Chapter 8
Finn
For the first time in thirty-eight years, my head shuts up.
Jess sleeps against my chest, her cheek pressed to the spot above my heart, one leg hooked over mine, her arm draped across my torso like she's pinning me down in case I get ideas about leaving.The cot dips under our combined weight, the canvas stretched thin, and I don't care.I'd sleep on broken glass right now and call it the best night of my life.
Her heartbeat lives inside mine.
Not a metaphor, not a feeling, not something I'm imagining because I want it too much. Her pulse threads beneath my own, a second rhythm running half a beat behind. Knox told me about this. Sat across from me in the garage months ago with grease on his hands and Sarah's heartbeat in his chest and tried to explain what a claiming bond feels like from the inside.
He used words likepermanentandanchoredandshe's part of me now, and I nodded and said all the right things and understood none of it.
I understand now.
She dreams. I feel it, not images, not sound, but flickers of emotion rolling through the bond in uneven waves. Safety first, the kind that comes from unconscious trust. Then a contentment so pure it catches in my throat, I tighten my arm around her shoulders and breathe through it because nobody has ever felt safe enough with me to sleep like this.
Not once. Not in thirty-eight years.
The storm faded an hour ago, the wind dropping from a scream to a groan to something closer to heavy breathing. Rain still hits the windows in scattered bursts, but the structural shaking stopped, and the generator caught and finally stayed on. The emergency lights cast the break room in dim amber that catches the edge of her jaw, the curve of her ear, the claiming mark on her neck.
I press my mouth against it. The skin runs hot, swollen at the edges where the bite broke through, the center darker where the punctures sank deepest. Already scarring over, raised ridges mapping the shape of my jaw, a permanent record of the moment she grabbed the back of my neck and saidclaim meand I stopped being a man with an ache in his bones and became a man with a mate in his arms.
She shifts in her sleep. Her fingers curl tighter, bunching the fabric against my chest, and the edge of her dream changes, still settled, still safe, but with something warmer underneath, an awareness of me even in unconsciousness. She knows I'm here. Her body knows it, her blood knows it, and the feral thing behind my ribs that spent eight months clawing at the cage of my self-control drops onto its haunches and goes quiet.
Mine. She's mine, and I'm hers, and the wordpermanentdoesn't make my skin itch the way it used to. Itfits. Like a socket wrench clicking onto the right bolt after years of reaching for the wrong size.
The ceiling stares back at me while my mind races, but different from the usual churn, not the spiral ofyou're not enough, you'll never be enough, Knox would've done this better.The thoughts that kept me awake at two in the morning rebuilding engines I'd already fixed because my hands needed work and my brain wouldn't stop tallying the ways I fell short.
Instead, my mind builds.
I'm going to marry this woman. The certainty sits in my gut like a stone I swallowed, smooth, heavy and immovable. Not because Knox married Sarah and I'm following the pattern, not because the club expects it, not because claiming bonds lead to weddings the way rivers lead to the sea. Because I want her name attached to mine. Because I want to stand in front of my brothers and saythis one chose meand mean it with every cell in my body.
I think about the apartment above the garage. My place. One bedroom, a kitchenette that doubles as a workbench, a bathroom where the hot water runs out after ten minutes. Bare walls except for the small painting tacked above the couch—me and Knox as kids, maybe six and ten, our mother standing behind us with her hands on our shoulders. I grabbed it when I left the Bloodstone Mountains. Rolled it up, shoved it in my jacket, carried it across two state lines, and hung it on the first wall that belonged to me.
I want her in my apartment. Her scrubs thrown over the back of a chair. Her medical textbooks stacked on the counter because she reads them in the morning with her coffee, not because she has to, because she can't stop learning. Her shampoo in the shower. Her boots by the door.
Her heartbeat skips beneath mine. A small flutter, the rhythm catching for half a second before it rights itself, and through the bond her dream shifts, the ease thinning, cooling at the edges, a thread of tension pulling taut.
A shutter slams.
Somewhere down the hallway, a piece of plywood works loose from its frame and catches the wind, cracking against the exterior wall with a sound like a rifle shot.
Jess flinches.
Her whole body jerks, a sharp, involuntary contraction that drives her elbow into my ribs and her face into my neck. Through the bond, the spike hits like a fist to the solar plexus. Fear. Not startled-by-a-loud-noise fear. Old fear, the kind that tastes like dust and burning metal and the silence that follows an explosion, the one where your ears ring and the world goes white and you don't know yet if you're alive or dead.
I tighten my arms around her. Pull her closer until her head tucks under my chin and my body wraps around hers, broad enough to block everything, the sound, the dark, whatever ghost found her sleeping.
Knox made this sound once, when Sarah woke screaming the first week after Peter attacked the clubhouse. I heard the rumble through the wall, felt it in my bones from two rooms away. I didn't understand it then.
I push through the bond. Not words, because it doesn't carry language, but feeling: safety, presence, the frequency ofI'm here and nothing will touch you while I'm breathing.
Her breathing stutters. Hitches and then evens out.
The fear recedes. I sense it pulling back into whatever recess it lives in, coiling down, banking itself for the next time a loud noise catches her. No claiming bite erases what the desert burned into her. But tonight, in this room, on this cot, she doesn't have to fight it alone.
She reaches for me without waking. Her fist curls into the fabric over my heart and holds on, knuckles pressing against bone, her face burrowing deeper into my neck.
