Chapter 16
sixteen
Tilly’s growl jerked Evander awake.
He shot out of bed and grabbed his rifle before Rainey even sat up. “What?”
“Someone’s here.”
“Fuck.” She scrambled out of bed and yanked on her clothes. Thankfully, he was still mostly dressed, minus his shirt. She scooped it off the floor and threw it at him. He took a second to pull it on, ignoring the spark of pain flaring behind his eyes, and crossed to the window.
He should’ve known Creed wouldn’t wait until morning.
Movement. A shape sliding between pines. Then another. At least three that he could see. Creed had brought back-up.
Rainey checked the pistol he’d given her, then started transferring supplies to the spare pack he kept in the locker. His old one was still sitting where Creed had left it after searching it. He hadn’t even thought to grab it. His only thought was of getting to Rainey.
Ammunition. The first-aid kit. The half-empty canteen. She worked fast, her hands steady.
The woman was a miracle.
Creed’s voice carried through the door. “Cole, send the girl out. Now. She walks to us, nobody touches her. You come out with your hands where I can see them, and this ends without more blood on your floor.”
Rainey went still by the rear wall. Her eyes found Evander’s across the cabin.
He knew better than to trust promises made by men riding with the Sins. Especially Creed fucking Calder. His finger settled against the trigger. He could shoot through the door…
But then he looked at Rainey. They wanted her alive, but if he took that shot, there was no stopping them from peppering the cabin with bullets and taking her dead.
Maybe giving her to them was the best way to keep her alive for now. Then he could contact River, and—
He shut down that idea, too. They wouldn’t leave him alive to contact anyone.
Fuck.
He genuinely had no idea what to do.
Rainey had frozen with the spare pack half-loaded, one hand on a box of ammunition, her eyes fixed on his. Waiting for him to decide.
The pattern again. His judgment. Her life.
Creed’s voice came through the door, softer now, almost reasonable. “Cole. You know how this ends. Don’t make it harder than it needs to be.”
Evander knew exactly how it ended. If he surrendered, they killed him and took Rainey.
If he fought, they killed him and took Rainey.
If he sent her out, they kept their word long enough to get her to a vehicle, then killed him anyway.
There was no version where Evander Cole walked off this mountain.
The only variable was whether Rainey survived it.
He could accept that. Had accepted it years ago, in principle.
What stopped his finger on the trigger was the possibility that Rainey wouldn’t accept it.
That she’d try something brave and stupid, that she’d fight when cooperation was the only coin that bought her time, that she’d die because she trusted him to have a plan.
He didn’t have a plan. He had a rifle and eight years of wanting to be left alone, and neither of those was worth anything now.
“Evander,” she whispered. “What do we do?”
He opened his mouth to tell her—what? Surrender, run, hide? He didn’t know. He didn’t fucking know—
The window beside his head exploded.
Glass sprayed across his cheek, and the report followed a half-second later, the heavy crack of a high-caliber rifle.
He dropped below the sill, blood already tracking down his jaw, and the second shot punched through the wall above the cot where they’d slept minutes ago.
Wood splinters rained on the sleeping bag.
“Rear!” Evander shouted, and rolled to the door frame, rifle up.
The front window gaped empty, dark, but muzzle flash bloomed from the tree line—two o’clock, low, behind the big fir—and he returned fire without aiming, squeezing three rounds into the dark, the recoil hammering his bruised ribs.
Someone out there yelled, a sharp curse cut short.
Rainey dropped the pack and took position at the other window, her body angled to present the smallest target. The next shot that came through the wall passed six inches above her head. She didn’t flinch. Returned fire, two quick shots, the pistol’s lighter crack answering the rifle’s boom.
Tilly pressed against Evander’s leg, hackles raised, a continuous low rumble in her chest.
“Stay,” he told her. She stayed, but the rumble didn’t stop.
The generator sat in its housing by the front corner.
He’d meant to move it to higher ground yesterday, before everything.
Now a bullet sparked off its metal casing, and he heard the fuel line rupture, a hiss like a snake, and smelled gasoline in the same breath.
The next shot hit something electrical. Blue light arced, and the generator made a sound like a man clearing his throat before it died, taking the cabin’s single electric light with it.
Darkness, except for the stove’s orange glow and the muzzle flashes strobing through the windows.
Rainey fired again. “One’s circling! East side, trying for the tree line!”
Evander couldn’t cover both fronts. He chose the front because the rifle outranged the pistol, because three men pressed the main approach, because if he turned his back on Hobbs he’d be dead before he completed the rotation. “Hold him!”
“I am!”
She was. He heard her shots, measured, spaced, not panicked. The pistol had a twelve-round magazine. She’d fired four, maybe five. The circling man would count her shots, wait for the click of an empty chamber, then rush.
Evander put another round through the front window, aiming at memory, at the space where the last muzzle flash had bloomed.
The cabin groaned around them. Bullets had found a load-bearing timber, and the roof settled with a sound like an old man easing into a chair. The walls that had kept out blizzards and bears and years of loneliness were coming apart around them.
Rainey’s pistol clicked empty.
He turned toward her, his ribs screaming. A man’s face appeared in the window—one he recognized from The Dead Marshall.
Hobbs, Rainey had called him.
Rainey hurled the empty pistol at the man’s face and followed it with her shoulder.
His shotgun discharged into the ceiling.
Sawdust filled the air like snow. She grabbed the shotgun’s barrel and twisted it sideways, her whole body weight behind the leverage.
The stock cracked against the window frame.
Hobbs’s head followed, hard enough to daze him, and Rainey yanked the shotgun from his hands and aimed it at his face.
Hobbs held up his hands and backed away from the window, but he was grinning as he did.
Evander had seen many things in combat. He had never seen a woman fight like that, with nothing, against a man with a shotgun, and win.
“Evander!” Her voice cut through the ringing in his ears. “We can’t stay here!”
She was right. The cabin was dying. Water sprayed from a ruptured line somewhere in the wall, soaking the floorboards, mixing with the gasoline from the generator to form a slick that caught the stove’s orange light. One spark and they’d burn alive.
His ax hung on the wall beside the stove, right where he’d left it after splitting firewood yesterday morning.
Now he grabbed it and swung at the rear wall, where the logs were oldest, where rain and rot had softened the pine.
The blade bit deep. He wrenched it free and swung again, wood splintering, the ax handle vibrating in his palms. Three swings, four, and gray dawn light showed through a gap wide enough for a body.
“Tilly! Out!” The dog shot through without hesitation.
Rainey followed, ducking through the hole with the shotgun in hand, her shirt catching on a splinter, tearing free.
Evander threw the pack out after her, then followed, backing through, rifle up, covering the front of the cabin where Hobbs and Creed and the kid still pressed their attack.
He whistled for Sable, two sharp notes.
She came. He saw her dark shape break from the tree line, her wild eyes finding his across the clearing. She was twenty yards out, fifteen, coming for him the way she always had, because she’d chosen him and that choice had never wavered—
Gunfire from the tree line, automatic, undisciplined, the kid panicking or Hobbs ordering suppression. Sable veered, her haunches bunched, and bolted into the timber on the far side of the clearing. He saw her for one more heartbeat, a dark ghost between the firs, and then she was gone.
He stood in the ruined back wall with the ax in his hand and the rifle in the other and watched the place he’d built with his own hands finish dying.
The front door splintered inward. Boots on the porch.
He fired once through the gap, but didn’t wait to see if he hit anything. He grabbed Rainey’s arm and ran.
They ran downhill, through the timber behind the cabin, where the slope dropped steeply toward the creek.
Tilly ranged ahead, black coat vanishing and reappearing between the trunks.
Rainey moved well, better than he expected, her boots finding purchase on the slick needles, her hand gripping his when the grade threatened to take her feet out.
She didn’t complain about her ribs. She didn’t ask where they were going. She just ran.
Behind them, the cabin’s roof finally gave way.
It made a sound like a giant exhaling, and then the fire started—gasoline catching at last, the orange bloom lighting the forest, throwing their shadows long and strange across the ground ahead.
They kept running until his lungs burned and his ribs felt like broken glass grinding together and Rainey’s grip on his hand had gone slippery with sweat.
They stopped in a hollow where two fallen logs made a natural barricade. Tilly circled back, tongue lolling, and pressed against Evander’s knee. He let himself sink to the ground, back against the moss-slick wood, and listened.