Page 37 of Finding His Redemption

And he didn’t know why Shane always answered. If the roles were reversed, he wouldn’t be so forgiving.

Sleep wasn’t coming back tonight. It never did after the nightmare.

He swung his legs over the side of the bed, bare feet hitting the cold linoleum floor. The shock of it helped clear his head some, anchored him to the present instead of that blood-soaked mission nearly fifteen years gone.

In prison, when the nightmares got bad, he’d had the puppies. They’d curl up against him on the narrow cot, warmbodies pressed against his ribs, their steady breathing eventually syncing with his until his heart rate dropped back to something resembling normal.

The dogs never asked questions. Never flinched when he woke up screaming. Never looked at him like he was broken beyond repair.

He dressed, pulling on his boots without bothering to lace them, then grabbed his pillow and blanket and slipped out of the bunkhouse, careful not to wake the other residents. The Montana night air bit through his t-shirt, but the cold felt good against his sweat-dampened skin. Real. Present. Not the suffocating heat of that compound in Afghanistan.

The barn sat maybe fifty yards from the main house, a weathered structure that Walker had converted into kennels for the rescue dogs. Jax’s boots crunched on gravel as he made his way across the yard, guided by the pale glow of a security light mounted on the barn’s corner.

The blue merle shepherd was awake, her mismatched eyes catching the moonlight that filtered through the barn’s high windows. She was back in her corner, body coiled tight as a spring, watching his approach.

“Hey, girl,” he said softly and opened the kennel door, stepping inside. “Can’t sleep either?”

Echo’s ears twitched forward for a split second before flattening back against her skull.

He stretched out on his side, pillow tucked under his head, blanket pulled up to his shoulder. The concrete was brutal against his hip, but he’d slept on worse.

“Just need some company tonight,” he murmured.

Echo’s head tilted slightly, studying him with those impossible eyes. In the dim light, her scars were barely visible. The notched ear, the slight favor of her left hind leg, the scabbymuzzle and jutting hipbones, the places where her coat grew in patches.

What she’d endured in her short life, Jax could only guess. The miracle wasn’t that she’d survived—it was that she hadn’t completely shut down, hadn’t given up on the possibility that the world might still hold something good for her.

“I get it,” Jax whispered. “Trust doesn’t come easy. You don’t have to come near me. Just knowing you’re there is enough.”

He kept his body still, his breathing even. Echo watched him, her chest rising and falling in rapid bursts. The barn creaked around them, the wind picking up outside. Somewhere in the distance, an owl called into the night.

Jax let his eyes drift closed, not sleeping, just resting.

Minutes stretched into an hour. His hip ached, his shoulder screamed, and the concrete leached the warmth from his body, but he didn’t move. Patience had been the first lesson of his military career, and the most valuable one in his recovery.

A soft shuffling sound made him open his eyes.

Echo had crept forward, still hugging the wall of her kennel, but closer than she’d ever come voluntarily. She lay with her belly pressed to the ground, head resting on her front paws, watching him.

“Hey there,” he breathed, careful not to move.

Her tail didn’t wag. He didn’t expect it to. But she didn’t retreat either, just maintained her vigil from this new, closer position.

It wasn’t much. But it was something. A fraction of an inch in the right direction.

For tonight, that would have to be enough.

Dawn found him still there, stiff and cold, a crick in his neck that would take days to work out. But Echo had stayed, watching over him through the night.

“Thorne!” Walker’s voice echoed off the concrete walls of the kennel, startling Echo back to her corner. The ranch owner stood silhouetted in the doorway, his massive frame blocking most of the early morning light. “The hell are you doing?”

Jax pushed himself to a sitting position, wincing as his joints protested. “Couldn’t sleep.”

Walker strode down the aisle between the kennels. The other dogs whined and barked in greeting, but Echo remained silent, a shadow in her corner.

“So you decided to torture yourself on my concrete floor? We’ve got perfectly good beds in the bunkhouse.” He stopped a few feet away, arms crossed over his chest, eyes narrowed as he studied the dog. “She let you get close.”

It wasn’t a question, but Jax nodded anyway. “For a little while.”