"I don't regret leaving. But sometimes I wonder if there's a version where we kept our family and built this one too."
I don't have an answer for that. Nobody does. So I stay close and let the bond carry what words can't. Steadiness. Presence. The assurance that I'm not going anywhere.
He squeezes my fingers until our knuckles press together.
Finn's phone rings before we make it back to his bike. He answers it and then hands it to me.
Colt's voice, tight and clipped: "Jess. Jax is spiking a fever. Hundred and two and climbing."
"We're on our way."
I'm moving before the calls ends. Finn keeps pace beside me, the clan argument shelved in the space between one heartbeat and the next. He swings onto his bike and I climb on behind him, arms locked around his waist, the engine drowning out everything except the wind and my own pulse. Fifteen minutes back to the clinic. I hit the door at a jog.
Jax lies on his cot in the trauma bay, flushed and sweating, the bandages on his left side dark with fresh seepage. His vitals confirm what Colt reported—temp at 102.4 and rising, heart rate elevated, blood pressure dropping. The shifter healing that stitched him together has stalled. His body is fighting an infection the accelerated healing missed.
"Hey, nurse." Jax's grin surfaces, thin and glassy. "Miss me already?"
"Shut up and let me work." I pull on gloves, peel back the dressing, and find what I expected. The deepest laceration along his ribcage, the one that almost nicked his lung, is inflamed andweeping. Debris from the collapsed building, ground in too deep for the initial debridement to catch.
I irrigate the wound, extract two slivers of wood and a chip of concrete the size of my thumbnail, and repack the site with the last of the clinic's antibiotic gauze. The supplies I'd rationed through the hurricane are running thin—two bags of saline left, half a bottle of broad-spectrum antibiotics, and the generator fuel gauge hovering above empty.
"You're going to feel worse before you feel better," I tell him. "The infection has to burn out. Your healing will kick back in once the source is clean."
"Comforting bedside manner, Doc."
"I'm not a doctor. And you're not dying on my watch, so lie still."
Finn leans in the doorway, watching me work with an expression I'm learning to read through the bond—pride tangled with worry, the residual ache from the fire pit layered underneath. He doesn't interrupt. He doesn't hover. He stands where I can see him and lets me do my job.
By the time Jax's temperature stabilizes at 101 and his color shifts from gray back toward pink, the afternoon light has gone gold through the plywood gaps.
My apartment smells like mold.
The roof leaked in two places during the storm, and the bedroom ceiling sagged and gave way sometime in the night, dumping insulation and rainwater across everything I own. My mattress sits in a puddle. Half my clothes hang soaked in the closet. The books on my nightstand bloat with water, their pages curling.
Finn stands in the doorway and takes in the damage with one sweep.
"Well, your landlord's going to love this." He nudges a sodden pillow with his boot. "Move in with me."
No preamble, no charm, no lead-up. His eyes still carry the red edges from the fight with Knox. His mother's necklace hangs around his neck now. He looks wrecked and certain at the same time.
"Finn—"
"I'm done wasting time." He steps into the apartment and his boots splash in the water pooled across my bedroom floor. "Move in with me. Please, Kitten."
I look at what's left of my careful, contained, independent life. Soaked and sagging and falling apart at the seams.
"Yes, okay, if you really want me to."
His apartment sits above the garage. One bedroom. A kitchenette where tools and coffee mugs compete for counter space. The walls hold nothing except a single framed painting: two orc boys, one tall and serious, one grinning wide enough to show a pair of tusks still growing in, their mother standing behind them with a hand on each shoulder. The same face as the necklace. The same warmth.
I carry my salvageable box of belongings through the door and set it on the kitchen counter. Photos. My combat medic patch. The copy of Gray's Anatomy I've carried through four deployments and nine moves.
The fridge holds four bottles of beer, a jar of hot sauce with a cracked lid, and a single lime gone soft and brown. No food. No leftovers. Not even condiment packets.
"Finn."
"Yeah?"
