Another caregiver.
No official charges. No proof.
Just…Finn. A ghost. Slipping through the cracks.
My fingers dig into the edges of the folder. It’s not possible.
Not Finn.
I hear his voice in my head, soft, teasing, dark.What’s wrong, Willow? Alphas playing a little too rough?
I remember his lips on my skin. The way he touched me as though I was his. I remember his hands on my throat. But he’d never hurt me.
Right?
“You see him now, don’t you?” Hunter murmurs, voice cutting through my spiraling thoughts.
I snap my head up, glaring. “I do. He’s not dangerous to me.”
Hunter leans in, his face inches from mine. “You see what he wants you to see.”
The words slam into my chest.
No.
No, that’s not?—
Finn is?—
He—
The air shifts.
And suddenly, I know. I know what Hunter is doing. He wants to scare me. He wants me to doubt. All it fucking does is make my heart ache.
Finn didn’t ask to be born and be treated as if he was a mistake. He didn’t ask to be locked away, to be ignored and erased. Of course he learned how to make people see what he wanted them to see. That’s how he survived.
And I’m supposed to hate him for it? No.
I close the folder. Hunter watches me, waiting. Waiting for me to get it. To wake up. To run from Finn the way they want me to. But instead—I look up. And I meet Hunter’s gaze head-on.
“You just did the opposite of what you were trying to do.”
Hunter’s jaw tightens. Carson mutters a fuck under his breath. Graham exhales noisily, rubbing his temples. I’m sure he knew this would happen. Because it wasn’t enough to make me afraid. It just made me angry.
Angry at the world that made Finn who he is.
Angry at the people who let him slip through the cracks and not protect the boy he was.
Angry that now, after all these years of being invisible, people finally want to act—only because they don’t like that he’s latched onto me.
I push the folder away and stand.
“I’m going to my room.”
They don’t stop me.
But as I walk down the hall, I feel their eyes on me. And through the window across the street? I know he’s watching too. And no matter how much they try to protect me from him—Finn Reed is already under my skin.
