Page 90 of Breaking His Exile

“Good,” River said. “Maybe he’ll lay off me for a while. Or we can finally cook the homicidal chicken for Sunday dinner.”

“No,” Boone and Jonah said simultaneously.

Rainey watched the blood track down Evander’s arm. Watched him not wipe it away. Watched the way he held Mayhem at a careful distance, not squeezing, not hurting him, just containing the fury with the same steady patience he brought to everything that couldn’t be reasoned with.

It wasn’t fearlessness. She knew that now. It was the opposite. It was a man who had decided, somewhere along the way, that his body was the least valuable thing he owned. That pain was currency he was expected to spend. That being hurt was the natural state of a person who had gotten other people killed and survived anyway.

The cut wasn’t deep. It would stop bleeding on its own. He would not mention it. He would not clean it. He would carry it the way he carried everything — quietly, alone, as evidence.

She stood up from the porch step.

River had recovered enough to approach Evander with caution, eyeing Mayhem warily. “I’ll take him. He calms down if you scratch under his chin. Don’t ask me why. I don’t make the rules.”

Evander handed Mayhem over.

River tucked the rooster under one arm, scratched briefly behind the comb, and Mayhem’s posture shifted from homicidal to merely disgruntled.

“Crisis averted,” River announced to the yard. “Return to your regularly scheduled— ow. Jesus. Okay, still working on it.”

He carried Mayhem toward the coop, talking to him in a low, reasoning tone that the rooster appeared to find entirely unconvincing.

The yard dispersed. X went back to whatever he’d been filming. Jonah resumed his hay run. Boone watched Evander for a long moment, then turned and walked toward the main house without comment.

Evander stood in the grass with the cut on his arm and the morning light on his face and nothing in his expression that suggested he intended to do anything about either.

Rainey crossed the yard to him. She didn’t reach for his arm. She stopped beside him and said, “The infirmary has bandages.”

He looked at the cut. “It’s fine.”

“It’s bleeding on your shirt.”

“It’ll stop.”

She wanted to argue. She wanted to tell him that wounds deserved attention whether he thought they did or not, that his body was not a ledger where pain balanced some invisible account. She wanted to say all of it and she didn’t, because the set of his jaw told her he’d heard it before — from Greta, probably, from Bear, from whoever had tried to reach him in eight years of isolation — and he had answers for all of it that she wasn’t equipped to dismantle today.

So she said, “Your call,” and turned back toward the porch.

She’d made it three steps when River’s voice reached her from the direction of the chicken coop.

“Rain. You got a minute?”

He stood at the edge of the yard with his hands in his pockets and none of the performative energy he’d brought to the rooster chase. Just her brother, looking at her across twenty feet of trampled grass, and the question in his voice was the same one he’d been carrying since she walked through the gate.

She nodded.

He crossed to the porch and sat on the step below hers, mirroring the spot Evander had occupied minutes earlier. The morning had warmed. A breeze moved through the pines along the fence line, and somewhere past the barn, Kavik barked once and fell silent.

River picked at a splinter on the porch step. “I’ve been trying to figure out how to say this since you got here. Which is stupid, because it’s not complicated. I just—” He stopped. Started again. “I’m sorry. For leaving. I should never have left you there.”

She looked at his profile. The same jawline as hers, the same stubborn set to his mouth when he was working through something hard. Eight years of River Beckett living in her head as the brother who ran, and now he was sitting three feet away picking at a splinter, and his voice had a ragged edge.

“You convinced yourself it was the right thing,” she said.

He nodded. “Yeah. I did. I told myself if I wasn’t there, he wouldn’t have as much to rage about. That maybe without me pushing back, without me there taking up space and making noise, he’d— I don’t know. Be less of what he was.” His throat worked. “It was bullshit. I know that now. But I believed it hard enough to pack a bag and walk out the door and not look back because looking back would’ve meant admitting I was leaving you behind.”

Rainey watched a sparrow land on the fence post, hop twice, fly off. The morning held still around them.

“He didn’t get less violent, River.” She kept her voice even. “Once you were gone, it had nowhere to go but me.”