Chapter 6
six
Rainey found the keys in the third place she looked.
Evander had set them on the shelf beside the woodstove, half-hidden behind a tin of coffee and a folded length of paracord.
She’d told herself she was just getting up to use the outhouse, but her hands had known better.
They’d gone searching before her mind caught up, and now she stood barefoot on the cold cabin floor with the truck keys pressed into her palm and her heart going too fast in her chest.
The room was dim. The woodstove had burned down to coals, and the only light came from the gray half-dawn bleeding through the single window.
Evander slept against the door still, or at least he looked like he slept—his head tilted back against the wall, the rifle laid across his thighs, his chest rising and falling in a rhythm too slow and even to be faked.
Tilly had shifted onto her side beside the cot, one ear twitching, but her eyes were closed.
Rainey moved without sound. She’d learned a long time ago how to walk like a ghost. How to place her weight on the outer edge of her foot and roll through the toe. How to breathe shallow and slow while her pulse hammered in her temples. She’d written a whole song about it.
She sang the lyrics now in her head as she crossed to the door.
I knew which floorboards wouldn’t talk
Which bedroom lock would stick
How long to hold my breath before
The worst of it would quit
So I’d count the quiet
One, two, three
Count every second it wasn’t me…
The door wasn’t locked. The handle turned easily, and she slid through the gap onto the porch.
Fog lay over the clearing. The pines were shrouded in mist, and the sky above them was the color of old silver. Somewhere down the mountain, a bird called, then went quiet. The air smelled of wet earth and pine pitch and the faint mineral sharpness of a nearby creek.
She ran toward the truck. The driver’s side door opened with a creak that seemed loud as a gunshot in the stillness, and she climbed in, pulled it shut, and sat behind the wheel with her ribs aching and her hands shaking.
She’d done this before. Not the truck, not the mountain, but the leaving.
She’d left her father when she was sixteen after the last time he’d hurt.
She’d left Mal in the middle of the night with a bag over her shoulder and her guitar in her hand, and she’d told herself she’d never let another man decide her fate again.
So why was she hesitating?
Because some part of her, the part that had watched Evander Cole fold himself onto the floor between her and the door, the part that had seen the faint loosening in his shoulders when Tilly chose to sleep beside her cot, the part that recognized the scars on his knuckles for what they were—that part was telling her to stop.
She shoved it down.
She put the key in the ignition. Turned it.
Nothing.
Not a crank. Not a click. Just the dead, mute silence of a machine that had no intention of answering, and the cold realization spreading like ice water through her chest. She tried again. The same nothing. Her hand fell from the key and her breath came out in a rush that fogged the windshield.
He’d known.
He’d known she would run, and he’d made sure she couldn’t.
Rage came up so fast and hot it burned the cold away. She threw open the door and got out, and her bare feet hit the dirt hard enough to jar her ribs, and the pain only fed the fire. She stalked around the front of the truck, opened the hood release, and yanked the heavy sheet of metal up.
The battery was gone. He’d disconnected and removed it.
She was still standing there, staring down into the engine bay, when his voice came from behind her.
“You won’t get far.”
She spun. Evander stood at the edge of the porch with Tilly at his side, both of them watching her with dark, unreadable eyes.
He’d slung the rifle over one shoulder, and his hair hung loose around his face, and he looked exactly as dangerous as the BOLO said he was.
But his voice had a dry edge to it that made her want to throw something.
“You removed the battery,” she said. “You made sure I couldn’t leave.”
“I made sure nobody could take my truck.”
“Don’t lie to me. You did it so I’d be stuck here.”
“I did it so you wouldn’t do something stupid to put yourself in danger while I slept.” He came down off the porch slowly, Tilly padding beside him.
“You’re holding me against my will.”
“Am I?” He stopped a few feet away and crossed his arms over his chest. The morning light caught the line of his jaw, the dark circles beneath his eyes.
Up close, he looked exhausted—not just from the night, but from years.
“You really want to leave and take your chances out there? I’m not stopping you. ”
The cold air bit through the thin cotton of her borrowed shirt.
Her ribs pulled with every breath. She stood there barefoot and shaking with her arms wrapped around herself, and she knew—she knew—that he was right.
There was no lock on the door. No chain on her wrist. He hadn’t touched her, hadn’t threatened her, had slept on the floor between her and whatever might come through the door after her.
She let the truck’s hood fall shut and threw the keys at him.
He easily caught them. “We need to talk.”
He turned and walked back toward the cabin without waiting for her answer. Tilly lingered, looking from Rainey to Evander and back again, her tail sweeping once against the dirt, a question in her eyes.
Rainey sighed and followed.
Inside, Evander had a topographical map spread across the table. “Come here.”
She didn’t want to. But her feet carried her to the table, and she stood across from him with her arms still wrapped around her middle and her teeth clamped against the ache in her left side.
He touched a finger to the map. “We’re here.
” His finger rested on a crease in the paper, a spot where the contour lines crowded together so tightly they looked like the bones of the mountain itself.
He tapped the cabin’s location again, then trailed his finger upward along a winding line that had to be the track they’d driven in on.
“The closest ranger station is here. Twelve miles as the crow flies, almost twice that on the ground. If you set out on foot with those ribs and no compass, you’d be lucky to make it in a day. ”
“I wasn’t planning on walking. I was planning on driving.”
“In a recognizable truck that’s already been on the news.
” His finger moved again, this time to the highway that ran along the western edge of the map.
“Every road between here and Solace is being watched. The sheriff’s department put out a BOLO within an hour of the fight.
That means deputies, state troopers, anybody with a radio and a desire to look useful is keeping an eye out for my truck. ”
“So I walk.”
“You walk, and you leave a trail a child could follow. Cracked ribs, no food, no water beyond what you can carry.” He looked up from the map, his dark eyes holding hers. “How long do you think it would take the Sons of Sin to find you once you’re on open ground?”
She didn’t have an answer. She wasn’t sure she wanted one.
He straightened and stepped back from the table. “I’m not keeping you prisoner. You can leave whenever you want. But if you walk out of this cabin without a plan, you’ll end up dead.”
She looked down at the map, at the tiny black dots marking springs and creeks, the red lines of roads, the blue of water snaking through the valleys.
It was a different language, one she couldn’t read the way he could.
But she could read the isolation. The distance.
The way every route out of this place led straight into the open.
He was right.
She hated that he was right.
“What about a radio?” She looked up, her jaw set. “If I’m staying, I want a way to call for help.”
“There’s a hand-crank solar radio in the cabinet. No signal here, but take it to the ridge above us, and it picks up some AM/FM stations, the emergency band, and the local sheriff’s channel. If something happens to me, you use it.”
“If something happens to you,” she repeated.
“The Sons of Sin will be gunning for me. If they find this place, they won’t be coming for conversation.”
She thought about Rux, the way he’d looked down at his own blood as if it had betrayed him. She thought about Hobbs, standing at the door with his hand inside his jacket, watching. They’d come for her and Evander was willing to put himself between her and them.
She sat down, and only once she was seated did she realize how much she needed to. The chair scraped against the floor, and the sound was loud in the small room.
“Fine.” She pressed her hands flat on the tabletop. “We do this your way. But I have conditions.”
His lip twitched close to something that might have been a smile. “I’m not surprised. Go on.”
“I keep a knife.”
“You know how to use it?”
She met his eyes. “I’ve been protecting myself since I was sixteen. I know how to use it and a gun.”
He nodded. “You get a knife, not a gun.”
“I get a radio. And I get to keep it with me, not in some cabinet where I have to ask permission.”
“There’s only one. We share it, but you can hold onto it.”
“And you warn me before you leave. No disappearing without a word, leaving me to fend for myself up here.”
The faintest pause. Then, “Agreed.”
“We reassess every forty-eight hours.” She held his gaze. “If there’s a way to get me to my brother without leading the club to his door, you get me there. No arguments. No ‘it’s too dangerous.’ You take me to River.”
He was quiet for a long second that stretched into another, and the only sound was Tilly’s breathing from her spot by the woodstove and the faint creak of the cabin settling. Then he nodded again, slower this time, and his eyes held hers with an intensity that made her want to look away.
“Forty-eight hours,” he repeated. “If I can find a way to get word to Walker without tipping our hand, I’ll take you to the ranch myself.”