Chapter 2
two
Stupid.
He’d been stupid, and now he was paying for it in switchbacks that came faster than the headlights could reach. Evander drove them too hard, too fast, the truck’s weight pitching through each turn.
He never should’ve gotten involved.
No doubt his truck description was already out there—white 1986 F-250, Montana plates. They’d have at least a partial plate number.
He’d broken every rule he had for himself. All for this woman beside him, who was shaking hard enough he could feel it vibrating through the bench seat.
What the fuck was he thinking?
He knew exactly what he’d been thinking.
He’d been thinking about Greta Dougherty and her needling certainty that he was lonely.
Greta—who’d appointed herself his best friend somewhere along the way—nagged him about his loneliness until he’d driven forty miles to a roadhouse to maybe get laid and prove her wrong.
So much for proving a point.
No doubt Greta would have something to say about this too, if he ever told her, which he wouldn’t.
Tilly shifted in the back, her head resting on the seat back, her breath warm on his neck. She’d held those two bikers without a command.
Such a good dog.
Better than he deserved.
“Why did you help me?” the woman asked again.
He kept his eyes on the road. The pines closed in on both sides, black trunks sliding past, the headlights carving a tunnel that ended six feet ahead and started again six feet later. He’d mapped these roads years ago. Knew every cut and every dead end.
The road steepened. Gravel gave way to dirt churned to mud and dried into ruts. The truck bucked through a washout, and her hand shot out to brace against the dash, knuckles white.
He needed her talking. Conscious people talked. Unconscious people were dead weight when you needed to run.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
She didn’t move.
“I just knifed a man for you. The least you can do is give me your name.”
She turned from the window. The dash light caught the edge of her face—blonde hair, the glint of a septum ring, shadows under her eyes deep enough to fall into. “Rainey Beckett.”
The name kicked behind his sternum. The air went out of him in a rush, and for a moment, the road in front of him wasn’t the road.
It was a different road on a dark winter night, eight years ago, a winch line singing under tension.
River’s voice—“you sure, man?”—and then the wet crack of the line snapping and the bright arterial spray of blood, and River on the floor with his hands pressed to his leg like he could hold it in—
Fuck, no.
He killed the memory. Shut it down behind the wall he kept for things like this, locked the door, turned the key. The road came back. The pines. The ruts under the tires.
“Relation to River?” He tried to be casual about the question, but his voice sounded wrong to his own ear, all edges.
She swung around fast. “You know my brother?”
River’s sister. Jesus Christ. Rainey was River Beckett’s sister.
He kept his hands on the wheel at ten and two and kept his expression locked down tight. She was watching him, and the last thing he needed was her reading him before he’d read her. He pulled air through his nose and let it out slowly. “I know him.”
“How?”
“He’s one of the men at Valor Ridge.”
“That’s—” She swallowed hard, an audible click. “That’s where I’m going. Can you take me to him?”
The road crested. Below, the valley opened black and vast, the highway a thin ribbon unspooling down the mountainside through the dark.
Headlights blocked the road ahead, a lightbar throwing red and blue flashes through the trees.
County cruiser.
Too early to be about the roadhouse. Ten, fifteen minutes since they’d left the bar, and county response was never that fast out here. A random patrol. A DUI check.
Or, with his luck, it was Sheriff Hank fucking Goodwin out hassling people.
He killed the headlights. “Hold on.”
He swung the wheel. The truck dropped off the road onto an old logging cut, undergrowth scraping both sides with a sound like fingernails on slate. Branches whipped the windshield. It pitched into a rut, and he fought it back, downshifting, the transmission groaning under it.
“You didn’t answer me,” she pointed out.
“No, I didn’t.”
“You’re not taking me to Valor Ridge, are you?”
“No.”
She released a long breath that hitched halfway through, and he glanced over in time to catch her wince.
“Are you hurt?”
She shook her head, but even as she did, she pressed her hand to her ribs. “It’s an old injury. Just aggravated it.”
Judging by her face, she more than aggravated it.
After a long stretch of silence, she said, “Now you know my name, but you still haven’t told me yours.”
“Evander.”
She waited a beat. “Got a last name?”
“Cole.”
She nodded as if that made sense. Had River told her about him?
Probably.
River Beckett liked to talk. Guy never knew when to shut up.
“Well, Evander Cole,” she said. “You have no idea what you did back there, do you?”
He kept his gaze on the barely-there road. “No, but I’m sure you’re about to enlighten me.”
She was quiet long enough that he thought she wouldn’t. Then: “His name was Rux Granger. President of Sons of Sin Montana.”
Fuck.
Just… fuck.
He’d known they were SoS when they walked in from their cuts, but the fucking president of the club? Every patch-holder in the state would know his face and his truck by morning. The club would come for him. Not a question of if, but when.
His hands tightened on the wheel until the leather creaked. That old animal urge to destroy something—the one he’d spent eight years in the woods starving out—roared to life inside his chest.
She shrank back against the window, as far away from him as she could get in the close confines of the cab.
Dammit, he didn’t want her to be afraid of him. So he couldn’t let the monster out. He had to swallow it back and loosen his grip on the wheel. “Why are they after you?”
She looked out the black windshield and was silent for a long beat. “Because I know things I’m not supposed to know. I’ve been on the run for the last month.”
He didn’t push. Because, hell, he didn’t want to know. He was already in too deep for his liking.
“This isn’t the first time they caught up, but it probably would’ve been the last if it weren’t for you.” She touched her ribs and winced. “So thank you. If you could just take me to River—”
She stopped.
Tilly’s head came up off the seat back. The dog whined and nosed hard at Rainey’s shoulder.
He glanced over. Her skin had gone gray in the dashboard light. Sweat sheened her forehead, and her breathing had changed—shallow, rapid. She kept going like that, she would hyperventilate and pass out.
“Breathe,” he told her.
Tilly whined again, softer, and pushed her nose against Rainey’s jaw.
“Rainey.”
She didn’t answer. Her hand was still pressed to her ribs and her shoulders had come up around her ears, and she was staring at the dark between the trees like it might have something to tell her.
“Rainey. Look at me.”
She turned. Her eyes were too wide, the whites showing all the way around, and her pupils had blown black in the dash light. The shaking had gotten worse—the kind that came from inside her now, the adrenaline finally worn off and nothing left behind it.
“I can’t—” She pulled a breath that stopped halfway. “I can’t—”
“You can.” He kept his voice flat. No warmth in it, no softness. Softness was a trap right now—it invited her to collapse, and collapsing was a luxury neither of them had. “You’re breathing too high. Drop it down. Through your nose, out through your mouth. Slow.”
She tried. The exhale came out ragged.
“Again.”
She pulled another one. This one went a little further before it caught. He watched her ribs move under the fabric of her shirt.
“Again.”
“Fuck you,” she said, but she did it, and her breath came out steadier.
“There it is.” He kept his own breathing going in an easy rhythm for her to follow. “Keep swearing at me. Means you’ve got the air.”
A sound came out of her that might have been a laugh if it hadn’t ended in a sharp, pained inhale.
“Your ribs. They did that to you?”
“Yes. Caught up with me in Nevada a few days ago at a rest stop bathroom. I only got away because a bus of tourists pulled in. Rux grabbing me tonight just aggravated it.”
“You need a hospital?”
“No.”
“Lies are a waste of air.”
“It’s not a lie. I don’t need a hospital.” She took another slow breath. And another, her breathing evening out with every exhale. “And even if I did, I wouldn’t go. They’ll be looking.”
Smart. She was smarter than he’d given her credit for.
“Then let me check them,” he said.
Her gaze flicked to him, sharp and guarded. “What?”
“Your ribs. I need to know if anything’s broken.” He kept his voice level. “I’m not going to touch you without permission.”
She studied him a long beat. Reading him again.
“Fine,” she said.
He pulled the truck over onto a flat patch of dirt where two logging roads crossed, killed the engine. The sudden quiet was enormous. No road noise, no engine, just the tick of cooling metal and the wind through the pines and the sound of her breathing, still too fast but steadier than it had been.
He turned in his seat and flicked on the overhead light. “Which side?”
“Left.”
“Shirt up.”
She hesitated. Then she pulled the hem of her shirt up slowly, wincing as the fabric dragged across her skin. The light caught the ink along her side—flowers and music notes trailing down toward her hip. Below it, old scars. Small, round, spaced in a line, faded to silver.
Some fucker had stabbed out his cigarettes on her smooth skin.
He tightened his hand into a fist before he caught himself. He shook it out and focused on her ribs.
The bruising was bad. Deep purple spreading out from under the lowest rib, mottled with green at the edges. Fresh. He pressed the flat of his thumb along the lowest one, light, feeling for the give that would tell him something was broken.
She hissed through her teeth.
“Breathe out.”
She did. He pressed again, firmer this time, working his way up the line of the ribs. The fifth one had a catch in it that made his jaw tighten. He felt the slight shift under his thumb when she exhaled.
“Cracked,” he said. “Fifth one. Maybe the sixth.”
“Great.”
“You’ll live.” He pulled his hand back and turned off the overhead light. The cab went dark again, just the faint glow of the dash. “Don’t cough. Don’t laugh. Don’t get hit again.”
“Your bedside manner is a real gift.”
He almost smiled. Almost. He killed the impulse before it could reach his face and turned the key in the ignition. The engine caught and the headlights cut back into the trees.
She let her shirt fall back down and pressed her hand flat over the bruise. “So what’s the plan, Evander? Where exactly are we going?”
He pulled back onto the logging road. The scanner on the dash crackled to life, and a dispatcher’s voice came through the static.
“All units, be advised. BOLO for a white Ford F-250, Montana plates, partial Tango-Charlie-Seven, last seen northbound on County Twelve near the Dead Marshall. Armed suspect, considered dangerous. May be holding a female against her will. Female described as white, blonde, approximately twenties—”
Fuck. They’d moved faster than he expected.
He killed the scanner. The silence after was worse.
Rainey stared at the dark radio.
“Against my will.” Her voice was thin, but it was steady now. “Why are they saying that? There had to be at least twenty witnesses in that bar.”
“It’s SoS Montana territory. None of those witnesses will tell the truth.”
“Then take me to River. We can explain everything, and he’ll believe us.”
Evander didn’t doubt that.
It was the smart play. The obvious one. A ranch full of hard men who protected their own. Gates. Guns. People who’d put themselves between her and the club without being asked. Every reason in the world to point the truck toward Solace and be rid of her by dawn.
Except…
Taking her to Valor Ridge meant walking every gun the Sons of Sin could put on the road straight through the gates of the one good place left in this part of the world.
“No.”
She jerked back. “No?”
“No,” he repeated.
“You just—you killed a man for me less than an hour ago, but driving me forty miles to my brother is too much to ask?”
“That’s right.”
“FYI, now you are holding me against my will.”
“You show up at that ranch tonight, you bring all of it with you.”
She opened her mouth to argue.
“You want to get River killed, that’s the fastest way I know.”
That landed. She folded back into the seat and went quiet.
“So where, then?” she asked finally.
He turned them east, off the good gravel, onto a track that climbed. “Somewhere we can hide.”