Page 57 of Breaking His Exile

“For staying.” The words came out quiet. Honest in a way that made her chest ache. “When you saw what I did in the shed. When you found me like this. You stayed.”

Rainey sat beside him on the cot. The mattress dipped under their combined weight, and his shoulder pressed warm against hers. She took his hand and laced her fingers through his, and they sat like that in the quiet, the lantern burning low, Tilly asleep on the floorboards, and the night holding its breath outside the door.

“I’m not going anywhere,” she said.

His hand tightened around hers, and tension eased out of his body as he leaned against her. His head tipped toward her shoulder, and she knew he was fighting sleep because sleep.

“Rest,” she whispered. “I’ve got the door.”

He didn’t argue. His breathing deepened, slowed, and within minutes the weight against her shoulder grew heavier as his body surrendered to the exhaustion he’d been carrying since the shelter. She sat still and let him sleep, her hand in his, and watched the lantern flame gutter on the shelf.

fifteen

The truck hit a pothole and Creed’s ribs slammed against the door frame. He bit down on a groan before it could leave his throat. The stab wound in his flank pulsed hot under the bandage.

At least he’d gotten the bastard back, stab for stab. Only fair. Even though he’d done it while Evander was passed out.

Some would’ve called that cruel. He called it mercy. He could’ve easily killed the man, after all.

His right knee sat propped on the backseat, swollen to twice its size and wrapped in an ace bandage. The brace kept it from bending. Didn’t do shit for the pain.

“Left,” he said. “The road curves left ahead.”

The driver—one of Mal’s newer recruits, a kid with a shaved head and a tattoo of knuckle dusters across his throat—eased the wheel over. The headlights swept across wet pine trunks and disappeared into the dark. The fire road hadn’t seen maintenance in years. Washouts. Fallen rock. Places where the shoulder had collapsed into the creek below.

Creed had walked this road once, two years ago, before Walker Nash cut him loose from Valor Ridge. He remembered the grade. The switchbacks. The way the trees opened at the top to a view of the whole damn valley.

He hadn’t remembered it hurting this much to get there.

Hobbs sat in the passenger seat. Quiet. He’d been quiet since they left Solace. Hobbs’s stillness was never peace. It was inventory. The man cataloged exits, angles, weaknesses, the same way Creed himself had been taught to do it in another life, under different flags. Right now, Hobbs was cataloging Creed.

“You’re sure about this ridge.” Not a question. A statement waiting for confirmation.

“I followed their sign from the creek to the shelter.” Half-truth. He’d followed Evander’s sign after the fight, backtracking through the rain to the rock shelter where he’d treated his own wounds and made the call. The cabin location he’d pieced together from terrain, from two years of watching Valor Ridge from a distance and knowing the kind of ground a man like Cole would choose. “The cabin is at the end of this road.”

He was sure of it.

Hobbs shifted to glance back, and his leather cut creaked. “And Rainey is there.”

“She’s there.”

“With Rux’s killer.”

Creed’s jaw tightened. “Yeah.”

The truck crawled over another washout. The suspension bottomed out with a metallic groan. Creed’s knee jolted against the dash and white fire raced up his thigh. He pressed his palm flat against the bandage on his flank and breathed through his nose until the spots cleared from his vision.

Hobbs watched him do it. Said nothing.

The road narrowed. Trees closed in on both sides, branches scraping the truck’s flanks. Creed directed the kid around a fallen log, then up a grade so steep the engine labored in low gear. The headlights swept upward, caught the underbelly of low clouds, and for a second the whole mountainside lit up silver.

There. A single point of light, yellow and warm against the black.

“Smoke,” the kid said. “Chimney’s going.”

Hobbs leaned forward. “How far?”

“Half mile on foot from where this road ends.” Creed pointed. “The trail cuts north from the last switchback. Steep. Washed out in places.”