Page 97 of Breaking His Exile

But she rolled over without waking up.

He dressed in the dark without turning on a light. His ribs protested. He let them. He found paper and a pen in the drawer of the nightstand — Nessie’s stationery, a cartoon coffee cup printed in the corner, absurdly cheerful for what he was about to write on it.

He kept it short. Longer felt like begging for something he didn’t have the right to ask for.

Stay with River. Trust Brandt. I’m leaving Tilly with you. She’ll take care of you until I come back.

He looked at the last line for a long time. He didn’t know if it was true, but he wrote it anyway because leaving her nothing felt like cruelty.

He set the note on the pillow beside her, close enough that she’d find it the second she reached for him and found empty sheets instead.

Tilly lifted her head from the foot of the bed and watched him gather his knife, his boots, the small amount of gear that had followed him down from the mountain and would follow him back up it. He crossed to her, crouched despite what it cost his ribs, and pressed his forehead briefly to hers.

“Watch her,” he said, so quiet it was barely sound at all.

Tilly’s ears flattened in something that might have been protest. He rubbed her blocky head. “You’re a good girl.”

She sighed and lay back down against Rainey’s side, watching him as he strode for the door.

He half expected to find Walker waiting for him, but the house was silent. The yard was gray with the hour before dawn, cold enough that his breath showed, the bunkhouse windows dark, the barn quiet except for the shift and huff of horses still asleep in their stalls. He walked past it all. Out across the field, past the blood stain Boone had left on the ground.

At the tree line he stopped and looked back.

The main house sat dark and solid against the paling sky, smoke starting to curl from one chimney where someone—Johanna, probably, always first up—had already lit the stove. Somewhere behind one of those windows Rainey was still asleep with his note on the pillow and his dog pressed against her side, and every argument he’d built on that porch still held, still made the same clean sum it had made hours ago.

Creed would follow him. Away from here. Away from River and Boone and the songbird who had become his world in such a short time.

Everyone inside those fences was safer now.

twenty-seven

She reached for him and found empty sheets.

Rainey’s hand hit cold cotton where Evander’s chest should have been. She opened her eyes. The guest room held the gray pre-dawn light, pale and thin through the window, and the space beside her was rumpled and warm and completely vacant.

“Evander?”

No answer. The house around her was quiet.

Tilly stood at the bedroom door, her blocky frame silhouetted against the hallway, one ear up. She’d been lying at the foot of the bed when Rainey fell asleep. Now she faced the door, awake and alert, her posture the same one Rainey had watched her hold all week on the mountain when something outside demanded attention.

Rainey sat up. The quilt fell away from her bare shoulders. She reached for the flannel shirt Evander had pulled off her hours ago and dragged it on, buttoning it with fingers that didn’t want to cooperate.

The note sat on the pillow where his head should have been.

Nessie’s stationery. A cheerful cartoon coffee cup in the corner, absurd against the four lines of his handwriting.

Stay with River. Trust Brandt. I’m leaving Tilly with you. She’ll take care of you until I come back.

She read it three times. The words didn’t change.

Tilly waited at the door, watching her, not moving.

Rainey crumpled the paper in her fist. The sound of it — that small, definitive crunch — lit something in her chest that went from cold to hot in the space of a breath.

He’d left.

He’d fucked her until she couldn’t see straight, held her while she fell asleep, and then walked out the door before dawn because he’d decided — again — that his judgment about what kept people safe was better than anyone else’s.