Chapter 38
Talon
The next few days are surprisingly quiet, but the silence doesn’t settle right. It sits under my skin, tight and waiting, like the forest itself is holding its breath.
Given the warning from Sheriff Clay Dawson about how the Denver police are trying to dig into Reid’s past, I’d been expecting the cops to show up at our doors within hours, but nothing happens.
No cruisers winding their way up our track.
No blue uniforms slamming car doors and doing their best to look intimidating.
No questions. No pressure. Maybe Luke’s right and they don’t have enough evidence.
Or maybe the Sheriff was bluffing, trying to shake us.
Or maybe the investigation is happening somewhere else, which would make just as much sense.
The alleged crime didn’t happen here. Different place, different time.
There’s nothing for them to find on this mountain.
Whatever the truth is, none of us manage to relax. That much is obvious, even if everything else is still shifting under the surface.
I watch Reid and Luke as they throw themselves into gathering evidence to get Amanda’s husband—Daniel Barnes, the kind of man who hides behind a title and uses it to push people around—locked up.
I’ve seen them working late into the night, papers spread across the table, voices low and tight with focus.
What they’re doing might actually help. But that’s not the only reason they’re doing it.
They need to feel like they’re not just sitting here waiting.
They need to feel like they’re pushing back.
I understand that.
Because I feel it too.
Only I don’t have their skills. I can’t dig through records or build a case.
So I focus on what I can do.
Sierra’s car gives me somewhere to put my hands.
The engine’s gone—no point pretending otherwise—but I track down a replacement a couple of hours away and haul it back to the shed.
It’s not the smartest move. She’d be better off scrapping the whole thing and putting the money toward something newer.
But this isn’t really about the car.
It’s about having something in front of me that I can take apart and put back together again. Something that responds when I work on it.
So I strip the old engine out piece by piece, setting everything aside, preparing the space for the replacement. It’s slow, heavy work, the kind that leaves my hands aching and my mind quieter. For a few hours at a time, it’s enough.
In between that, I walk.
Hours at a time, circling the land, mapping it out in my head. Every ridge, every dip, every place someone could hide if they wanted to get close without being seen. I trace paths that don’t exist yet, testing angles, sightlines, escape routes.
We’re all doing something.
None of it touches what’s really there.
At night, the quiet presses in harder. Reid retreats into himself, speaking less, carrying something I can almost feel pressing down on him.
Luke swings the other way—louder, sharper, filling the space with noise that doesn’t quite land.
Sierra moves between us, steady and watchful, like she’s trying to hold something together before it comes apart.
And me…
I just feel it.
The imbalance.
The way something is building with nowhere to go.
We’re wound too tight. Sitting in it too long. Waiting. Carrying things we’re not meant to carry on our own.
We need a release.
Not distraction. Not avoidance.
Something that shifts us. Grounds us. Pulls us back into each other instead of letting us drift further apart inside our own heads.
I don’t arrive at it logically.
It just… comes to me.
A place I haven’t brought anyone before.
I stop mid-step on the trail, looking out through the trees as the idea settles into place, simple and certain.
Yeah.
That’s what we need.
It’s not about the view. Not really.
It’s about what that place does to you when you’re there. The quiet. The weight of it. The way everything else seems to fall away for a while.
If anything can break this tension—wash some of it out of us—it’s that.
The only problem is getting them there without overexplaining it.
In the end, I keep it simple.
I tell them I need to get off the retreat for a few hours. That I think we all do. I mention a spot I know up in the mountains—a place worth seeing. Nothing more than that.
Luke complains immediately. Reid hesitates. Sierra watches me for a second longer than the others, like she’s trying to read something I haven’t said out loud.
But in the end, they all agree.
We leave the next morning, putting Key in charge while we’re gone.
I’ve never been great with words, so as we head deeper into the forest, I don’t explain where we’re going.
I just lead.
The ground is uneven beneath our boots, the air cooler at this higher elevation. Less sunlight reaches us through the canopy than back in our clearing where the retreat buildings sit, and the scent of pine and damp earth settles into my lungs with every breath.
I glance back at Reid.
To tell the truth, I wasn’t as shocked as Luke when I found out his secret. I always thought he was hiding something dark. No one without a past disappears into the middle of nowhere and builds a place like this just to “help people.”
Sure, he meant that part. I believe him.
But I always expected something else beneath it.
The retreat wasn’t just built for others. It was built because Reid needed somewhere to exist with what he’d done. Somewhere quiet enough that it didn’t follow him every second of the day.
I could see it even then. It still haunts him. Anyone who knows him long enough can see it.
The first time we met, there was a weight behind his eyes, something restless and buried at the same time. He carried himself like a man trying to stay calm, but the calm never quite held.
I recognized it.
I knew he needed this place before he ever said it out loud.
And now that I know the truth…
It takes adjusting to. There’s no point pretending otherwise. But when I place it against everything I know about him, everything I’ve seen…
It makes a different kind of sense.
I didn’t know my parents. My grandmother told me they died in a landslide when I was two. Every year, we honor them the same way—stories, a glass of bourbon, a toast to their spirits, and a prayer that we’ll meet again one day, if the Good Lord wills it.
She used to say my mother came to this mountain to escape something. That she was troubled, worn down by whatever life she’d been living before. But the land—and my father—helped heal her.
That stuck with me.
It’s one of the reasons I sold this part of my estate to Reid. In her honor. To give him the same chance she had.
I have a picture of her tucked into my journal. The only one I have. Soft eyes. A contemplative look—not quite a smile, not quite a frown. Even without knowing her, I feel connected to her in a way I can’t explain.
And because of that…
If I imagine being her son, watching someone hurt her the way Reid described…
I can’t say I wouldn’t have done the same thing.
Luke had someone dig into Reid’s father. The file wasn’t clean. Theft. Public intoxication. Assault. Multiple women.
That tells me everything I need to know.
Men like that don’t stop.
And honestly, I can’t bring myself to lose any sleep over a man like that being gone.
So yeah… I’ve come to terms with it.
But me coming to terms with it isn’t the issue.
Reid hasn’t.
That’s the problem.
I see it every time he goes quiet, every time his jaw tightens like he’s holding something back.
Which is why I brought us out here.
Not because I planned it out. Not because I thought it through.
Just because I knew this place might give him something the rest of us can’t.
“Jesus, Tal, where are we going?” Luke complains, his boots crunching loudly behind me. “You shouldn’t have invited us if it was going to take us to the edge of civilization.”
“I didn’t invite you,” I say without looking back. “I invited Sierra and Reid.”
“Yeah, well, that was hurtful. I thought we had something.”
“You almost broke my nose.”
“I thought we were past that.”
I smirk to myself. I knew he’d come anyway. That’s part of it. We don’t really do separate anymore, whether we admit it or not.
Behind me, Sierra stumbles.
I turn instantly, but Reid is already there, his hands catching her waist, steadying her before she can fall.
“Got you,” he murmurs.
She smiles up at him. “Thanks.”
Then her eyes flick to me, a quick wink that lands somewhere low in my chest and stays there.
“I’m with Luke on this one,” she says, catching her breath. “It feels like we’ve been walking forever.”
“It’s been three hours.”
“Exactly.” She laughs softly, brushing hair from her face. “I know you hike all the time, but this is… a lot. For normal people, I mean. That said, I thought it’d be denser.”
So did I, the first time.
But the forest opens differently here. Sunlight cuts through the canopy in narrow beams, striping the ground in shifting gold. The air feels lighter, clearer—like something ahead is pulling us forward.
The light starts to crisscross more tightly.
We’re close.
“We’re almost there,” I say.
“You said that half an hour ago,” Luke mutters.
“Well, we were. But we’re really close now.”
I keep going until the trees thin and we break through.
Luke starts to speak again, but the words die in his throat.
“What’s that noise?” He stops suddenly, the others almost walking into him.
He lifts a hand and they all go quiet.
“That’s what we came for,” I say.
“Is that a—?”
“Come on. It’s just around the bend.”
We round it.