Chapter 28
twenty-eight
The track to the cabin had changed. Evander noticed it in the first quarter-mile – the ruts deeper than he remembered, the low branches he’d trimmed back at the first spring thaw now hanging across the path at windshield height.
A week away and the mountain had already started reclaiming the ground he’d carved out of it.
He drove the ranch truck through the gaps.
He knew the terrain by muscle, and tried not to think about the last time he’d come up this road with Rainey in the passenger seat.
The cabin came into view through the pines. He parked the truck where he always parked it, killed the engine, and sat for a minute with his hands on the wheel.
It looked smaller. That was the first wrong thing. The walls were peppered with bullets. Part of the roof had collapsed.
But it was standing.
The fire hadn’t done as much damage as he feared. Hobbs or Creed must have doused the fire for fear it would alert the authorities. Fire in the mountains in July always drew attention.
He got out of the truck. His ribs protested the climb to the porch, and he ignored them.
He pushed the door open and stepped inside. The silence hit him like a punch, knocking the air from his lungs.
Rainey’s guitar still sat in the corner, miraculously unharmed.
But she wasn’t here to play it. Tilly wasn’t here to pad across the floorboards to sniff his boots.
No scent of Rainey lingering in the bedding, no half-empty mug on the table, no notebook open on the chair with lines crossed out and rewritten.
Just his cabin. A little beat up, but it was the same as it had been for years before a blonde woman with a septum piercing and cigarette burns on her arms had walked into it and stayed a week and left him different.
He dropped his pack on the table and went to the woodstove.
Started a fire because the cabin was cold and he needed the work of it, the methodical layering of kindling and paper and the first split logs.
The flame caught. He closed the door and stood with his palms to the iron, feeling the heat seep into skin gone numb on the drive up.
Something moved outside.
He went still. Hand to the knife at his belt, eyes on the window. The sound came again – a shift, a weight settling, the soft exhale of a large animal standing on pine needles.
He knew that sound.
Evander crossed to the door and pulled it open.
Sable stood at the tree line thirty yards from the cabin, her dark coat dull with sweat and dust, her left hind leg cocked at an angle that tightened his chest. She lifted her head when she saw him.
Made a low, rough sound that wasn’t quite a whinny and wasn’t quite relief.
“Hey, girl.”
He approached slowly. She let him. No sidestep, no ear-flattening wariness – just the steady, exhausted regard of an animal that had run until it couldn’t run anymore and had come, against every reasonable expectation, home.
He reached her. Put a hand on her neck. She leaned into it.
Her coat was cold under his palm. She’d been out all night, maybe longer.
The leg was the problem – torn muscle high in the haunch, swelling already setting in, the kind of injury that would take weeks to mend if it mended clean at all.
No bullet wound, thankfully. Creed hadn’t shot her.
The stake had been the trap, not the punishment.
He’d walked a lame horse down a mountain and staked her in the open as bait, and she’d torn herself free and found her way back here through the dark because Sable had never done anything the easy way in her life.
“Stubborn,” he said. She blew warm breath against his jacket.
He led her to the lean-to behind the cabin, talking low the whole way – nothing with meaning, just the sound of a voice, something to orient her.
She followed with the three-legged lurch of a horse in real pain, and each step cost her something he could read in the set of her ears and the tension along her spine.
He got her into the shelter, filled the water trough from the rain barrel. She drank long and hard.
He cleaned the leg. Cold water from the stream, a cloth, his hands working the swollen tissue.
Sable stood still for it. She’d always stood for it.
There was a trust between them that had nothing to do with dominance and everything to do with the fact that he had never once given her a reason to doubt his hands.
When he finished, he pressed his forehead to hers and stayed there a long moment. Her breath warmed his face. Her forelock tickled his brow. He could feel the rapid, shallow pulse where the great vessels ran under her jaw.
She’d come back. Against odds. Against sense. She had come back.
“You’re okay now, sweetheart,” he whispered. “You’re okay.”
He left her with hay and water and the promise he’d check again in an hour, and he went to the woodpile and took up the axe.
The work was what he needed. Always had been.
Physical labor occupied the body and quieted the mind, or at least gave the mind something narrow to focus on besides the things it wanted to revisit.
He split wood he’d need to rebuild. Started with the rounds he’d cut in April, maple and pine and the occasional birch, and worked through them with a rhythm that ignored the protest from his ribs and the pull of the stitches in his side.
The axe bit. Wood cracked. Splinters flew.
His hands grew raw and then numb and then raw again, and he kept going because stopping meant thinking and thinking meant Boone’s blood on his knuckles and Creed standing on that ridge with a rifle and the flat certainty that he had been right all along – everyone was safer the farther they stayed from him.
The pile grew. He stacked as he split, building a wall of cut wood along the east side of the cabin where the morning sun would dry it.
His breath came hard. Sweat froze on his temples.
The concussion Bear had warned him about made the edges of his vision pulse faintly with each impact, and he welcomed that too. Pain was information. Pain was useful.
He worked until his arms shook. Until the blisters on his palms broke and sealed and broke again.
Until the sun climbed high enough to melt the frost from the roof and send water dripping in a steady percussion from the eaves.
He worked until there was nothing left to split, and then he cleared the deadfall from around the cabin perimeter, dragging branches into a burn pile he had no intention of lighting, and when that was done he started on the gutter, reattaching the section the wind had torn loose, hammering the brackets into place with more force than the job required.
The satellite phone he’d taken from the ranch rang inside the cabin. He couldn’t say why he’d taken it. He didn’t want to be reached.
He ignored it. Whoever it was – Walker, probably, or Brandt with an update on Creed, or River with whatever half-formed concern had occurred to him – could wait. The work wasn’t finished. The work was never finished.
The ringing stopped.
He started to take a relieved breath, but an engine sounded outside.
Fuck.
He turned. Through the window, Greta’s red Jeep was pulling into the clearing, navigating the ruts easily. She parked beside the ranch truck, killed the engine, and sat for a moment behind the wheel like she was composing herself. Then she got out.
She had a thermos in one hand and a paper bag in the other.
She crossed to the porch without looking at him, climbed the steps, and set both items on the rail.
Then she turned and took him in – the sweat, the blood on his knuckles, the way he was standing in the doorway with a satellite phone clutched in one fist and his whole body oriented toward the east like he was already halfway gone.
“Walker called,” she said.
Evander didn’t move.
Greta unscrewed the thermos. Poured coffee into the cap. Handed it to him. He took it automatically. The warmth burned his palms. He didn’t drink.
“Boone’s alive,” she said. “Pissed as hell, but alive. Took the round high in the shoulder. Clean through-and-through. No major vessels, no bone involvement. Bear says he’ll have full range of motion inside a month if he stops trying to get out of bed every ten minutes.
” She took a sip from the thermos itself. “Which he won’t.”
The coffee sat in Evander’s hand. Steam rose from it into the cold air.
“He’s furious you left,” Greta continued. Her voice had that particular evenness it took on when she was delivering information she knew would land hard and had decided not to cushion. “Says you used his blood as an excuse. His words, not mine.”
Evander found his voice. “Creed came to Valor Ridge because of me. Not Rainey. Not the RICO case. Me. He tracked me. He used Sable as bait to get me into the open.” He set the coffee on the rail.
His hand was steady. He was glad for that.
“Boone would never have been on that ridge if I’d stayed away. ”
Greta looked at him. Her pale green eyes held his without flinching, without softening.
“I’m not going to argue with you about whether you attract danger,” she said.
“Maybe you do. Maybe danger’s got a thing for tall, quiet men with good trigger discipline.
I don’t know.” She capped the thermos. Set it down.
“But Boone chose to go with you,” Greta said.
“Rainey asked you to take him. Walker chose to welcome you back to that ranch after eight years of watching you orbit it like some kind of melancholy satellite. I have spent the better part of a decade choosing to remain your friend despite your best efforts to make it impossible.” She folded her arms. The morning light caught the compass tattoo on her inner forearm – find your way – and for a second Evander couldn’t look away from it.
“You dismiss every one of those choices the second it conflicts with your belief that everyone is safer without you. You don’t get to do that.
Not if you want to call it accountability instead of control. ”
The cabin sat quiet around them. The fire popped in the stove. Somewhere behind the lean-to, Sable shifted her weight and blew softly through her nostrils.
“You made that catastrophic call in Afghanistan because you believed your assessment outranked everyone telling you to stop.” Greta’s voice had gone quieter.
Not gentler. Just precise, the way a blade is precise.
“You’ve spent eight years repeating the exact same mistake from the opposite direction.
Deciding what risks everyone else may take.
Calling that control guilt. Acting like the only lesson was that you have to make better decisions alone, when the actual lesson was that you have to stop making every decision alone. ”
Evander stared at the porch boards. She was right.
The satellite phone rang again.
She glanced toward it. “You going to pick that up?”
The phone sat on the table where he’d left it, the small black unit with its stubby antenna blinking a green light. Greta picked it up and frowned at the display. “I think that’s Rainey’s number.”
“What?”
“Johanna gave her a new phone to replace the one she lost.” She pulled out her own phone and scrolled until she found Rainey’s contact info. She compared the two numbers. “Yeah, that’s Rainey’s.”
He grabbed it from her hand and hit the answer button. “Rainey?”
“Not quite, Mr. Cole.”
Evander went still. Every cell in his body turned to ice. “Who is this?”
“Malachai Granger,” the voice said. “I believe you met my father.”
Rux’s son. The club president. The man who had delighted in hurting Rainey until she’d finally worked up the nerve to say no more.
“I have something of yours,” Mal said. “I’m going to make this simple.
You come to the turnout on County Road 14.
The one where the power lines cross. Alone.
Unarmed. You have three hours. If you’re not there by then, I put a bullet in Rainey Beckett’s head and dump her where the marshals will find her eventually. Probably.”
The cabin around him had ceased to exist. Greta disappeared. There was only the phone against his ear and the voice on the other end and the cold, spreading certainty that every calculation he’d made since leaving Valor Ridge had been wrong.
“I want to hear her voice,” Evander said. “Make sure she’s alive.”
A shift on the line. Muffled sounds. Then –
“Evander.”
Rainey. Her voice cracked on the second syllable. She was scared. She was trying not to sound scared. She was failing.
“I’m here,” he said. Stupid. Useless. The only thing he could think to say.
“Don’t come–”
The line went dead. Then Mal’s voice returned, smooth and unhurried. “Three hours, Mr. Cole. Turnout on 14. Just you. Anything else, and she dies before you reach the property line.” A beat. “I’d hurry if I were you. Hobbs gets impatient.”
The call ended.
Greta’s hand closed over his wrist. Judging by her face, she’d heard enough of the call to know what was happening.
“If you go alone,” she said, “you’re making Rainey’s choice for her. Walker’s choice. Boone’s choice. Everyone’s choice. Again.” Her fingers tightened. “The same mistake. Different direction.”
He looked at her. Her face was set. Her eyes held his without yielding an inch.
The phone rang.
He snapped it up. “Don’t fucking touch her. I need time to get there.”
Silence.
Then Mal’s voice, cool and amused. “You have until eleven. The clock’s running.”
Evander said nothing. He wanted to throw the phone, but set it down with care and turned to Greta.
“I need your Jeep,” he said. It would be better on the ruts downhill than the ranch truck he’d driven up.
She handed him the keys without hesitation. “Go. I’ll take the truck back.” She caught his hand before he drew away. “But call the ranch. Don’t go alone.”
He picked up the satellite phone and dialed Valor Ridge as he ran for the Jeep.
Walker answered on the second ring. “Cole, what’s wrong?”
Evander slid in behind the wheel, and he said the words he had never once said to anyone in his life. “I need your help.”