Page 84 of Breaking His Exile

Then he pushed off the fence and walked toward the bunkhouse.

She stayed on the porch until he was swallowed by the light from the open door. The sound from inside swelled briefly as he entered, River’s voice rising above the others in some greeting she couldn’t make out, and then the door closed and the night went quiet except for the creek in the low ground past the east fence.

He could have said no.

He hadn’t.

She sat with the guitar across her lap and smiled at that.

Maybe, finally, Evander Cole was healing.

twenty-three

The bunkhouse hit him in layers. Voices first, then dogs, then the smell of something warm off the stove. He stood just inside the doorway and took inventory the way he took inventory of every space he entered: exits, threats, where the light fell short. Two exits, both known. No threats. Just men and their dogs in a room, and River pointing at him from across a card table with the satisfied expression of someone who’d won a bet no one else remembered making.

“He came,” River announced to the room.

Jonah materialized from the kitchen area before Evander had fully closed the door. He had a plate in one hand and held it out.

“Leftover reception food,” Jonah said. “Bear wants you eating.”

Evander took the plate because refusing it would have required more energy than accepting it, and because whatever was on it smelled better than anything he’d made for himself in years. He found a spot against the wall near the end of the table — close enough to qualify as present, far enough to keep the door in his peripheral vision.

X set down his cards without looking up and hooked a chair out from under the table with his foot. “Sit down, hombre. You’re making everyone nervous standing there like a fire exit.”

Evander sat.

The card game was already in progress, the table surface half-covered in chips and a collection of drinks that skewed heavily toward sparkling water and coffee, which told him something about the house culture that he already knew from Walker. River handed him a glass without asking what he wanted — cold water, fizzing — and went back to his own cards.

The bunkhouse had the comfortable disorder of a shared space that nobody apologized for. Wires coiled on River’s windowsill. A guitar leaned against the far wall with a pick wedged under one string. Bear sat at the corner of the table with King’s enormous head planted on his thigh and played cards with his typical scowl firmly in place. Boone stood rather than sat, one shoulder against the wall behind the table, which Evander understood as a preference rather than impatience.

He ate. The food was good — considerably better than anything he’d had in the last week, which was not a high bar given what the last week had involved, but still. He held the plate in his lap and watched the card game and let the noise of the room settle around him without trying to reduce it.

Kavik threw himself at Evander’s leg, sniffed the plate, and was removed by X with the automatic correction of someone who had done this seven hundred times.

“He does that to everyone,” X said. “Don’t take it personally. Or do. He doesn’t care either way.”

“I know dogs,” Evander said.

“Kavik’s more of a general concept than a dog.” X looked at his cards. “River, you have a terrible poker face.”

“I’m not playing poker.”

“You have a terrible face in general, then.”

River pointed at him. “I am so close to folding this hand just to spite you.”

Boone said nothing. He never said anything during cards, which was how he consistently won.

Jonah refilled Evander’s water from across the table and settled back into his chair with the easy patience of someone who had nowhere else to be and no objection to that fact. He played cards loosely — a chip here, a fold there, never quite in contention, apparently content to exist in the middle of the action without needing to win it.

It was River who opened the subject. He did it the way he did everything uncomfortable: sideways, at speed, with a joke balanced in front of it like a shield.

“So.” River arranged his cards with great concentration. “I’ve been thinking. Eight years ago, you held Valor Ridge’s record for shortest residency. Two nights.” He glanced up. “You still hold it. Nobody’s come close.”

X looked between them.

“Quite a record,” Jonah said carefully.