Chapter 34
Saoirse
By the time I gave my final signature, my hand was shaking from more than fatigue.
The interview room smelled like old coffee and institutional floor polish, and my brain felt scrubbed raw.
Across the table, Isla leaned forward, murmuring something too soft for me to catch.
Her statement had taken hours. Mine nearly as long.
Not because the detectives didn’t believe us, but because they wanted every detail.
Every name. Every timeline. And we gave them everything.
The lead officer, MacLeish, was a tall, sharp-featured man with a no-nonsense voice and a surprising underlying gentleness. He flipped his notebook closed and gave us a look I couldn’t quite name. Respect, maybe. Or sympathy he wasn’t ready to voice.
“You’ve both done incredibly well. This is going to be a hell of a case. I willnae lie. There’s a long road ahead. But what you’ve given us? It matters.”
Beside me, Isla nodded stiffly. Her knuckles were white where she clutched the edge of the table. I didn’t reach for her, but I felt the ache to. We’d had too many eyes on us for too many hours. Now that it was done, I didn’t quite know what to do with my body.
The door opened, and one of the constables gestured that we were clear to go. For now, we were done with forms and questions.
They didn’t offer us a ride. Thankfully, they didn’t need to.
Callum was waiting out front, parked illegally on the yellow lines, arms folded across his chest and a flat expression that said he dared anyone to challenge him on it. He caught my eye through the drizzle-damp glass as Isla and I stepped out into the soft gray daylight.
His nod was small, but sure. A silent It’s done now .
And for the first time in days, I almost believed it.
The drive home passed in silence.
Outside the window, the Highlands bled into themselves—soft, gray, and endless. Rain streaked the windscreen. Low clouds veiled the tops of the hills, brushing the landscape in mist and shadow. Trees blurred past, branches wet and bowed as we rolled along the winding road.
I curled my fingers into my sleeves, palms pressed against the fabric like I could ground myself through touch alone.
Isla sat beside me in the backseat, head tipped toward the glass, her profile caught in fleeting reflections.
Her eyes were closed, mouth slack with exhaustion.
She wasn’t sleeping, not really. But she was too shattered to fake being truly awake.
Neither of us had spoken since we’d left the station. Not even to Callum, who drove with one hand loose on the wheel, gaze never quite leaving the road. I didn’t think I could’ve managed words if I tried.
Glenlaig looked exactly the same.
Stone houses pressed close to the winding road, windows flower-boxed and still. Hedges trimmed. Flags fluttering in damp wind. A garden gate swung gently on its hinge in front of the bakery like someone had stepped inside moments ago.
It should have felt comforting. Familiar. But instead, something inside me recoiled. The unchanged sameness of it—all of it—felt wrong. Like the village hadn’t noticed we were gone. Like it couldn’t possibly understand what had happened in the wild between then and now.
The 4x4 crunched to a halt in front of my cottage, tires whispering over damp gravel. The second we came to a full stop, the front door swung open.
My grandfather didn’t wait. He was down the steps in a heartbeat, striding toward us, his expression thunderous with worry. He went straight for my door, and the moment I opened it, his arms were around me in a fiercely protective hug.
“I’m all right.” My voice was muffled against his shoulder.
His hand cradled the back of my head. “No’ the point.”
The tension in my chest cracked a little at that. Simply split open and softened. I didn’t realize how much I’d needed that hug until his arms had wrapped around me, familiar and solid.
When we pulled apart, his eyes flicked past me to the other side of the car. “Isla.”
She was slower to get out. Tired. Still pale, still moving like every bone ached. I was sure they did after the days of captivity and the hours we’d spent in interrogation. But when she stepped around the vehicle, he was already there, pulling her into a gentler version of the same embrace.
“Good to see you in one piece, lass.”
She managed the ghost of a smile at his gruff but heartfelt words. “Better to be in one piece.”
“Let’s get you both inside.” He began herding us toward the house. “You’re home now.”
I didn’t correct him. Isla was only visiting, but that didn’t matter right now. The cottage was a safe place, and that counted for something.
Inside, everything looked the same. Too much the same.
The familiar scent of lemon balm and old wood.
The kettle still resting on the stove. The well-worn rug Pippin frequently claimed for naps on sunny days.
It made the last week feel even more surreal.
Like we’d stepped sideways into a story someone else had written, and now we were simply… back.
Grandda was back to the practicalities. “Have you been medically cleared? Checked out by anyone?”
I glanced around for my errant cat. “A quick going over by emergency services at the police station.”
“I’ll call Taryn.” Granddad reached for the kitchen phone.
I wasn’t about to object to a house call from one of the village doctors. “Thanks.”
I helped Isla out of her borrowed coat and got her seated on the sofa, her frame folding down like her strings had finally gone slack.
Pippin appeared a moment later, tail puffed to the size of a bottle brush, giving me a look like I’d personally betrayed the crown.
I crouched to scratch his ears, murmured apologies he accepted with only mild disdain, and then flopped into the chair opposite Isla.
The relief was real. So was the exhaustion. But it still didn’t settle completely. Because Finn wasn’t here. And that silence—his silence—was the one thing I couldn’t make peace with. But I couldn’t think about that now. Not until I was alone.
The knock came about twenty minutes later. As Grandda was puttering in the kitchen making tea, I opened the door to find Taryn Donaldson standing there, rain jacket spotted with drizzle and her usual no-nonsense expression tugged a little tighter than usual.
“Hey.” She gave me a once-over. “You alive?”
I resisted the vaguely hysterical bark of laughter that wanted to escape as I stepped aside. “Barely. Come in.”
She offered me a faint smile as she brushed past. We weren’t close, not really. Merely two professionals who happened to serve the same small village. But there was a quiet trust there. You didn’t live in Glenlaig and not know who had steady hands in a crisis.
Taryn’s gaze flicked immediately to Isla, still swaddled on the couch beneath half a dozen blankets. She didn’t ask questions. The placid look on her face told me she’d seen worse and didn’t need the whole story to do her job.
“I’ll start with her. You sit.”
I didn’t. I lingered nearby, watching her work—thermometer, blood pressure, pupil response, a hydration check. Isla barely stirred, murmuring something that might’ve been “cold” or “tea” or both.
When Taryn finished, she glanced up at me. “She’s dehydrated, bruised up, but no signs of concussion or serious trauma. Keep her on fluids. Let her sleep.”
I nodded, something easing in my chest.
Taryn turned to me. “Let me see your wrists.”
I held them out automatically. The skin was broken in places, raw and inflamed where the zipties had bitten in. They’d been cleaned and disinfected earlier, but that had been the bare minimum. She took my hands with a gentleness I wasn’t quite prepared for and turned them slowly under the light.
“This’ll heal.” Her tone was clinical. Her eyes weren’t.
I nodded, not sure if I believed her. Not sure if she meant the skin or everything else. Maybe both.
Once Taryn packed up her bag and left with a last reminder to push fluids and take it easy, the house fell quiet again.
My grandfather lingered near the door, one hand braced on the frame like he couldn’t quite decide whether to stay or go.
His eyes moved between me and Isla, still curled on the couch under a heap of blankets, breathing steady but shallow.
The guest room was just down the hall, but if she was finally resting, I wasn’t going to disturb her.
Grandda looked like he wanted to say something. Maybe a dozen things. But instead, he stepped close and rested a hand on my shoulder, the same way he used to when I was small, and scraped my knee and tried not to cry. I leaned into it for a second longer than I meant to.
“We’ll sleep. We’re okay. Just… tired.” That was perhaps not entirely true, especially for Isla. But it was where we were for now.
He gave a single, gruff nod. His hand lingered for a beat longer, then dropped. He stepped back, his boots quiet on the wood floor, and let himself out with no more than a soft click of the latch behind him.
The quiet that followed was deep and thick with the kind of stillness that only comes after chaos.
I didn’t sleep.
Didn’t sit either. I moved through the house like a ghost, checking on Isla, adjusting the blanket that didn’t need adjusting, rinsing mugs we hadn’t used.
And when I finally ran out of excuses to keep moving, I ended up at the window.
Arms folded tight across my chest. Forehead nearly touching the glass.
The sky stayed gray, same as it had all day. The rain had slacked off sometime in the past hour, but more would come. It always did. Now there was simply a sense of waiting. A low, endless pressure, as if the clouds were holding their breath.
Maybe that was just me.
Alex had said Finn went after Sandhurst. That he was fine. That he’d be back. And I believed him. Finn wouldn’t vanish. Not from his team, not from the village he’d built something solid in. His roots were here now. Tied down in people and routines and a job I knew he loved.
But that wasn’t what twisted in my gut.
The real question that kept tugging at me like a frayed thread just shy of snapping was whether he’d come back to me.
Not Out of Bounds Scotland. Not the village. Me.
What had happened out there in the dark had felt like something real. Like it mattered. Like we did. But maybe it only mattered because the world had narrowed to survival and urgency and quiet touches in the cold. Maybe it wasn’t enough to carry past adrenaline and stitched up wounds.
I pressed a hand to the window frame. Cool wood beneath my palm.
Was it real for you too, Finn? Or simply another mission you’re already packing away?