Chapter 24
twenty-four
The lyric wouldn’t come.
Rainey stared at the blank line in her notebook and resisted the urge to tear the page out and start over.
She’d already started over. Three times.
The opening line sat there empty because the song had changed on her sometime between the cabin and this porch, and the words she’d built around the original idea now felt like furniture in the wrong room.
Past the last good road, past where the signal dies.
That was the premise. A cabin in the pines where the dark comes down hard. Nobody knows my name out here. Nobody knows yours.
Except now somebody did.
She set the guitar on the porch boards beside her and propped the notebook on her knee.
Tilly lay at her feet, head on paws, watching the yard with the steady attention of a dog who believed her job description included every moving object within two hundred yards.
The morning had that clean Montana light to it — sharp-edged and clear, the kind that made everything look both more real and slightly unreal at the same time.
She’d been out here since seven. The ranch was already moving — men in the barn, boots across gravel, the distant sound of Jonah’s voice directing someone through a chore she couldn’t quite make out.
She’d slept badly. The guest room bed was too soft after a week on a mountain floor, and her body had apparently decided that safety meant vigilance, which meant she’d woken at every creak and footfall until dawn.
The song was the problem. The song was supposed to be about disappearing.
About finding somewhere so far from expectation that expectation couldn’t reach you.
Somewhere nobody knew your name, nobody knew your history, nobody looked at you and saw the sum of every bad choice you’d ever made or every bad thing that had ever been done to you.
Somewhere you could be nobody.
She wasn’t nobody on that mountain. Evander had looked at her and seen exactly who she was, and he’d stayed anyway.
He’d stayed when she was angry, when she was scared, when she’d dressed a stab wound in the dark with hands that shook.
He’d stayed when the fever took him and when the gunfire started and when the choices got hard.
He hadn’t made her small. He’d made her necessary.
That wasn’t the song she’d set out to write.
She pressed the pen against the paper hard enough to dent it.
“Coffee.”
She looked up. Evander stood at the bottom of the porch steps with two mugs, his dark hair tied back, the bruise along his jaw faded to yellow at the edges.
He’d dressed in the clothes Boone had brought him — jeans that sat loose on his hips, a gray Henley that might have been Jonah’s, boots she recognized as his own.
His left arm was still tucked close to his ribs.
“Nessie’s orders,” he said.
She took the mug. The coffee was perfect — dark, clean, nothing like the bitter camp-brewed stuff they’d survived on. She drank half of it before she remembered to say thank you.
He sat on the step below hers, his back to the rail post, and held his own coffee between his palms. The morning light caught the line of his shoulders and the quiet watchfulness in his posture.
He didn’t ask what she was working on. He never asked.
He waited, which was worse, because waiting meant he’d already decided he wanted to know and was prepared to outlast her reluctance.
She set the mug down and picked up the guitar. Played the opening progression — the one she’d worked out in her head while watching him sharpen a knife, the one that had arrived whole and refused to leave. Past the last good road. Past where the signal dies.
She stopped. “The opening line doesn’t work.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s a lie.” She set the guitar down harder than she meant to.
“The song was supposed to be about disappearing. Finding somewhere nobody expected anything from you. Somewhere you could just stop being whatever everyone else decided you were.” She looked at the mountains beyond the fence line.
His mountains. “That’s not what happened. ”
He was quiet. Then his gaze dropped to the notebook in her lap, to the empty line, and he said, “You’re still writing about me?”
She almost laughed. Almost. “That depends. You planning to sue for royalties?”
He didn’t smile.
She set the pen down. “It didn’t start out being about you.
It was supposed to be about running away.
Finding quiet. Somewhere nobody knew my name.
” She looked at the mountains again because looking at him right then felt like standing too close to something hot. “Somewhere nobody expected anything.”
“And now?”
She turned to him. His eyes were dark and watchful, and she couldn’t read what was behind them except that he was waiting, the way he waited for everything that mattered, and the waiting itself was a kind of trust she wasn’t sure she deserved.
“Now I think maybe I found somewhere I wanted to be found,” she said.
The words sat between them. Not heavy, exactly. Present. The kind of truth that changed the air in a room without making a sound.
He looked at her a long moment. Then his gaze drifted past her, toward the ridge line, and she knew exactly where his mind had gone. His mountain. His cabin. The life he’d built out of silence and distance and the conviction that staying away was the only moral choice available to him.
“You figure out how it ends?” he asked.
“Not yet.”
“Probably shouldn’t force it.”
“No.” She picked up the guitar again, ran her thumb along the strings without playing. “I think I have to see what happens first.”
He nodded. Once. The conversation was over in the way his conversations ended — not because he’d run out of words but because he’d said the thing he came to say and the silence after was part of it.
She let the silence sit. Then she asked, “Any word on Sable?”
His jaw tightened. A small movement, barely there, but she caught it. “No.”
“Jonah’s still looking?”
“He went out again at dawn. Covered the east ridge and the game trail where we came down.” He drank his coffee. “Nothing.”
She didn’t offer reassurance. False comfort would have been an insult to both of them.
Sable was out there somewhere, riderless, possibly injured, in country that had teeth even without Creed Calder in it.
Evander knew that better than anyone. Offering hope he didn’t believe would have been taking something from him, not giving it.
So they sat with the worry. His worry, which he carried the way he carried everything — internally, without complaint, without the performance of burden that would have made it easier for someone else to reach for.
She recognized the pattern now. He didn’t protect himself from pain.
He accepted it. Welcomed it, even. The cut on his arm from the rooster yesterday, the way he’d glanced at the blood and then away like it was information rather than injury.
The cracked ribs he worked through without mentioning.
The fever he’d walked off a mountain with.
Pain was something he believed he deserved.
The thought settled in her chest like a cold stone.
The chaos arrived at a sprint.
River came tearing across the yard from the direction of the chicken coop with his arms windmilling and his voice carrying at a volume that suggested either genuine alarm or performance art.
Behind him, General Mayhem moved with the focused fury of a fifteen-pound rooster who had identified a target and intended to extract payment in blood.
“Jesus Christ— somebody— would somebody please—”
The men materialized from various points around the yard.
X leaned against the barn doorframe with his phone already recording.
Jonah paused halfway through carrying a bale of hay to the paddock.
Boone stepped out of the equipment shed and folded his arms. None of them moved to help.
They watched with the settled amusement of men who had seen this particular drama play out enough times to recognize it as entertainment rather than crisis.
River vaulted the picnic table, lost his footing on the far side, and went down hard on one knee. Mayhem closed the distance with the aerodynamic efficiency of something built for short-range combat.
Evander was on his feet before Rainey registered he’d moved.
He crossed the yard at a walk, not a run, and stepped directly into Mayhem’s path.
The rooster launched — wings spread, combat mode engaged, targeting what appeared to be Evander’s left shin — and Evander caught him.
Barehanded. One smooth motion, palm around the body, wings pinned, and Mayhem’s furious crowing cut off into an indignant squawk.
Evander held him at arm’s length. The rooster’s black eyes fixed on him with pure, undiluted hatred.
A thin line of blood welled along Evander’s forearm where Mayhem’s spur had caught him. He didn’t seem to notice it.
River picked himself up, brushing grass from his knees, and grinned. “See? This is why we keep him around. He caught that psychotic rooster mid-air! Man’s fearless.”
“He also caught a spur to the arm and didn’t blink.” X lowered his phone. “You just made an enemy for life, hermano.”
“Good,” River said. “Maybe he’ll lay off me for a while. Or we can finally cook the homicidal chicken for Sunday dinner.”
“No,” Boone and Jonah said simultaneously.
Rainey watched the blood track down Evander’s arm. Watched him not wipe it away. Watched the way he held Mayhem at a careful distance, not squeezing, not hurting him, just containing the fury with the same steady patience he brought to everything that couldn’t be reasoned with.