Page 92 of Breaking His Exile

The air changed.

Rainey felt it before she saw it — the shift in the yard, the way attention redirected. Boone was already moving toward the equipment shed. Evander emerged from the barn doorway, and she didn’t need to see his face to know what was happening behind it.

Boone came back with binoculars. He raised them, scanned the eastern tree line where the pines thickened toward the ridge, and held still. Then he lowered the glasses and crossed to Evander without speaking. Handed them over.

Evander took them. Raised them to his eyes. The line of his shoulders went rigid.

He lowered the binoculars. “That’s Sable.”

He was moving before the words finished. Three strides toward the barn, toward the tack room, toward whatever gear he needed to go after her. Boone stepped into his path.

“Hold on.”

Evander stopped. Barely.

“That’s the exact blind spot you mapped for Ghost yesterday,” Boone said. His voice was quiet. Flat. “Eastern game trail, hundred yards in from the fence line. Where the cameras don’t reach.”

“Creed,” Rainey said.

The name sat in the yard. Nobody contradicted her.

Evander’s jaw worked. He looked at the tree line, then at Boone, and whatever calculation was happening behind his eyes moved too fast to track.

“He’s using her as bait,” Boone said. Not a question.

Evander didn’t answer. He didn’t need to.

Rainey crossed to him. She put a hand on his arm, below the cut, where the skin was warm, and she could feel the tension in the muscle underneath. “Let Boone go with you.”

He looked at her. The conflict was naked on his face — the need to move, now, immediately, warring with the part of him that had spent eight years refusing to let anyone follow him into risk.

“Evander.” She kept her voice steady. “Take him. Please. For me.”

twenty-five

Fuck. He couldn’t deny Rainey Beckett when she looked at him like that, with her heart in her eyes.

So here he was, trudging across the fields at last light next to Boone. The sky behind them had gone the color of bruised fruit, and the timber ahead was a jagged black seam.

The first mile passed in silence, save for the steady crunch of their boots and the dry thrum of his pulse.

Sable’s tracks were easy enough to read. She’d come in fast, then slowed, then started dragging her left hind — evading something, or someone, or just done in from the run. He didn’t need to crouch to see the blood. The hoof prints staggered, the drag mark clean and sharp.

“She’s hurting,” Boone said.

Evander nodded.

They found her at the edge of a small clearing, standing three-legged in the last of the light, head low, favoring the hind leg so badly she’d worn a circle in the dirt trying to ease it. A lead rope ran from her halter to a stake driven into the ground.

Evander stopped.

“Someone staked her here,” Boone said quietly. He knelt, pressed two fingers to the disturbed earth. “Recent.”

She hadn’t wandered down off the mountain on a bad leg and found her way to the one fence that meant safety. Someone had walked her here, hurt or found her hurt, and tied her in the open where anyone glassing the ridge from the ranch would see her.

Bait. And he’d read it as his horse coming home.

Sable lifted her head and saw him and made a low sound, and every instinct in him pulled toward her. He crossed the clearing anyway, because leaving her staked and lame in the dark was not a thing he was capable of doing, and he knew — the way he knew terrain, the way he’d known the second Boone stepped into his path at the gate — that walking into the open was exactly what he’d been brought here to do.