My throat tightens. “Itisbad.”
“I know,” he says quietly.
He exhales, long and rough, the sound of someone letting the mask slip without meaning to.
“I’m scared,” he admits.
The word hits me harder than I expect.
“You?” I ask softly.
He huffs a humorless laugh. “Yeah. Me. Surprise.”
The flirt is gone now. The man in front of me looks different without it. Still handsome. Still sharp. But raw in a way I haven’t seen before.
“I joke because it’s easier than sitting with this,” he says, gesturing vaguely at the situation. “Because if I stop talking, I have to think about the fact that someone targeted you. And it might be simply because you metme.”
My stomach twists.
“And that means,” he continues, “whatever mess we thought we left behind didn’t actually stay behind.”
Zane’s silence beside me is heavy. Agreement without words.
“I don’t scare easy,” Finn says, looking at me again. “But I don’t like this. I don’t like that you were alone. I don’t like that someone thought they could touch your life and get away with it.”
I swallow hard.
“You’re not stupid,” I say.
He blinks. “Never said I was.”
“You’re not shallow either. But I do have to ask… what did you leave behind? What might be following you here?”
Finn goes still.
Not the playful freeze from earlier. Not theoh shit, I messed uppause.
This is different. This is him deciding how much truth I can handle.
Zane shifts beside me, just enough that I feel the quiet gravity of him there. A wall at my back if this goes sideways.
Finn drags a hand down his face. His jacket rides up slightly, and I catch a glimpse of ink along his wrist.
I don’t know why my brain clocks that.
“Some people,” he says slowly, “don’t take kindly to being left.”
“That’s not an answer.”
He nods. “Fair.”
He leans his hip against the bar, eyes dropping to the scarred wood.
“We were part of something that didn’t end clean,” he says. “When you’re in that kind of world, leaving isn’t neutral. It’s a statement.”
My gaze flicks to Zane without meaning to.
His arms are crossed now. Ink disappears beneath his sleeves, but I’ve seen enough of it already to know it’s not accidental. Tools. Engines. Symbols that mean something to the people who recognize them.
