Epilogue
Forty-one minutes.
Evander checked his watch again. Not because he’d lost track, but because looking at his wrist gave him somewhere to put his eyes that wasn’t the room.
The Dead Marshall smelled like every roadhouse he’d ever been in — spilled beer and old wood and the ghost of a thousand cigarettes smoked before Montana put that to rest. The ceiling was low, the beams exposed and dark with age, the walls covered in decades of signage that nobody had thought to take down and nobody had thought to add to recently.
A neon beer sign threw bruised-purple light across the far corner.
The jukebox in the corner was grinding out something twangy about a woman who left and a man who should’ve known better.
Evander had been listening to it repeat the same three songs for forty minutes.
Under his barstool, Tilly lay with her chin on her paws, her dark eyes moving across the room in slow, regular sweeps.
Tracking the exits. Tracking the strangers.
Not growling, not tense—just watching, the way she always watched, the way they both always watched, because watching was the habit that kept you alive long enough to develop other habits.
The bartender had had feelings about his dog, which he had made clear with a single long look when Evander walked in with Tilly at his heel. Evander had held his stare until the man looked away first, and that had settled it. Nobody had said anything since. His dog went where he went. Period.
He picked up his beer. Didn’t drink it. Set it back down.
The beer was the price of admission. Sitting at a bar without a drink was conspicuous, and conspicuous was the one thing he’d spent eight years refusing to be.
So he’d ordered it, and he’d nursed it, and now it was warm, and he’d had maybe three sips, and the bartender had stopped looking at him. Which was the point.
You’re lonely, Evander. You’ve been lonely for a long time.
He scowled at the bar top.
He wasn’t fucking lonely. He chose solitude. There was a difference, and Greta Dougherty was wrong about this particular thing.
Which was how he’d ended up here, in a roadhouse forty miles from nowhere, proving something to a woman who couldn’t even see him.
He’d give it twenty more minutes so he could tell Greta, the next time he saw her, that he had a social life.
A woman at the far end of the bar glanced his way for the second time. Mid-thirties, black jeans, a denim jacket with something embroidered on the sleeve he couldn’t read from this distance.
He ignored her.
He and Tilly lived well. The cabin was warm.
The work was straightforward— track, trap, repeat.
Repair what needed repaired. Sleep when he needed to sleep.
Eat when he needed to eat. He didn’t require the noise and friction of other people’s lives pressed up against his own.
He’d had that once, in a different life, and it had led to classified files and dead civilians and six years of federal lockup, so he had ample evidence that proximity to other people was, on balance, a net negative.
He was not lonely.
He checked his watch. Nineteen minutes.
Tilly’s ear rotated.
Not toward the woman at the end of the bar.
Not toward the two men who’d been playing pool since before he arrived, their game slow and conversational.
Toward the front door — that particular forward angle she used when she was tracking something approaching from outside, something still thirty or forty feet out.
She’d had that quality since before she was his.
His spotter had always said Tilly heard things three seconds before they happened.
His spotter had been right about most things.
Evander set his beer down and watched the door without appearing to watch it.
The jukebox ground through the end of its current song and the needle caught, skipped, and dropped into silence before the next track loaded.
For three seconds, the roadhouse was quiet enough that he could hear the wind outside working at the eaves.
Then the new song started — something slower, sadder — and Tilly’s ear held its angle, and the front door stayed closed for another half-minute while he sat with his hands loose on the bar and his back to the wall and his eyes on the neon Coors sign and thought about nothing in particular, which was what he was best at, which was what Greta apparently considered evidence of a problem.
Nineteen minutes. He could do nineteen more minutes.
The door opened behind him.
Awareness crept up the back of his neck, and he turned.
Everything went quiet.
His breath. His heart. His frayed nerves. His demons. Everything in him went still in a way that hadn’t happened in a long, long time.
She walked in like she’d never for a second doubted her right to be here, and she was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen.
She carried a battered, black guitar case. The latch was held shut by a bungee cord and a prayer, and the shell was delaminating in a fan of loose material that she’d reinforced with duct tape gone gray with age. The case itself had probably been inexpensive when new. It was a long way from new.
She was in her mid-twenties, lean. Her blonde hair was loosely knotted at the back of her head with pieces falling free around her face.
A silver ring through her septum caught the neon when she moved.
Flannel over a faded band tee he couldn’t read from here, jeans with the knee blown out, boots with serious mileage on them.
She moved as if she were protecting her ribs, her core slightly braced.
She walked to the bar without looking at him and ordered a whiskey neat, sliding a folded bill across the bar top before the bartender had poured.
She picked up the glass, threw it back like it was a shot, then walked to the stage and opened the guitar case.
She settled onto the barstool, fit the guitar into her lap, and adjusted the mic stand down two inches.
Checked the tuning by ear, made three small adjustments, checked it again.
And she started to play.
The first song opened with four bars of fingerpicking— spare, the notes falling into the silence without apology. Her voice came in on the fifth bar, full of grit and smoke. The words were about a highway and a wrong turn and a decision that couldn’t be unmade. He didn’t know the song.
By the end of the first verse, the two men playing pool had stopped. The bartender set down the glass he was drying and turned his attention to the stage.
She closed her eyes for the last line, voice dropping into a breathy, aching hush that Evander felt in the hollow behind his breastbone.
When she finished, there was a split second of pure silence, then the bartender said, “Shit,” under his breath, and one of the pool guys let out a single, sharp whistle.
Evander didn’t realize he’d been holding his breath until Tilly exhaled at his feet.
The next song had more drive, more edge.
Halfway through, the door blew open and hit the wall hard enough that the impact cracked through the bar like a gunshot.
The song stopped as three men walked in.
Black leather cuts, the back patches reading Sons of Sin in an arc over a bottom rocker that said MONTANA.
Club property, not weekend riders. The lead man was broad through the shoulders with a shaved head and a beard going gray at his chin.
He walked to the center of the room and stopped there, and the two men behind him spread out to either side without being told.
The singer’s face went white as he grinned at her.
“Rainey, sweetheart. We’ve been looking for you.”
Most people, when three men with cuts walked into a room and spread out like that, took a step back.
It was self-preservation. Instinct. But Rainey sat on that stool with her guitar still in her lap and her hands gone still on the strings, and she didn’t move.
Her shoulders slumped, and she closed her eyes for a heartbeat.
Like she’d been waiting for this.
The lead biker took two steps toward the stage.
Tilly rose to her feet.
Evander set his beer down, turned around, and took a read of the room in three seconds flat.
Two pool players backing toward the far wall, smart enough to understand this wasn’t their problem.
The bartender’s hand had gone below the bar, which meant either a phone or a weapon, and it didn’t matter which because neither would be fast enough.
The two flanking bikers were watching Rainey.
Not him. They hadn’t clocked him yet as anything worth watching.
Good.
The lead man stepped up onto the stage. He was big. Not Bear-big, but still a man who’d never had to wonder whether he’d win a fight. He closed a hand around Rainey’s upper arm.
She flinched. The guitar hit the stage floor with a hollow thud and a discordant ring of strings.
“Did you really think you could hide from us?” He yanked her off the stool by her arm, but she didn’t go easily. She swung at him with her free hand, the heel of her palm catching him under the chin, and his head snapped back. For half a second, it looked like she might actually get loose.
Then the knife came out.
The blade pressed flat against the side of her neck just below her jaw. His other hand had her by the hair now, her head pulled back at an angle that had to hurt.
“Try that again,” he said quietly, “and I’ll open you up right here.”