Page 94 of Breaking His Exile

“You know he only got me because I stepped into it,” Boone said.

Evander grunted. He didn’t have words.

“Can’t control everything, Cole. Sometimes a man just chooses to bleed.”

Evander looked down at him. “Why.”

Boone smiled again, softer. “You’re the best shot we got. Wasn’t going to let you go down before I did.”

Something in Evander cracked, then set harder than before. He kept the pressure, kept the count, kept the world narrowed to what his two hands could hold and nothing past it.

The blood slowed. Not enough. He checked the pulse. There. Not strong. There.

Bear reached them first, King baying down the slope, Bear’s boots heavy and certain on the grade. He dropped beside Boone and took the wound. “You good?”

“Peachy,” Boone said, lips gone gray.

“Get him out of here.” Bear jerked his chin at Evander. “You’re point.”

They carried him down in a fireman’s carry, Evander at the legs, Bear at the arms. Jonah met them at the break with River a step behind, and by the time they crossed the yard both men wore more of Boone’s blood than Boone had left to give.

Twelve minutes to the ranch. Bear’s hands never came off the wound, not across the yard, not through the infirmary door.

Evander backed away and let him work.

He stepped out onto the porch into the cold. Behind him the infirmary was all motion and light and noise — Bear’s voice pitched low and hard, Jonah running for supplies, someone calling for the good clotting gauze, Boone answering something dry enough that a strained laugh went around the room. The sounds of people pulling together around a man who was hurt. The sounds of a family closing over a wound.

He stayed on the porch with the door between him and all of it.

He looked at his hands. The blood had gone tacky, filling the lines of his knuckles and drying dark under his nails. Boone’s blood. He turned them over and looked at the backs and then the palms, and they did not know the difference between this blood and any other he’d carried out of any other bad ground.

He’d flagged the blind spot on Ghost’s map that morning. He’d named the exact ground Creed used. He’d let himself want the horse badly enough to walk out into it, and Boone had followed him into the dark the way men kept following him into the dark, and now Boone was on a table and Sable was gone up the mountain on a ruined leg and Creed had stood on that ridge and made sure Evander saw his face while he did it.

There was a version of the last week he’d let himself half-believe. Coffee at a table that wasn’t his. A song about a name. A door somebody kept holding open, and the idea, quiet and unfamiliar, that he might walk through it and stay.

This was the other version. The true one. He stayed, someone trusted him, someone bled. It had been true in a country on the far side of the world, and it was true on a ridge above Solace, and it would go on being true wherever he let himself stand still long enough for people to gather.

Inside, Boone’s voice again, faint through the glass, telling somebody to quit crowding him.

Evander stood on the porch with the man’s blood drying on his hands and did not go in.

twenty-six

He stood there until the blood dried tight across his knuckles, and even then he didn’t move to wash it off.

Creed had come to Valor Ridge because of him.

Not because of Rainey, not because of the RICO case or Brandt’s task force or whatever the Sons had planned. Creed had tracked him specifically, lured him out with his horse, and waited on that ridge for a shot at him.

And Boone had taken it instead.

He looked at his hands again. The red had gone dark and cracked at the creases, and he thought about River’s face when he’d seen it, the way the kid had gone quiet and put a hand flat on the fence post like he needed something solid to hold.

Rainey was protected now. She had River, and Brandt with his flat unhurried competence, and Ghost, a man who never slept, running perimeter sensors off a laptop. The whole ranch had closed around her like a fist.

She didn’t need him standing in the middle of it drawing fire.

Footsteps sounded behind him, light and quick across the porch boards. He knew them before she reached him.