Page 19 of Breaking His Exile

“Don’t touch me.” River’s voice was low now, dangerous. “Don’t tell me to calm down. Don’t tell me it’s going to be okay. It’s not going to be okay. She might be dead, X. She might already be dead, and I’m standing here in the ruins of some psycho’s cabin, and I can’t⁠—”

He stopped. His breath hitched, and for a second, X thought he was going to collapse. Then Boone stepped through the doorway. Brandt stayed back, watching through the open door, obviously having decided it wasn’this place to intervene.

That man was one of the few genuinely good guys in this world.

Boone didn’t say anything at first. He crossed the room slowly, his boots heavy on the warped floor, and stopped in front of River. He didn’t touch him. He just stood there, close enough that River had to look up to meet his eyes.

“You done?” Boone asked.

River’s jaw tightened. “No, I’m not fucking⁠—”

“You done?” Boone repeated, and his voice was the same low rumble X had heard him use with spooked horses.

River stared at him. His chest was still heaving, his hands still shaking, but something in his face shifted—the wildness retreating, replaced by something raw and exhausted. He looked away first.

“I don’t know what to do,” River said, and his voice cracked on the last word. “I don’t know how to find her.”

“Then you let us help you figure it out.” Boone reached out then, and put a hand on River’s shoulder. “Killing Cole won’t bring her back. It won’t undo the last nine years. It’ll just put you in a cell and leave her alone again. You want to help your sister? Stay sharp. Stay here. Let us do what we do.”

River’s shoulders sagged. The fight went out of him all at once, like a wire snapping, and a single, harsh sob tore out of him. Boone pulled him in then, rough and solid, one arm around River’s back, and River buried his face against Boone’s shoulder and broke.

X stood by the door, watching, and felt utterly useless. He’d known River for years. He’d seen River drunk, seen him manic, seen him spiral into depressions that made him disappear into his shop, under the hood of a vehicle, for days. But he’d never seen this. This was grief with teeth.

And he didn’t know what to do with it.

six

Rainey found the keys in the third place she looked.

Evander had set them on the shelf beside the woodstove, half-hidden behind a tin of coffee and a folded length of paracord. She’d told herself she was just getting up to use the outhouse, but her hands had known better. They’d gone searching before her mind caught up, and now she stood barefoot on the cold cabin floor with the truck keys pressed into her palm and her heart going too fast in her chest.

The room was dim. The woodstove had burned down to coals, and the only light came from the gray half-dawn bleeding through the single window. Evander slept against the door still, or at least he looked like he slept—his head tilted back against the wall, the rifle laid across his thighs, his chest rising and falling in a rhythm too slow and even to be faked. Tilly had shifted onto her side beside the cot, one ear twitching, but her eyes were closed.

Rainey moved without sound. She’d learned a long time ago how to walk like a ghost. How to place her weight on the outer edge of her foot and roll through the toe. How to breathe shallow and slow while her pulse hammered in her temples. She’d written a whole song about it.

She sang the lyrics now in her head as she crossed to the door.

I knew which floorboards wouldn’t talk

Which bedroom lock would stick

How long to hold my breath before

The worst of it would quit

So I’d count the quiet

One, two, three

Count every second it wasn’t me…

The door wasn’t locked. The handle turned easily, and she slid through the gap onto the porch.

Fog lay over the clearing. The pines were shrouded in mist, and the sky above them was the color of old silver. Somewhere down the mountain, a bird called, then went quiet. The air smelled of wet earth and pine pitch and the faint mineral sharpness of a nearby creek.

She ran toward the truck. The driver’s side door opened with a creak that seemed loud as a gunshot in the stillness, and she climbed in, pulled it shut, and sat behind the wheel with her ribs aching and her hands shaking.

She’d done this before. Not the truck, not the mountain, but the leaving. She’d left her father when she was sixteen after the last time he’d hurt. She’d left Mal in the middle of the night with a bag over her shoulder and her guitar in her hand, and she’d told herself she’d never let another man decide her fate again.