Five seconds. Ten.
Nothing from the other side.
He straightened. “The bolt should hold for now,” he said, “but these doors are old, and the hinges are rusted through. If enough of them pile against it from outside, the hardware will fail before the metal does.”
He turned and spotted the small basement window near the ceiling—a narrow rectangle of filthy glass letting in a sliver of gray daylight from the alley above.
“That window,” he observed.
“It’s too small for a person to fit through,” I said.
“You’d be surprised what gets through a small opening when it doesn’t care about breaking its own bones.”
The image that sentence conjured sent my stomach plummeting.
He scanned the basement one final time and headed for the stairs.
“Here’s where we stand,” he said, climbing. I followed close behind. “The front door is solid—gate, deadbolt, the couch. That holds.” He emerged into the hallway without breaking stride. “The back kitchen door is the problem. Hollow core, no reinforcement—one good hit and it splinters. That gets barricaded first. The basement bulkhead is secondary—the bolt buys time, but the hinges will fail. The seven ungrated windows are our biggest exposure. Ground floor and basement first. The second floor is less urgent, but I’m not ruling it out.”
He stopped in the center of the living room and turned to face the three of us. Fiona stood in the kitchen doorway, arms crossed. Lily was still on the stairs, knees to her chest. A man I’d met four minutes ago had just assessed my house more thoroughly than I had in fifteen years of owning it.
“Do you have tools?” he asked. “Hammer, nails, screws—anything to work with?”
“Old toolbox in the basement, behind the water heater. And some scrap lumber left over from when I redid the pantry shelving last year.”
“How much lumber?”
“Enough for two windows. Maybe three.”
He nodded, already recalculating.
“Furniture—bookshelves, dressers. Are the interior doors solid wood?”
“A bookshelf in the spare bedroom. An old dresser in the basement I’ve been meaning to get rid of. And all the interior doors are original to the house—solid oak.”
Something shifted in his expression. Not relief, exactly, but the first flicker of tactical optimism I’d seen since he’d come through the front door.
“We pull a few of those oak doors off their hinges, layer them against the hollow-core back door, brace them with lumber, and nail them into the frame. Between that and the dresser blocking the base, it won’t be elegant, but it’ll hold.” He paused. “We’ll probably make it through the night.”
Probably.
The word hung in the air between us.
The matter-of-fact way he said “tonight”—not this week, not until help arrives, just tonight—sent a chill through my chest. Not because it sounded dramatic, but because it didn’t. He’d already moved past the shock, grief, and disbelief the rest of us still lived inside, landing somewhere colder and more functional. This man had done this before. Not this, exactly, but something like it.
Military. It had to be.
Fiona had mentioned once, casually over coffee months ago, that her oldest brother had served in the Navy and had longsince left it behind. But the man standing in my living room with dried blood on his sleeve and pale eyes still running numbers didn’t carry himself like someone who’d left anything behind, more like someone who’d simply been waiting for the world to catch up to what he’d always known it was capable of.
Finn looked at each of us in turn.
“We board up the back door and the ground-floor windows first, then the basement, then the second floor if we have materials left. We work fast and we work quietly—hammering carries and noise draws them, so we do it in one sustained push and then we stop. Nobody makes sound longer than they absolutely have to.”
He paused.
“Questions?”
Lily raised her hand from the staircase, straight up, deliberate, like she sat in the back row of fifth-period history rather than in the middle of what the morning had become.
