"Copy, Rescue Seven. Nightfall Medical standing by. Bring them in."
The trauma bay doors bang open under my shoulder before the radio clicks off. Gloves ready, tray prepped, IV stand positioned, the defibrillator with the cracked housing powered up and waiting. Finn appears beside me without being told.
"What do you need?"
"Backboard from the supply closet. C-collar, top shelf, blue package. Grab every clean towel you can find." I snap the overhead surgical light on, running off the generator, and it floods the table in white. "And roll the crash cart to the foot of the bed."
He moves. No questions, no hesitation, no jokes. The crash cart rolls into position before I finish arranging the instrument tray.
The first stretcher comes through the door ten minutes later, two rescuers hauling a man in his fifties strapped to the backboard—good, we don't need to use ours. His head is immobilized but blood seeps from a laceration across his scalp, pooling in the collar. The second stretcher follows close behind—a woman, early thirties, screaming, her left forearm bent at an angle that makes Finn go pale. The walking wounded trails them in, a teenager pressing a blood-soaked towel against his own arm, eyes glassy with shock.
Triage kicks in like a second heartbeat, and I'm moving before my brain catches up.
The spinal takes priority. I check the collar Finn fitted, verify responsiveness, run through the neuro assessment with commands barked over my shoulder while Finn holds the man's head steady on the backboard. He doesn't waver. His grip stays firm, absorbing every shift as the wind slams the building and the lights flicker and the man on the table groans through gritted teeth.
"Pressure's dropping," I tell Finn, reading the monitor. "Hold him. Don't let him turn his neck."
"I've got him."
His voice carries the same steady weight I heard when he told Knox he'd stay with me. I shove the break room out of my head and throw away the key because I can't think about it now, not with blood on my gloves and a man's spine on the line.
The woman with the broken arm screams again. I set the bone, splint it, push morphine from the kit, talk her through the breathing until her sobs thin to hiccups. The walking wounded, a teenager with glass cuts across his arms and a stunned expression, sits in the corner and watches me work with wideeyes. I clean his cuts, bandage them, press a bottle of water and a blanket into his lap.
Two hours. Fluid bags swapped, vitals charted, the spinal patient stable enough that I allow myself a breath. Through all of it, Finn anticipates what I need. He passes the gauze before I reach for it. Holds the IV bag at the right height without being asked. Moves a chair into position for the screaming woman before I turn to look for one.
Every time. Without a word.
Between charting the spinal patient's vitals, I catch him against the wall, arms crossed, his focus locked on me. The mask he wears for everyone else is gone. The grin, the swagger, the easy deflection. The expression underneath is open and unguarded and aimed at me with an intensity that makes my pen skip across the chart.
I don't know what to do with that look.
The patients sleep. The teenager curls up on a cot in the waiting area, the woman with the splinted arm dozes in a recliner with an ice pack propped on her forearm, and the spinal patient's vitals hold steady enough that I stop checking every five minutes. He needs a CT and an MRI and a neurosurgeon, none of which I can give him in a clinic running on generator power. But I can keep him alive and stable until the medevac routes open back up.
Finn brings me a bottle of water from the break room. Our fingers brush on the plastic, I jerk away too fast, he notices, and neither of us says anything.
The nurse's station holds my weight when I lean against it, and I drink half the bottle in one long pull. My scrubs have blood on the hem. My shoulders ache from hunching over thetable. The adrenaline drains out and leaves behind a bone-deep exhaustionand the echo of his voice sayingJess, I—before the radio cut him off.
I know what he was going to say. I know it the way I know my own pulse, and that terrifies me more than anything the hurricane can throw at this building.
We're in sync. Not the fumbling teamwork of two people figuring it out as they go—the real thing, the kind I had with my unit, where you stop needing words because the other person is already there. I set the water bottle down because my hands shake again and I don't want him to see how much he is affecting me.
I'm terrified of what that means. I'm more terrified that he would have meant it.
Chapter 4
Finn
The spinal patient's monitor beeps at two-second intervals, and I count them the way I count engine revolutions. Steady, mechanical, a rhythm I can anchor to while the clinic tries to shake itself apart around us.
I lean my forehead against the corridor wall and let Jess's scent wash over me, threading through the antiseptic and the copper tang of other people's injuries. Months of catching it across crowded rooms, losing track of conversations, lying awake at two in the morning with her name lodged in my chest.
Something cracked open between us in the break room. I told her I went home alone and thought about her instead, and she didn't run. She saiddon't do this to me,and her voice cracked on the word, and I started to say I love you when the radio screamed and she was gone. Back behind the walls, back in medic mode, back to pretending I'm furniture. But her voice cracked. You don't crack over something you don't feel. I'm clinging to that with both fists.
A gust slams the clinic hard enough to rattle the plywood we bolted over every ground-floor window, and the walls groanunder the pressure. Category 4. A storm that rips houses off foundations and tosses fishing boats into parking lots, and I'm standing in a structure held together with screws and prayers while the woman I love refuses to leave.
I push off and check the barricades again. Front door, braced with a filing cabinet and a stack of supply crates. Side entrance, locked and bolted, a plywood sheet screwed across the frame. Back hallway, the window I boarded over holds, but the caulk between the plywood and the frame leaks a thin stream of rainwater across the linoleum. I grab towels from the supply closet and shove them against the base.
In the trauma bay, Jess adjusts the spinal patient's IV drip. The woman with the broken arm sleeps in the recliner, her splint propped on a pillow. The teenager dozed off an hour ago, curled under a blanket in the waiting area, his bandaged arms tucked against his chest.
