Chapter 7
seven
“I have to go out.”
Rainey looked up from trying to fix her poor guitar. Evander stood inside the door, rifle slung on his shoulder.
“Why?”
“The cat.”
“Isn’t it gone?”
“For now.” He crossed to the counter, pulled the coffee pot off the camp stove, and drank straight from it, which told her more about the night he’d had than anything on his face did.
“A lion doesn’t come that close to a cabin with a dog in the yard for nothing.
Either it’s traveling through, or it’s got a reason to stay—a kill it’s working, cubs denned up somewhere near. I need to know which.”
“And if it’s got cubs?”
“Then we’ve got a mother defending a den within half a mile of Sable, and she’ll keep coming.” He set the pot down. “I’d rather know now than find out when she takes a bite out of my horse.”
“Why don’t you have a barn?”
“Sable doesn’t like barns.”
“Then why didn’t you kill it?” She nodded toward the window, the clearing, the tree line beyond it. “You told me you were a sniper. I’m sure you made shots from a lot farther than that, but you missed. Twice.”
“I’m rusty.”
“No, you’re not.”
He didn’t answer right away, and the not-answering was its own answer.
“You didn’t want to kill it.”
“I wanted it gone.” He reached behind the door for a jacket.
“Killing it wasn’t the fastest way to do that.
A dead lion in the yard draws every scavenger on the mountain and tells anyone who finds it that somebody’s living up here worth avoiding.
” He shrugged the jacket on. “Two shots in the dirt and it leaves thinking the ground’s not worth the trouble. ”
It was a practical answer.
It also wasn’t the whole truth, and they both knew it.
She’d watched his face when he’d fired—both times, wide, into tree and dirt—and there’d been no hesitation in it, no bad aim.
A man didn’t miss like that by accident.
He missed like that when some part of him didn’t want the thing in his sights to die.
“Okay.” She set the guitar aside. “I’m coming with you.”
He swung back to face her. “No.”
“Yes.” She crossed her arms. “Rule number whatever. You don’t leave without telling me. Well, you’re telling me, and I’m telling you I’m coming.”
“Your ribs—”
“Are cracked, not shattered. I can walk. I can watch your back. I can stand still and be quiet, which is more than most people can do.” She held his stare.
“You said it yourself. Two days. That means two days of me being here, and I’m not spending them staring at these four walls while you disappear into the trees every time something needs doing. ”
Something moved across his face—frustration, maybe, or the ghost of the argument he wasn’t going to win—and then it was gone, replaced by that flat, assessing look she was starting to recognize as Evander Cole making a calculation he didn’t like the answer to.
“Fine.” He reached behind the door and took down a rifle—a different one, shorter, with a scope—and checked the action. “Stay behind me. Step where I step. If I stop, you stop. If I signal quiet, you go quiet. No exceptions.”
“Deal.”
He slung the rifle and grabbed a jacket from the hook. Tilly was already at the door, ears forward, tail low and alert. Rainey pulled on her boots and followed them out into the clearing.
The woods here were thick and swallowed them fast.
Evander set a pace that was just slow enough to tell her he’d shortened his stride on purpose, though he’d never admit it.
The ground underfoot was soft with needle-fall, springy and quiet.
Pine trunks rose on all sides, close enough that she could reach out and touch the rough bark.
The air was cooler here, carrying the green smell of sap and fungus and something darker underneath—soil, old leaves, the mustiness of a forest that didn’t get many visitors.
Evander stopped twenty yards in. Crouched. His fingers brushed the ground where the needle-fall was disturbed, pressed into a shallow depression the size of her palm.
“Here,” he said. “Forepaw. Adult female, based on the size. Headed east.” He traced the direction with two fingers. “See how the needles are pushed forward? She was moving with purpose. Not stalking. Traveling.”
Rainey crouched beside him. Her ribs complained and she ignored them.
The track looked like nothing to her—a dent in the pine litter, maybe, or the kind of mark a falling branch might leave.
But Evander saw a story in it. She could tell by the way his eyes moved, reading the ground the way she read a room full of strangers—scanning for threats, for exits, for the one detail that didn’t belong.
They moved deeper. Evander pointed out signs she would have missed completely: a broken fern frond, its stem snapped at knee height.
A scrape on a pine trunk where something had marked territory.
The way the wind moved through the canopy, carrying scent from the ridge above them.
He spoke in that same practical voice, nothing wasted, each observation clean and specific.
This is how you read a mountainside. This is how you know what lives here.
And he would tell her any of it. She realized that as they climbed.
He would share every piece of knowledge about these woods, every skill, every warning.
He would teach her to track a mountain lion and build a fire and read the weather in the clouds.
He would give her tools, labor, protection, care.
What he wouldn’t give her was himself.
The question about Valor Ridge sat between them, unanswered. The story of the two nights. The thing that had sent him into these woods for eight years. She could ask it again right now, and he would find a reason not to hear her.
They crested a small rise and Evander held up a hand. Stopped. Tilly went still beside him, her nose working the air. Rainey held her breath.
Nothing moved. A jay called somewhere to the west. Wind moved through high branches. Nothing larger.
Evander swept the trees with the rifle scope. Lowered it.
“No kill site. No den.” He turned in a slow circle, scanning the terrain. “She was passing through. Probably on her way to the creek drainage south of here. Good hunting along the water this time of year.”
Relief loosened something in Rainey’s chest. “So Sable’s safe.”
“The cat’s moved on.” He slung the rifle. “We head back.”
The return was downhill, which should have been easier.
It wasn’t. The slope was steep in places, cut with runoff channels and loose scree that shifted under her boots.
Evander picked a route that wound between the worst of it, but twice she had to grab a sapling for balance, and each time her ribs lit up with a bright, specific pain that made her breath catch.
She was watching her feet, counting steps, when the ground gave way.
One second solid under her boot, the next nothing—a patch of loose gravel and dry soil sliding out from under her with a sound like pouring rice. Her weight went backward. Her arms flung out, grabbing for anything, and there was nothing to grab, just air and the sudden sick tilt of falling—
Evander’s arm locked around her waist. Hard.
He yanked her against his chest with a force that drove the air from her lungs and sent a white-hot spike through her ribs.
Her face smashed into his shoulder. She could smell him—pine smoke, gun oil, the sharp salt of sweat—and feel the solid wall of his chest against hers and the hammer of his heart where her palm had landed.
He didn’t let go. His grip was iron, one arm banded across her back, the other hand braced against a tree trunk, holding them both upright against the slope. His breath came fast against her hair.
“Jesus Christ.” His voice was rough, stripped of its flatness. “Are you hurt? Your ribs—check your ribs.”
He was already checking. His hand moved to her side, pressing gently along the line of the fracture, his fingers probing with a urgency that felt wildly out of proportion to a stumble on a hillside.
His other hand came up and cupped her jaw, tilting her face toward the light, his thumb brushing her cheekbone as if checking for blood.
“I’m fine.” Her voice came out smaller than she wanted. “It’s just a slip. I’m fine.”
He didn’t seem to hear her. His eyes moved over her face—her mouth, her eyes, the pulse jumping in her throat—and something raw moved behind them, something she had no name for. Fear, maybe. Or guilt. Something old and deep and entirely his.
Then he caught himself. She felt it happen—the moment his body remembered who he was, and where they were, and what he was allowed to feel. His grip loosened. His hand fell from her face. He took a half step back, putting air between them, and his expression closed like a door slamming.
“Watch your footing.” The flatness was back, but it sounded forced now, stretched thin over whatever had just broken through. “The soil’s unstable on this grade.”
Rainey stood where he’d left her. Her ribs throbbed. The place where his hand had been on her jaw felt warm, marked. She could still feel the shape of him against her chest, the specific heat and weight of a man who had just reacted to her near-fall like she’d stepped in front of a train.
She didn’t understand it.
They walked the rest of the way in silence. Evander stayed closer than he had before, though he’d never admit that either. Tilly ranged between them, her dark eyes moving from Evander to Rainey and back, reading a tension neither of them would name.
Back at the cabin, Evander checked Sable again.
The mare was calm now, dozing in the sun with the blanket still across her back.
He refilled her water trough from the hand pump and spent five minutes running his palm along her neck, talking to her in that low murmur Rainey couldn’t make out from the porch.
She went inside. Her guitar lay across the cot where she’d left it, the scrape along its flank a pale mirror of Sable’s.
She picked it up and cradled it against her chest, feeling the familiar weight, the curve of the body against her ribs.
The low E string had gone flat again. She tightened the peg, tuned it by ear, played a G chord. The string slipped. Flat again.
She tightened it. Tuned again. Played the chord. Better.
The song came without her deciding on it.
Something slow she’d written in a motel outside Boise, rain ticking against the windows and nowhere she had to be by morning.
Four chords. A wandering melody. Lyrics about a highway and a decision that couldn’t be unmade.
She’d played it a hundred times. Could play it half-asleep.
Apparently not tonight.
The low E slipped flat halfway through the first verse.
She stopped. Retuned. Started again and made it through the verse this time, almost to the chorus before the string gave out again and dragged the chord sour beneath her fingers.
“Ugh. Come on.”
She twisted the peg, plucked the string, listened.
Still wrong.
Instead of starting over, she let her fingers move.
Not the Boise progression. Something else. Slower. Quieter. A handful of chords she’d been picking at in her head all day without realizing it.
She played them again.
Then once more.
A melody settled over them.
There’s a cabin past the last good road
Where nobody knows my name…
Rainey frowned but kept playing, and the next lines arrived before she could think too hard about them. Pines crowded against dark windows. Firelight. Tilly stretched out near the stove.
There’s a dog asleep beside the fire,
A man who barely speaks—
Her hand flattened over the strings.
Nope.
Absolutely fucking not.
Of all the things rattling around in her head, apparently her subconscious had decided the half-feral mountain hermit deserved a song.
Not happening.
She reached for the tuning peg again.
“Play it again.”
Her hand froze.
Evander had set the rifle aside. He sat at the table watching her, forearms resting against the wood, his expression giving her absolutely nothing.
She narrowed her eyes. “You weren’t supposed to be listening.”
“You were singing.”
“That doesn’t mean you have to pay attention.”
The corner of his lips lifted in that not-quite-a-smile of his. “Play it again, songbird.”
Something low in her stomach gave an annoying little flip.
Oh, for fuck’s sake.
She should refuse. On principle, if nothing else.
Instead, she put her fingers back on the strings.