Chapter 32 #2
The question hung. Simple. Clean. A marshal offering a former scout sniper the chance to track a wounded man through winter timber.
Brandt would allow it. Might even coordinate it.
One phone call, and Evander could be on Creed’s blood trail within the hour, moving through the trees the way he’d moved through Afghanistan, through prison, through eight years of self-imposed exile. Hunting. The thing he was best at.
Rainey’s fingers tightened around his.
Evander looked at the blood on her wrists. At the swelling above her eye. At the way she sat against the pine trunk with her shoulders squared and her chin up and nothing in her posture that asked him to chase vengeance on her behalf.
“No,” he said.
Brandt nodded. Once. No judgment. No relief. Just acknowledgment.
“Bear’s two minutes out. I’ve got a truck staged at the turnout. Get her to the infirmary. I’ll secure the scene and meet you at the ranch.” He turned to go. Paused. Looked back. “Good call, Cole.”
He disappeared into the trees. The radio chatter followed him, fading, and the clearing went quiet again.
Bear arrived with his medical kit and his particular brand of gruff concern. He checked Rainey’s pupils, her pulse, the swelling at her temple. Cleaned the zip tie abrasions with an antiseptic wipe that made her hiss through her teeth. Applied a pressure bandage to the worst of it.
“Concussion. Mild. Possible hairline at the temple, but nothing the scanner won’t catch.” Bear packed his kit. “Infirmary. Now. Not in an hour. Now.”
Evander lifted her. His ribs protested. His side pulled where the stitches held. He ignored both. Rainey’s arms went around his neck, and she tucked her face against his throat the way she had in the trees, and he carried her through the timber toward the turnout where Brandt’s vehicles waited.
The clearing came into view. Black SUV. Side-by-side.
The camp chair where Rainey had sat for three hours, its aluminum legs scraped across gravel.
Blood on the ground. A lot of blood. Hobbs lay where he had fallen, a dark shape on the gravel, covered now with a emergency blanket from one of Brandt’s kits.
Federal marshals moved through the scene with evidence bags and cameras.
Walker stood near the SUV, talking to one of Brandt’s men, and when he saw Evander carrying Rainey his face did something complicated—relief, concern, something deeper that Evander didn’t have a name for.
X jogged over. His usual swagger compressed into something tighter, more focused. He had a pistol on his hip and blood on his knuckles that wasn’t his own.
“Truck’s ready,” he said. “Keys in it. I’ll drive.”
“I’ll drive,” Evander said.
X looked at him. At the way Evander held Rainey. At the blood on both of them. He nodded. Stepped back.
The drive to Valor Ridge took eighteen minutes.
Evander drove. Rainey sat in the passenger seat with her head against the window and Tilly wedged between them, the dog’s massive head in Rainey’s lap.
The radio stayed off. The road unwound through winter-gray grassland and scattered pine, and the mountains rose ahead, familiar and solid, and Evander kept one hand on the wheel and the other on Rainey’s thigh where her fingers laced through his.
She drifted. In and out. The concussion pulling her under, then letting her surface. Each time she came back, her grip tightened. Each time, he squeezed back.
They passed the gate. The yard opened before them—the main house with smoke from the chimney, the bunkhouse, the barn where Sable would be waiting in her lean-to with her bad leg and her stubborn heart.
Johanna stood on the porch. Boone watched from the infirmary window, his shoulder bandaged, his face set in lines of worry that smoothed when he saw the truck.
Evander carried Rainey inside. Through the door he had walked out of before dawn. Across the threshold he had crossed a hundred times in eight years of orbiting this place without landing. The house welcomed them with warmth and woodsmoke and the sound of the fire popping in the stove.
Bear had the infirmary ready. Clean sheets. The scanner humming. Johanna brought blankets. Walker appeared in the doorway, his hat off, and said nothing because nothing needed saying.
Evander set Rainey on the exam table. Her hand didn’t let go of his.
“I’m not going anywhere,” he said.
“I know.” Her voice was thin. The adrenaline had worn off. The pain was settling in. “But say it anyway.”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
She nodded. Closed her eyes. Bear moved in with his scanner and his quiet competence, and Evander stepped back just far enough to let him work, and Tilly sat at the foot of the table and watched everything with the focused intensity of a dog who had decided, irrevocably, that Rainey Beckett was hers to protect.
Brandt arrived an hour later. The yard had quieted. X and Jax were cleaning weapons on the porch. River had disappeared into the barn—needing space, Evander guessed, or animals, or both. Walker and Johanna moved through the house with the particular rhythm of people managing aftermath.
Brandt found Evander on the infirmary steps. Rainey was sleeping. Bear had confirmed the concussion, cleaned the abrasions, given her something for the pain. Nothing broken. Nothing that wouldn’t heal.
“Hobbs is dead,” Brandt said. No preamble.
“Confirmed. Single gunshot, close range. Creed’s weapon, Creed’s positioning.
The marshals found shell casings. We’ve got his rifle, his prints, enough to put him at the scene.
” He checked his notebook. “Mal and Gemma are gone. Highway patrol has BOLOs out on the motorcycle. They won’t make it far with her injuries, but they’ve got a head start and Mal knows the back roads. ”
Evander nodded. Said nothing.
“Creed Calder has disappeared.” Brandt closed the notebook. “Blood trail. No body. No vehicle. He either walked out injured or someone extracted him. My money’s on the latter. Men like Creed have contingencies.”
“They do.”
Brandt studied him. “You’re not going after him.”
It wasn’t a question. Evander didn’t treat it like one.
“No.”
“Good.” Brandt tucked the notebook into his jacket.
“The federal case is airtight. Rainey’s testimony, the evidence from today, the club’s financial records that Mal was trying to protect—it’s enough for RICO.
Enough to break the Sons as an organization.
Mal running just means we indict him in absentia. He’ll surface. They always do.”
Evander looked past Brandt, toward the infirmary window where Rainey slept under Bear’s watch. Her blonde hair spread across the pillow. Her face was peaceful in a way it hadn’t been since the mountain. Since before the mountain.
“Thank you,” he said.
Brandt’s expression didn’t change. “Get some rest, Cole. You look like hell.”
He walked away. His boots crossed the yard toward his SUV, and the engine started, and the taillights vanished down the county road toward whatever federal apparatus waited in Missoula or Billings or wherever men like Brandt went when the shooting stopped.
Evander stayed on the steps. The cold bit through his Henley. His ribs ached. His side pulled. The cut on his arm from General Mayhem had reopened somewhere during the day and dried again, and he hadn’t cleaned that either.
He would, though. Later. When Rainey woke up and demanded it with that bright stubborn insistence that had drawn him from the first day on the mountain when she’d stood in his cabin doorway with blood on her hands and refused to be afraid.
He went inside. Closed the door. The fire warmed him.
Tilly followed at his heel, and somewhere in the barn, a horse with a bad leg waited for morning, and somewhere in the infirmary, a woman he loved slept under clean sheets, and for the first time in eight years, Evander Cole had nowhere else he needed to be.