The moment didn’t last.
Bare feet hit the hallway at a dead sprint.
Fiona didn’t knock. Didn’t slow. She caught the door frame with one hand, used it to swing herself through, and crossed the room in three strides—slamming into Finn hard enough to drive him back against the headboard with a crack that shook the wall.
“You idiot!” she shouted, and her voice broke on the last syllable.
Then she hugged him.
It was a clinging, desperate weight—not gentle. Her arms locked around his neck, her face pressed hard against his shoulder, her whole body curved into his as if to physically anchor him to this world.
“I thought you were dead,” she said into his shoulder, the words muffled and raw. “I thought—God, Finn, I thought I left you there. I thought I left you and you were gone and I’d never—I kept hearing you tell me to go and I went and I shouldn’t have—I should have—”
“Hey,” he said. One hand came up and cradled the back of her head, his fingers threading into her hair, holding her against him. “You did exactly what you should have done. You got on that boat. You got the girls out. You did the right thing, Fi. The only thing.”
“It didn’t feel right—” she started.
“It never does,” he said quietly. “But it kept you alive. It kept all of them alive. That’s what matters.”
Libby sat in the middle of it all—Lily still pressed against Finn’s side, her crying quieting into hiccupping breaths; Fiona clinging to his neck; the cat settled at the foot of the bed, licking his paw with serene indifference.
Not just survival instinct and military training, and the particular hardness that had calcified in him over years of not having anyone to lose.
Family.
Messy, loud, stubborn, fiercely loyal family.
The kind Libby had spent her whole life wanting and never quite finding.
Fiona finally pulled back, both hands coming up to grab Finn’s face between her palms, squeezing his cheeks slightly, forcing his eyes to hers.
“You’re real,” she said, half statement, half question, her voice still unsteady. “You’re actually here. This isn’t—I’m not dreaming this.”
“Still annoyingly alive,” he muttered through slightly squashed cheeks. “And you’re crushing my face.”
She let out a shaky laugh that turned.
“Don’t ever do that again,” she said, releasing his face but keeping her hands on his shoulders, gripping hard.
“No promises,” he said automatically, the words coming out with the reflexive ease of a man who’d made deflection into an art form.
She smacked his shoulder.
Hard.
The bad one.
His arm screamed with pain, and he winced, jaw clenching, breath hissing between his teeth—
“Okay—some promises,” he amended quickly, rolling the shoulder with a grimace. “Jesus, Fi. You pick the one with the hole in it.”
“Good,” she said fiercely. “Remember that next time you consider dying.”
The commotion in the hallway resolved into voices, and then Lock appeared in the doorway, Callan a step behind him.
“Well,” Lock said, leaning against the frame with his arms crossed. “We heard what sounded like a door being torn off its hinges, followed by screaming, crying, and a physical assault. Thought we’d come investigate.”
His eyes moved across the room, taking in the tableau: Lily tucked against Finn’s side, Fiona gripping his shoulders, Libby beside him, the cat presiding over it all from the center of the bed.
