Page 78 of Breaking His Exile

Brandt waited.

“The control started inside the first month. Small things. Who I talked to. What I wore when I came to club events. He’d tell me what he wanted me to say to certain people, what to say I did for work. He monitored my phone for a while without telling me, and when I found out he just — explained why it was necessary. And I accepted it.” Her chest felt strange. Tight and hollow at the same time. “I’d stopped playing shows six months in. Stopped seeing most of my friends. My contact list had basically narrowed down to people he’d approved of, and I’d done it so gradually I almost didn’t notice until I looked up one day and there was almost nobody left.”

Naomi sat very still in the corner.

“Fear kept me longer than any of it kept me,” Rainey said. “I knew, by the end, that I wanted out. I’d known for a while. But leaving meant— I didn’t know what leaving meant. I knew what he’d said leaving meant. And I believed him.”

Brandt wrote for a long, quiet moment after she stopped talking.

“Okay,” he said. He reached over and paused the recorder. “Thank you. I know that last part wasn’t easy.”

She exhaled. The mountain had held all of this at arm’s length — the week in the cabin had been about survival, about gunfire and fever and cracked ribs and Evander’s hands on hers in the dark, and none of it had required her to sit in a room and say this is what was done to me in plain sentences with a recorder running. She’d forgotten how much effort it took to hold a thing until you finally set it down.

Her eyes went to the doorway.

He was there.

Evander stood in the frame with one hand braced against the wood, dressed in borrowed clothes that weren’t quite his size, pale as chalk under the bruise climbing his jaw. He’d clearly been there long enough to hear at least some of it. He wasn’t moving. Wasn’t speaking. His dark eyes were on her face with an intensity that stripped everything else out of the room.

He’d come to find her.

She hadn’t gone to him, so he’d come to find her.

Rainey stared at him across the room, the recorder on the dresser, Brandt still in his chair, Naomi very carefully not looking at either of them, and the thing she’d been holding at arm’s length since she fell asleep with one boot on cracked right through the middle.

twenty-one

She was still talking when he got there. Her voice came through the half-open door, steady and clear, and Evander stopped in the frame with his hand braced against the wood and let the sound of it anchor him. Brandt had the recorder running. Naomi sat in the corner with her phone face-down on her knee and her full attention up. Rainey sat at the center of the room in borrowed clothes with her back to the door, and she was fine. Whole. Talking in complete sentences about things that had been done to her without her voice cracking once.

His ribs had opinions about the hallway he’d just crossed. He ignored them.

Brandt’s pen moved on the notepad. Rainey was wrapping up — something about fear, about staying longer than she should have, about the shape of control when it arrived quietly and you didn’t name it until you were already standing inside it. Evander stayed in the doorway and listened to the tail end of it and held himself very still.

Rainey turned her head and saw him.

The room went quiet in a particular way — not stopped, just rearranged. Brandt looked up from the notepad. His gaze moved from Rainey to Evander, the flat appraisal of a man who’d spent his career reading rooms, and he reached over and switched off the recorder. He collected the notepad and capped his pen. Naomi stood without being asked, and the two of them moved toward the door with the unhurried efficiency of people who understood when a room had stopped being theirs.

Brandt paused beside Evander in the frame. He said nothing. He looked at him once — not hostile, just thorough — and nodded, once, the way men nodded when they’d decided something about each other. Then he was gone down the hall, Naomi’s footsteps behind him.

The door sat most of the way closed.

Rainey crossed the room fast.

“What are you doing out of bed.”

Not a question. She stopped in front of him and took one look — the borrowed shirt, the way his arm was pinned against his left side without him quite realizing he was doing it, the gray that hadn’t fully left his face — and her expression went to something that lived between relief and fury.

“Bear said twenty-four hours.”

“Bear says a lot of things.”

“Your concussion⁠—”

“Is manageable.”

“Is it.” She looked at his face with the focused attention of someone checking pupils without a light and apparently finding the results unconvincing. “You’re pale. You’re holding your ribs. And you walked across the entire ranch on a stab wound that needed stitches, a concussion that Bear was monitoring overnight, and two cracked ribs.” She crossed her arms. “So what I want to know is what was so important that you had to do that instead of staying in that bed for six more hours and letting your body repair itself.”

He looked at the wall past her shoulder. The window. The guitar case in the corner he hadn’t noticed before, until he recognized it and understood what it was.