Page 60 of Breaking His Exile

Evander couldn’t cover both fronts. He chose the front because the rifle outranged the pistol, because three men pressed the main approach, because if he turned his back on Hobbs he’d be dead before he completed the rotation. “Hold him!”

“I am!”

She was. He heard her shots, measured, spaced, not panicked. The pistol had a twelve-round magazine. She’d fired four, maybe five. The circling man would count her shots, wait for the click of an empty chamber, then rush.

Evander put another round through the front window, aiming at memory, at the space where the last muzzle flash had bloomed.

The cabin groaned around them. Bullets had found a load-bearing timber, and the roof settled with a sound like an old man easing into a chair. The walls that had kept out blizzards and bears and years of loneliness were coming apart around them.

Rainey’s pistol clicked empty.

He turned toward her, his ribs screaming. A man’s face appeared in the window—one he recognized from The Dead Marshall.

Hobbs, Rainey had called him.

Rainey hurled the empty pistol at the man’s face and followed it with her shoulder. His shotgun discharged into the ceiling. Sawdust filled the air like snow. She grabbed the shotgun’s barrel and twisted it sideways, her whole body weight behind the leverage. The stock cracked against the window frame. Hobbs’s head followed, hard enough to daze him, and Rainey yanked the shotgun from his hands and aimed it at his face.

Hobbs held up his hands and backed away from the window, but he was grinning as he did.

Evander had seen many things in combat. He had never seen a woman fight like that, with nothing, against a man with a shotgun, and win.

“Evander!” Her voice cut through the ringing in his ears. “We can’t stay here!”

She was right. The cabin was dying. Water sprayed from a ruptured line somewhere in the wall, soaking the floorboards, mixing with the gasoline from the generator to form a slick that caught the stove’s orange light. One spark and they’d burn alive.

His ax hung on the wall beside the stove, right where he’d left it after splitting firewood yesterday morning. Now he grabbed it and swung at the rear wall, where the logs were oldest, where rain and rot had softened the pine. The blade bit deep. He wrenched it free and swung again, wood splintering, the ax handle vibrating in his palms. Three swings, four, and gray dawn light showed through a gap wide enough for a body.

“Tilly! Out!” The dog shot through without hesitation. Rainey followed, ducking through the hole with the shotgun in hand, her shirt catching on a splinter, tearing free. Evander threw the pack out after her, then followed, backing through, rifle up, covering the front of the cabin where Hobbs and Creed and the kid still pressed their attack.

He whistled for Sable, two sharp notes.

She came. He saw her dark shape break from the tree line, her wild eyes finding his across the clearing. She was twenty yards out, fifteen, coming for him the way she always had, because she’d chosen him and that choice had never wavered⁠—

Gunfire from the tree line, automatic, undisciplined, the kid panicking or Hobbs ordering suppression. Sable veered, her haunches bunched, and bolted into the timber on the far side of the clearing. He saw her for one more heartbeat, a dark ghost between the firs, and then she was gone.

He stood in the ruined back wall with the ax in his hand and the rifle in the other and watched the place he’d built with his own hands finish dying. The front door splintered inward. Boots on the porch. He fired once through the gap, but didn’t wait to see if he hit anything. He grabbed Rainey’s arm and ran.

They ran downhill, through the timber behind the cabin, where the slope dropped steeply toward the creek. Tilly ranged ahead, black coat vanishing and reappearing between the trunks. Rainey moved well, better than he expected, her boots finding purchase on the slick needles, her hand gripping his when the grade threatened to take her feet out. She didn’t complain about her ribs. She didn’t ask where they were going. She just ran.

Behind them, the cabin’s roof finally gave way. It made a sound like a giant exhaling, and then the fire started—gasoline catching at last, the orange bloom lighting the forest, throwing their shadows long and strange across the ground ahead. They kept running until his lungs burned and his ribs felt like broken glass grinding together and Rainey’s grip on his hand had gone slippery with sweat.

They stopped in a hollow where two fallen logs made a natural barricade. Tilly circled back, tongue lolling, and pressed against Evander’s knee. He let himself sink to the ground, back against the moss-slick wood, and listened.

The fire crackled distant, up the slope. No pursuit yet. Hobbs would secure the cabin first, check for bodies, realize they’d escaped through the back. Then he’d send men down the hill.

It gave them a precious head start.

Evander took inventory. Rifle: seven rounds remaining, plus the partial magazine in his pocket. Rainey had the field knife, the empty pistol, and the shotgun. First aid kit, another box of ammo for his rifle, some water but no food. Rainey hadn’t finished packing the bag.

His ribs were definitely worse, the bandage on his temple hung loose, and the stab wound in his side throbbed in time with his heart.

Rainey sat beside him, her knees drawn up, her face pale in the early dawn light. She was shaking. He didn’t think she knew it.

“Your ribs?” he asked.

“Fine.” The word came out automatically, then she seemed to hear herself. “Not fine. But functional.”

“Your hands.”