Epilogue #2
Evander moved. He crossed the room in eight steps, closed his hand around the biker’s wrist, and drove the man’s arm up and back against the joint.
The crack was loud in the small space. The knife hit the stage floor.
The biker swung his free elbow and caught Evander across the cheekbone, but he had already shifted his weight, and the blow glanced off without doing much.
With the man’s wrist still torqued, he shoved his forearm across the back of his neck and drove him down onto the stage floor face-first.
The biker was strong. He got a knee under himself and pushed hard enough to drive Evander off-balance. They went sideways into the mic stand, which toppled with a shriek of feedback. Evander took the impact on his shoulder, rolled with it, and came up with the biker’s knife in his hand.
He’d palmed it off the stage floor without thinking. Muscle memory from a different life.
The biker came at him fast, and Evander understood in the half-second before contact that this wasn’t going to be a clean takedown. The man had been in real fights before.
The first blow got through— a short right that caught Evander in the ribs and drove the air out of him in a grunt. He stepped into the second swing instead of away from it, let it graze past his ear, and drove the knife up and under.
The biker exhaled in a wet rush and staggered backward. He stood there for two seconds, his hands over the wound, looking at Evander with something that might have been surprise. Then he toppled sideways.
The room went absolutely still.
Evander stood over him, breathing hard, and took stock.
The two flanking bikers had frozen— one near the pool table, one by the door.
The bartender had stopped reaching for whatever was below the bar.
The pool players were flat against the far wall.
Tilly stood at the edge of the stage, growling softly, watching the flanking bikers.
She was keeping them subdued, but it wouldn’t last.
He turned to Rainey.
She was still on the stage, standing now, her guitar on the floor beside her. She was staring at the man on the ground with both hands pressed flat against her sternum. Her face had gone the color of old paper. Her chest was moving too fast.
He held out a hand. “I can protect you.”
She looked at his hand for one second. Then she scooped the guitar off the stage floor by its neck and took his hand.
They went off the back of the stage, through the door marked STAFF that Evander had clocked when he first walked in. It opened into a short hallway that smelled like mop water and old grease, one bare bulb overhead, a fire door at the end, its push bar glowing red in the dim light.
Behind them, one of the flanking bikers had found his voice.
Evander hit the fire door at a run, shoulder-first, and the high-country air hit like a slap. Tilly came through the door a half-step behind them.
He reached his truck first and pulled open the passenger side door.
She skidded to a stop and hesitated, looking from him to the truck.
“Get in or don’t,” he growled. “But I’m not sticking around long enough for those bikers to rub their two brain cells together and come after us.”
She looked toward the bar, then threw her guitar in the backseat, and slid in.
He pulled the seat forward for Tilly to jump in, then slid behind the wheel and cranked the engine just as the two remaining bikers shoved through the fire exit with guns drawn.
He peeled out of the lot and watched the mirror until the roadhouse lights disappeared.
He waited for the growl of bikes, but none came.
The woman—Rainey—sat with the seat belt across her chest and her hands in her lap. He could hear her breathing. Still too fast, still too shallow. She was staring straight ahead at the dark highway with the fixed, glassy focus of someone who wasn’t actually seeing the road.
He checked the mirror again. Nothing behind them. No headlights. No bikes.
He didn’t trust it.
He turned off the highway onto a forest service road he’d used twice before when he needed to move without being tracked.
It was little more than a narrow cut through the pines that climbed for two miles before dropping into a dry creek bed and coming out on the far side of the ridge.
No lights behind them. No sound except the engine and the trees and Rainey’s too-fast breathing.
He drove for six minutes before she said anything. “Why did you help me?”
He kept his eyes on the road.
Good fucking question.
He sentenced himself to a life alone.
Evander Cole came to Montana to disappear.
Tucked away in the mountains outside Solace, he keeps his distance from everyone — including the men at Valor Ridge who would have been his brothers if he’d stayed at the ranch.
But after eight years alone, numbness feels safer than letting anyone close.
His Cane Corso, Tilly, is the only company he allows himself.
Then she walks into a roadside bar with a guitar on her back and danger at her heels.
Indie singer-songwriter Rainey Beckett knows better than to trust dangerous men. Unfortunately, that hasn’t stopped her from ending up on the wrong side of the Sons of Sin motorcycle club. And when danger catches up to her before she can find her brother, there’s nowhere left to run…
Except straight into the path of the quiet stranger at the end of the bar — a man with cigarette burns on his hands that mirror the scars on her wrists, and a dog at his side that looks ready to kill on command.
One violent night changes everything.
Now, the president of the Sons of Sin is dead, the club wants revenge, the law is hunting Evander for murder, and the media is convinced he kidnapped a rising music star.
Forced deeper into the wilderness together, Evander and Rainey discover hiding from the world starts to feel less like survival… and more like freedom.
But falling for Rainey means abandoning the exile Evander built for himself.
And for the first time, he’s starting to wonder if just surviving alone is enough — or if he wants more.
Don’t miss Breaking His Exile.