"Do you just not eat?"
He grins for the first time since the fire pit, and the sight of it cracks loose a knot in my chest I didn't know I'd been carrying. "I eat at Betty's."
"Every meal?"
"She likes feeding me. I like eating. It's a system. Sarah also feeds me."
His bathroom has one towel. One. I hold it up and he shrugs like he's never considered needing more than one towel in his life. The medicine cabinet contains a razor, a toothbrush, and a bottle of motor oil that has no business being in a bathroom.
"The motor oil?"
"The garage is right downstairs. It migrates."
I close the cabinet and add "towels, groceries, and boundaries between mechanical fluids and personal hygiene" to a mental list that's growing by the minute. This place really needs a feminine touch.
Finn watches me prop the photo of my unit against the wall beside his painting. Watches me stack my books on his empty shelf, hang my jacket next to his cut on the hook by the door.
Wonder pours through the bond, raw and disbelieving, like a man staring at a life he sketched in his head a hundred times and never expected to touch.
I lean against his side and rest my head on his arm.
We stand in the quiet of our apartment and look at the wall where his past and mine hang side by side.
Chapter 10
Finn
I wake up with a mouthful of Jess's hair and her cold feet press against my calves, both of them, shoved between my legs like I'm a heating pad she ordered off the internet. Her elbow digs into my ribs and her breathing rattles with the faint whistle of someone who sleeps with her mouth open and will deny it under oath.
Best morning of my life.
Seventh best morning, technically. Every morning since she moved in has ranked higher than the one before, and the bar keeps climbing. I lie here with her hair in my mouth, her frozen toes against my skin, the bond humming between us low and warm like an engine idling, and I think about what's different about the apartment.
Her coffee mug next to mine on the counter. Hers readsI survived residency and all I got was this mug. Medical textbooks line up on the shelf I cleared, alphabetized, because of course they are. The woman organized a triage bay during a hurricane and arranges her books by author's last name. Herjacket on the hook next to my cut. Boots by the door, laces tucked in.
Her scent woven through everything. The sheets, the couch cushions, the towels in the bathroom. My apartment smells like us now, not me alone, and the orc in my blood hums at the difference. Engine grease and loneliness used to fill this place. Now it's gunpowder and vanilla and the warm copper trace of the claiming bond running through both of us.
She rolls over and her knee drives into my thigh. Through the bond, contentment radiates steady and deep, the frequency of a woman sleeping harder than she has in years. No flinching tonight. No desert dreams. No sharp fear cutting through the dark at two in the morning.
I bury my face in her hair and breathe her in.
The necklace sits in the drawer beside our bed. Mom's twin peaks pendant.I think about it every morning. Think about the woman who wore it, the one in the painting on our wall, her face soft in a way I've half-forgotten and half-invented over the years.
The anger from last week still burns, but duller now. Low embers instead of open flame.Knox threw the war axe and armor into the fire pit without a word, he let me keep the jewelry—Mom's things—but the look on his face when I reached for them told me he'd considered burning those too.My brother builds walls so fast he sometimes bricks himself in. Always has.
I need to talk to him. Not want to. Need to.
Jess shifts against me, mumbles a word that might be "coffee" or "don't," and burrows deeper into the pillow. I ease out from under her, tuck the blanket around her shoulders, and pull on jeans and a flannel.
Morning light cuts through the kitchen window and catches the painting above the couch.
I take the necklace from the drawer and slide it into my pocket.
The garage smells the way it always does—brake fluid and metal shavings.
Knox lies under a Chevy Silverado, his boots sticking out from beneath the chassis, a ratchet clicking in a rhythm I've heard since I first picked up a wrench. The bay doors stand open to let the September air through. Sawdust and salt breeze roll across the concrete.Garrett runs a chainsaw through a downed oak at the far end of the lot, the trunk splitting clean each time he leans his weight into the cut. The rest of the compound holds quiet, most of the brothers still running cleanup crews through the neighborhoods the hurricane hit hardest.
I grab a stool and sit without speaking.
