Chapter 19
Chapter
Nineteen
SLOANE
By morning, the storm vanishes from the mountains. The violence forgotten, though it leaves behind dripping pines, low fog, and a strange, fragile quiet that feels temporary in every way.
I wake on the floor alone. The sleeping bag still tucked around me. The fire burned down to embers. And Rhys nowhere inside the cabin.
For one disorienting second, panic flares through me. Then I see him through the window. Outside near the washout again.
Of course.
He stands at the edge with his hands shoved into the pockets of his jacket, staring down toward the Jeep like stubbornness alone might pull it free.
The posture is familiar now. Rigid shoulders. Head slightly bowed. A man holding himself together through sheer force of habit.
I watch him for a long moment before pushing the blanket aside and standing. Everything inside me feels unsettled, like the earth beneath the mountain after a slide. Nothing where it used to be.
I step onto the porch. Cold air brushes my skin, threaded with pine and wet stone.
Rhys hears me but doesn’t look up at first. “You should go,” he says without turning around.
Instead of fighting him, I lean against the damp porch railing. “The Jeep’s still stuck.”
“That can be fixed.” His gaze fixes on me. “Now that you know, why stay any longer than you have to?”
My eyes narrow slightly. “You planning on carrying me down the mountain?”
“If necessary.” There’s enough seriousness beneath the dry response that I almost smile.
Almost.
“I’m not finished,” I say instead.
This time he looks at me. Those dark eyes search mine briefly before drifting away again toward the ravine. “With what?”
The investigation. The truth. You.
But I don’t say any of it. “Everything.”
Tension flickers across his face. “There’s nothing else here.”
We both hear the lie in it immediately.
I step farther onto the porch. Closer to him now. The wood creaks beneath my boots. “That’s not true.”
Rhys goes still.
“You just don’t want me to see it.”
His throat works once. God. I understand him now in a way I wish I didn’t. The guilt. The fear. The terrible possibility that if I stay long enough, I’ll see every broken thing he’s spent years trying to bury beneath silence and isolation and mountain storms. And worse—that part of him wants me to.
Wind moves gently through the trees. Below us, water trickles down the washout in thin silver streams beneath the morning light.
Rhys finally turns fully toward me. “You don’t know what you’re asking for.”
“No.” I hold his gaze steadily. “I don’t think you do either.”
Something shifts in his expression then. Recognition. The kind that happens when someone sees straight through the defenses you barely survived building.
He steps closer slowly. Careful with the injured arm… and with me. The porch suddenly feels very small.
My pulse throbs as he stops only a foot away. Close enough now that the mountain air feels less cold, and I remember his hands gripping my waist in the rain. His blood on my skin. His voice breaking in the dark while he told me how my brother died.
“You should hate me,” he says quietly.
The words hurt more now than they did before. Because I know he means them. Some part of him still believes survival itself was betrayal.
I shake my head slowly. “I don’t.”
His eyes search mine carefully. Like he’s waiting for the rest.
Maybe I am too. “I don’t know what I feel,” I admit softly. “But it’s not that.”
The honesty of it settles between us. No easy absolution or dramatic forgiveness. Just truth, raw and unfinished.
Wind moves off the mountain, loosening strands of my hair and casting them across my face. Rhys watches the movement wordlessly before lifting his hand and stopping. The restraint wrecks me more than the possibility of his touch, as if he still isn’t sure he’s allowed.
I close the distance myself. Only half a step. But enough.
His composure slips for half a second.
“You keep trying to send me away,” I whisper.
“You can take the ATV.”
“But you don’t want me to.” The silence that follows feels louder than thunder.
Rhys’s gaze drops briefly to my mouth before returning to my eyes. It’s a calculated mistake. One neither of us can come back from.
All the tension that fractured beneath grief and truth and guilt comes roaring back stronger than before.
The porch creaks softly as he shifts closer. Now I can feel the heat of him fully. The sharp clean scent of pine and leather.
Every instinct inside me says this is dangerous. Once this line breaks, nothing between us stays simple again.
Not that it ever was.
“What happened over there—you don’t know what it did to me,” he says roughly.
“I understand enough.”
Tension flickers across his face. “That’s the problem.”
Maybe.
But I’m tired of pretending complicated things become simpler if we refuse to look at them.
Phoenix made a choice. Rhys made one, too. And somehow both of them have been trapped inside that moment ever since.
I look up at him steadily. “I came here because I thought you abandoned him.” The words leave visible pain across his face. I continue anyway, “But you didn’t.”
His eyes close, face fracturing.
“No.”
One syllable changes everything but fixes nothing. The mission still failed, and people died. Phoenix is still gone, and Rhys carries it all like punishment branded into his skin.
But now the truth exists between us instead of the lie. And that feels more intimate than touching him ever did.
His hand lifts again, slowly. This time it reaches me. Rough fingertips brushing carefully along my jaw. Tentative. Like he’s touching something fragile. Or maybe he’s the fragile thing here.
My breath catches, and my eyes close. Neither of us moves or pulls away.
The mountains loom behind him, glimmering with rain and cloud and morning light. And standing here now, close enough to feel the war still living inside him, I realize something terrifying.
I’m no longer staying because of the investigation. Or even concern for Rhys.
Now I’m staying because somewhere along the way, this broken, haunted man stopped feeling like the enemy.
And started feeling like home.