Page 75 of Breaking His Exile

He stared at the door.

He had wanted everyone gone. Now they were, and the silence he’d been wanting all morning was suddenly suffocating.

Why hadn’t she come in?

Maybe she was sleeping. Maybe she was with Brandt, or River, working through eight years in a single afternoon.

All of it reasonable.

None of it did anything about the fact that he’d been tracking the hall for hours, waiting on a set of footsteps that hadn’t come.

Fuck it.

He pushed himself out of the chair.

Pain washed his vision white. He braced a hand against the wall and breathed until the room steadied.

Then he went to find her.

twenty

Tilly had not moved from the rug. That was the first thing Rainey registered — the dog’s warm weight against the side of the bed, her slow breathing, the way she lifted her head the moment Rainey stirred. The room came back in pieces. The quilt. The window throwing pale Montana morning across the floor. Somewhere outside, men’s voices, a door, a horse moving in a paddock. She lay still and let it settle over her: she was at Valor Ridge. She was alive. Evander was somewhere in this building, and she had fallen asleep before she could go to him.

She was still wearing one boot.

She got the other one off before the knock came.

Nessie arrived first, carrying coffee in a mug that said World’s Okayest Baker in chipped blue letters and a stack of folded clothes draped over one arm. She set both on the dresser without ceremony, took one look at Rainey’s face, and said, “Shower first. Questions whenever you’re ready, or never. Whichever.”

She left the coffee and went.

Rainey sat with it for a minute, both hands around the mug. The coffee was extraordinary — dark and clean, nothing like the camp-brewed stuff she’d been living on for a week — and she stared at the wall and drank it slowly and let herself have this one quiet thing before the morning got complicated.

It got complicated fast.

Maggie arrived next with a paper bag that smelled of cinnamon and a guitar case she set carefully in the corner like she already knew it was sacred ground. Rainey stared at the case. She recognized it. Her old Taylor, the one she’d left in the trunk of her car before any of this started, before the Dead Marshall, before Evander.

“Someone grabbed it from your car after they found it parked at the trailhead,” Maggie said. “Figured you’d want it close.”

“Thank you.” Rainey touched the case’s worn handle. She didn’t open it.

Not yet. There was too much packed into that guitar right now and she couldn’t afford to open it the way she couldn’t afford to open a pressure vessel — it would all come out at once and she wasn’t ready.

She left it in the corner and stepped into the shower.

By the time she came out, the room had acquired two more women and a second cup of coffee. Naomi Lefthand sat in the chair by the window reading something on her phone, unhurried, as if she’d simply decided this was where she’d spend her morning. Mariah Duval stood at the dresser sorting through what appeared to be a curated stack of clothing, her dark red hair swept into a neat twist, her posture that of a woman who did everything at the same impeccable standard.

“These should fit,” Mariah said without turning around. “The jeans are a half size up because I assumed you’d want room to breathe after a week on a mountain.”

Rainey looked at the clothes. Soft flannel shirt, dark jeans, a simple gray pullover. All clean. All real, not borrowed from a dead man’s closet, and the normality of it was almost too much.

“Thank you,” she said. Her voice came out rough.

Mariah glanced over her shoulder. Whatever she saw in Rainey’s face made her turn fully around, and she held Rainey’s gaze just long enough to make the acknowledgment land. Then she went back to the dresser. “There are toiletries in the bathroom. Greta brought extras.”

As if on cue, Greta appeared in the doorway with her arms full — a toiletry bag, a pair of clean socks, and a dog biscuit she held out to Tilly with the confidence of a woman who understood dogs better than most people. Tilly took it with a delicacy that seemed entirely out of character.

“Didn’t want to show up empty-handed,” Greta said.