23. Evie
Evie
I wake before Gabriel.
For a while, I lie still beside him and listen to the slow rhythm of his breathing.
One arm is stretched across the pillow toward me, his hand open where it fell sometime during the night.
He looks less guarded when he’s sleeping.
The line between his brows is gone, and the morning light softens the hard shape of his jaw.
Last night’s dinner comes back in pieces.
Ruth’s letter. Ben’s hand on Jacob’s arm. Gabriel looking down the length of the room as though he finally understood that the family around him was something he’d helped build, not something his existence had damaged.
I think about waking him.
Then our daughter rolls beneath my ribs, a slow, insistent movement that makes me press one hand over the curve of my stomach.
“All right,” I whisper. “I’m up.”
Gabriel doesn’t stir.
I slip out of bed and empty the bladder my daughter is currently using as a trampoline. Pulling on yesterday’s jeans and a shirt and cardigan, I go downstairs.
Grabbing a glass of water, I step onto the porch for a little air.
This has become a ritual of sorts over the last week.
I love sitting out on the porch before the world wakes, the ranch caught between night and day.
Gray light over the pastures. Mist low along the fence line.
I watch the darkness give way to the golden hues of dawn while I talk to our daughter.
The morning is cool enough that I pull the blanket from the back of the porch swing around myself.
A light comes on in the kitchen behind me. A moment later, the screen door opens and Maggie pokes her head out, white braid hanging over one shoulder.
“Morning, sweetheart.”
“Morning.”
“You hungry?”
“Not yet.”
She gives me a look that says she considers this a temporary and suspicious condition. “I’ll put the biscuits in anyway.”
“Of course you will.”
“Coffee?”
“Water’s fine for now.”
Maggie nods toward the blanket around me. “Don’t sit out here getting chilled.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She disappears back inside, muttering something about stubborn pregnant women and men who let them wander around before breakfast.
I smile into my glass as the screen door closes behind her.
The kitchen light glows warm behind me while Maggie moves around inside, close enough that I can hear a cupboard open and the soft clink of crockery.
I sway gently on the porch swing and breathe.
Home.
The word still feels new. Not fragile anymore. Just new.
I look up as a barn door bangs in the distance. Falcon is coming across the yard fast. Not running, but close. His usual controlled stride has sharpened, one hand lifted as soon as he sees me.
“Evie.”
I’m already standing. “What happened?”
“It’s Chance.”
My heart thumps. “What about her?”
“She went down near the lower paddock. Looks like she caught a hind leg in the wire.” His breathing is uneven, as though he came all the way from the barn at a run. “She got loose before I reached her, but she won’t get up.”
My blood turns cold. “How long?”
“Five minutes. Maybe less.”
I glance toward the upstairs window. Gabriel is asleep less than thirty yards away. For one second, I consider waking him.
Then Falcon says, “There’s blood on her leg.”
That decides it. I nod. “Okay.”
“I’ll get the truck,” he says, already turning toward the barn.
I go to the kitchen door. “Maggie?”
She appears almost immediately, wiping her hands on a towel.
“Chance is down by the lower paddock,” I tell her. “I’m going with Falcon to check on her.”
Maggie’s face tightens. “Want me to wake Gabriel?”
“No. Let him sleep. We’ll be back in a few minutes.”
The utility truck rounds the side of the barn and pulls up beside the porch, engine running.
Falcon leans across and pushes open the passenger door. “Come on.”
I climb in, and he pulls away before I have the door fully shut.
“Where exactly?” I ask.
“Lower pasture. East side.”
“That isn’t where she was last night.”
“I know.”
“How did she get out?”
He keeps his eyes on the track ahead. “Gate was open when I found it.”
Something in his voice catches at me.
Falcon is always calm around horses. Even when the bay gelding panicked in the barn, even when Chance refused the new stall, he described what he saw with precision.
This is different.
“Was the gate latch broken?” I ask.
“No.”
“Then who opened it?”
His hands tighten on the wheel as the truck hits a rut hard enough to throw me against the door.
“Slow down.”
He doesn’t.
The old barn disappears behind us. The house follows. We pass the turn toward the lower paddock.
“Falcon.”
He keeps driving east.
“Chance isn’t this way.”
Nothing.
I reach for the door handle.
It doesn’t move. Locked. Fear hits me, sharp and real.
“Donovan Kirk, stop this truck.”
“I can’t.”
His voice is low. Not threatening, but something worse. Regretful.
I turn toward him. Falcon’s face is set, his eyes fixed ahead. A pistol now rests against his thigh, held in his right hand, angled toward me.
For one second, my mind refuses to understand.
Then it does. Chance isn’t hurt. Gabriel is asleep. And the quiet man who stood beside my mare while she learned to enter a stall has a gun pointed in my direction.
I automatically reach for my phone before I remember I left it on the bedside table. Panic rises fast.
“Pull over.”
“I can’t do that.”
“You can.”
“No.”
“Falcon.” I keep my voice steady, the same voice I use with Chance. “Who are you taking me to?”
His jaw tightens. “I only have to deliver you.”
The word goes through me cold.
Deliver.
My father’s language: the language of transfers, arrangements, and problems moved from one place to another.
“Alexander,” I whisper.
Falcon flinches.
My stomach drops. “Whatever he offered you, whatever he threatened—”
“Don’t.”
“He owns you?” I ask.
Falcon’s jaw clenches. “No one owns me.”
“That’s what he wants you to believe.”
He closes his eyes for half a second. “I don’t want to hurt you.”
“Then stop the truck.”
“I can’t.” The barrel lifts slightly. Not aimed at me, but at the door beside me. A warning. “Sit back.”
I don’t. I look through the rear window. Stoneridge is gone behind the rise. No truck following. No Gabriel running across the yard. Not yet.
But he’ll wake. He’ll reach across the bed. He’ll find my phone. And he’ll know I’m gone.
The thought hurts, knowing how terrified he’ll be.
“What did he use?” I ask.
Falcon’s face remains blank.
“Money? A threat? Someone you love?”
His grip tightens.
There.
“Who?”
“Stop talking.”
“He found someone you couldn’t afford to lose.”
“Stop.”
“And he told you this was the only way to keep them safe.”
Falcon swings the gun toward me.
His hand is steady. His eyes are not. “I said stop.”
I sit back slowly. Not because of the weapon, but because I’ve found the wound.
The truck reaches the eastern boundary. A section of fence lies open ahead, the wire cut cleanly and pulled aside. Tire tracks have turned the ground to mud around it.
Falcon drives through without slowing, onto land I don’t recognize. The pasture stretches wide and empty, the house nowhere in sight. A low ridge blocks Stoneridge behind us. Beyond it, the field has been torn open.
At first, I can’t make sense of what I’m seeing. The grass has been scraped away in a long, straight strip. The ground beneath it is graded and compacted, pale against the green pasture.
Small lights run along both edges, dim in the morning haze.
I stare at them. Survey markers? Except survey markers don’t need lights. A service road? But it doesn’t lead anywhere. No barn, gate, or equipment shed. Just an unnaturally straight stretch of cleared ground pointing east across open country.
Then I look toward the far end. The trees have been cut back. The approach is open.
My gaze travels the length of it again—the compacted earth, the measured width, the lights marking both sides.
And suddenly the shape resolves.
Not a road.
A runway.
Hidden on another man’s land. Close enough to Stoneridge to reach us. Far enough that nobody would see it from the house.
My father didn’t build this overnight. The machinery tracks, the cut fence, the packed earth. This has been waiting since before he visited the ranch. Maybe before I arrived in Montana, for whatever twisted purpose he needed it for.
I look at Falcon. “How long have you been working for him?”
His face closes. “Long enough.”
A sound reaches us from the east, low at first, then growing. Engines.
I follow Falcon’s gaze as he looks through the windshield. A white aircraft appears beyond the distant ridge, descending out of the gray morning sky.
My father didn’t send men to retrieve me.
He came to do it himself.