copper curls just clearing the chair back, his stuffed velociraptor on his lap despite being informed it was a wedding.

X grinned at that. He adored that weird little kid and his “Veloci,” who went everywhere with him. Tate waved. He wiggled his fingers back.

Mariah turned, saw him grinning at them, and scowled.

Walker read the ceremony. Short, no flourish, so very typically Walker. When Jax said his vows, his voice came out rough at the edges, and X found his eyes had suddenly gone blurry.

Oliver stood so still during the rings that X almost didn’t know him. The kid who’d spent the past year running at full volume, who’d informed X on several occasions that T-Rexes had feathers and demanded he update his understanding accordingly — that kid stood with his hands folded and watched his mother marry the man who’d been doing the work of “dad” for months. When Jax slid the ring onto Nessie’s hand, Oliver looked up at him and nodded, once, the way a business partner might. X smothered a laugh.

When the new husband and wife were announced, Kavik howled. Ceremonially, and at full volume.

Echo startled into Jax’s leg. Oliver doubled over laughing. Nessie put her face in her hands, shoulders shaking, and Jax — solemn, stone-faced Jax Thorne — tipped his head back and laughed, full and real, a sound X had never heard out of him before.

X clapped Kavik on the side of the neck. “Outstanding. Truly. Your best work, hermanito.”

Kavik wagged.

The reception spread across the yard in the long evening light. Johanna had done most of the food, and the smell of it came off the tables in waves — slow-cooked things, warm bread, the sweet sharpness of whatever Nessie baked at four that morning because she baked when she was anxious. Someone had a speaker going, something low and warm that sat under the talk.

Across the yard, River sat alone at the end of a table, a drink sweating in front of him. Gemma had planted herself beside him, close, saying something with her hands, and River gave her the barest of nods and nothing else. She tried again—leaned in, bumped his shoulder.

Nothing. River stared out past the dance floor at the tree line.