Chapter 16 #2
The fire crackled distant, up the slope. No pursuit yet. Hobbs would secure the cabin first, check for bodies, realize they’d escaped through the back. Then he’d send men down the hill.
It gave them a precious head start.
Evander took inventory. Rifle: seven rounds remaining, plus the partial magazine in his pocket. Rainey had the field knife, the empty pistol, and the shotgun. First aid kit, another box of ammo for his rifle, some water but no food. Rainey hadn’t finished packing the bag.
His ribs were definitely worse, the bandage on his temple hung loose, and the stab wound in his side throbbed in time with his heart.
Rainey sat beside him, her knees drawn up, her face pale in the early dawn light. She was shaking. He didn’t think she knew it.
“Your ribs?” he asked.
“Fine.” The word came out automatically, then she seemed to hear herself. “Not fine. But functional.”
“Your hands.”
She looked down. Blisters on her palms from the shotgun barrel. A cut across one knuckle, bleeding slowly. She wiped it on her jeans without comment.
Evander turned his attention outward. The hollow sat in a fold of the mountain, sheltered from the wind but open to the east, where the first pale gray of dawn showed above the ridge. They had maybe an hour of real dark left.
After that, they’d be visible to anyone on the high ground.
He ran through options. Go north, deeper into the wilderness.
He knew those mountains well enough to survive indefinitely, to lose any pursuer in the high passes and glacier-scoured valleys.
But Rainey was injured, unprovisioned, without cold-weather gear.
The nights up there dropped below freezing even in summer. She’d last three days. Maybe four.
East, toward the national forest boundary and the fire road. But Creed knew that road. Hobbs probably had men watching it by now.
South, back toward Solace. The town was compromised. Sheriff Goodwin’s office had Sins’ influence. Every road in would be watched.
West. Valor Ridge.
He saw it in his mind—the gate, the long drive where River had bled, the porch where Boone had stood with his coffee and tried to convince him to stay.
Eight years of watching from the ridgeline, through binoculars, telling himself he was guarding them from a distance, knowing even then that distance was the only thing he could bear.
Rainey’s hand found his in the dark. Her fingers were cold, trembling, but her grip was firm.
“Tell me you have a plan,” she said. “Even a bad one. Even one I won’t like.”
He looked at her. At the sawdust in her hair, the blood on her cheek from a splinter he hadn’t noticed. She’d earned the right to know what came next. He’d never met anyone who’d earned anything from him, and now she had, and he didn’t know what to do with that except tell her the truth.
“One option,” he said. His voice came out rough, scraped raw by smoke and shouting. “One place with enough men, enough weapons, enough secure ground to stand against what’s coming. Medical supplies. Food. Communications with the outside.”
“Where?”
He forced the name out. “Valor Ridge.”
“Will they take you back? Because I’m not going if they’ll turn you away.”
“They won’t. They’ll take us both in a heartbeat. Boone Callahan never stopped trying to get me to come back.” Admitting that Boone’s persistence had mattered to him, that it had been a tether he hadn’t cut, cost him more than a bit of pride. “They’ll fight for you. For us.”
They’ll probably die fighting.
But he didn’t say that part out loud.
He stood, his ribs screaming, his side throbbing. His body was an inventory of damage he’d ignored for so long that he’d forgotten what whole felt like.
Rainey stood with him, her hand still in his, and together they looked west, where the ridge blocked the view but not the knowledge of what lay beyond it.
“We’ll follow the creek down,” he said. “Cross below the falls where the trail’s washed out. From there, the old logging road cuts toward Valor Ridge property. Six miles. Maybe eight.”
“Can you make it that far?”
He almost laughed. The sound that came out was closer to a cough. “I’ll make it.”
“Evander.” She stopped him with the hand in his, pulling him around to face her.
He saw the fear in her eyes, the exhaustion, and something else—something that looked too much like love for his comfort.
“You don’t have to be okay. You don’t have to be strong enough for both of us.
Just tell me if you need to stop. Just let me help you carry this. ”
He turned away. “We need to move.”
She sighed, but didn’t say more about it as she followed.
They hiked down the hollow toward the creek, Tilly running ahead, the dawn light strengthening behind them and the voices of their pursuers fading into the general noise of the mountain waking. Robins called. Water rushed below.
All the while, his cabin burned on the ridge behind him. The second cabin he’d lost this year—one to water, one to fire.
Maybe it was a sign.
They crossed the creek at the falls, where the water dropped fifteen feet into a pool that churned white and cold, and the spray soaked them to the bone.
Rainey slipped on a wet stone, and he caught her, his ribs shrieking.
They held each other a moment while the water roared around them, and Tilly waited on the far bank with her ears flat and her eyes worried.
“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.