Chapter 27 Finn #2
Wren inhales like it hurts. The crease between her brows deepens. She closes the drawer without opening it, which somehow says more than reading anything would. She’s past the point of needing content to fill in the threat. The threat is the repetition, the proximity. The certainty.
My throat closes.
“Wren,” I say, and use the quietest voice I own, the one from last night, the one she recognized. “Look at me.”
She does. Immediately. Like her body knows my tone means we’re stepping outside of the rest of the world for a second.
Atlas watches her look at me and some part of me hates that it twists my insides. Not because he doesn’t deserve it. Because I am selfish and tired and scared, and jealousy is easier to feel than raw terror.
“You don’t have to decide anything right now,” I say. “But you also don’t have to white-knuckle it alone.”
The corner of her mouth trembles. She catches it with her teeth. “I’m not alone,” she says, and flicks her gaze toward Atlas and then toward where Kael is pretending to update the drill chart and actually running twelve contingencies in his head.
I nod. “Good answer.”
She doesn’t smile. She does breathe a little deeper.
Kael arrives like a storm no one heard rolling in. He doesn’t raise his voice. He doesn’t need to.
“Practice is over,” he says. “Boys—showers. Wren—office. Five minutes.”
Two sentences, five outcomes. He’s offering privacy and structure. He’s also putting a captain’s arm around a situation without announcing it to the room.
“Kael,” she says, warning and gratitude braided together.
He tips his head. “If you want,” he adds, soft enough only the four of us can hear it.
That phrase—If you want—has shown up in his handwriting and in his mouth more than once lately, and every time it guts me a little because it’s Kael’s version of tenderness.
He will not take a step she doesn’t authorize.
He will also move an entire team out of her path so she can take it without tripping.
Atlas looks at me. The silent question lands like a puck on my tape: How much do you know?
I hold his stare and give him the truth I can without giving away hers. Enough.
His jaw works. It’s not aimed at me.
“Atlas,” I say, “I’m going to walk her.”
“I’m not leaving,” he answers.
“Didn’t ask you to.”
Kael slides a look between us that says coordinate this like adults, then addresses Wren again. “We’ll clear the hallway. You take your time.”
She nods, fingers flexing once like she’s testing whether they still belong to her. I want to take her hand. I don’t. Last night taught me the difference between wanting and helping. Asking is helping. Assuming is not.
“Do you want me to touch you?” I ask, quiet.
Something in Atlas’s posture unlocks at the question alone. He understands that language; I saw it on him the first time she reached for his wrist in the training room and he looked like someone handed him a live wire and told him it was a gift.
Wren nods. “Yeah.”
I offer my hand palm-up. She slides her fingers over mine and squeezes, not hard, not light, exactly enough. The pressure is steadying for both of us.
We move. Kael plants himself at the mouth of the corridor and starts directing traffic in the world’s calmest evacuation—rookies to the left, vets to the right, no one loiters, we’re not available for questions.
Atlas takes the opposite wall, broad and silent, not looking like a bouncer because he isn’t one—he’s a defenseman offering the simplest kind of defense there is: presence.
We pass the drawer. The phone buzzes again, buzz-buzz-buzz, a pattern I’ll hear in my sleep. Wren’s steps hitch and then even out. My thumb slides along her knuckles once. Not a shush. A here.
Her office is small and too bright. She hates it when it’s like that; says the fluorescents make everything feel interrogative. I cross and flick off the overhead, leave the lamp on, warm light pooling like we borrowed someone else’s living room for five minutes.
Kael stops at the door, back to the hallway. Atlas posts up on the far side of the frame. Neither of them intrudes, and somehow the space shrinks in a way that doesn’t scare her.
“Close?” I ask Wren.
“Half,” she says, and I pull the door until it kisses the jamb without latching.
She lowers onto the edge of the desk. I stay in front of her, not between her and the door—that would feel wrong—but close enough that if she needs to look at my chest and breathe, she can.
“You want to tell them?” I ask. No names. No lecture. Just the choice.
Her throat works. “I don’t want to make it real.”
“It’s real whether we name it or not,” I say, and hate myself for the truth. “Naming it just gives us better tools.”
She presses her lips together. “I told you last night,” she says to me, quiet like the confession has to sneak to make it out. “I’m not ready to tell them all of it.”
“All of it isn’t required,” Kael says from the doorway, voice calm water. “Only what helps you.”
Wren looks over my shoulder at him, and I see it happen—the exact second she realizes he’s not asking for control. He’s offering it back.
Atlas doesn’t speak. He doesn’t have to. Everything about his stance says: point and I’ll break whatever you’re pointing at. I love him and hate him for it in the same breath.
Wren inhales slow. “My ex,” she says, and the two words cost so much air she has to pause. “He... he doesn’t stop.”
Kael’s expression doesn’t change, but something behind his eyes sharpens to a blade. “Is he here,” he asks, “or is he trying to be here?”
“Messages,” she says. “Calls under new numbers. Gifts when he can find where I am. Sometimes he—” She cuts herself off and shakes her head. “He likes to remind me he exists.”
Atlas’s hands curl loose, then looser, because he promised me in a look to hold the line.
Kael nods once, slow. “Okay. Then we remind him you’re not alone.”
“I don’t want you to fight him,” she says, eyes cutting to Atlas before she can stop them, then to me because she knows I will absolutely get myself arrested with a smile on if someone dares breathe near her wrong.
“I won’t fight him,” Atlas says, and the sentence has gravel in it but holds. “Unless he touches you.”
“Atlas,” I warn.
He clamps his jaw. “I won’t fight him,” he repeats, like the words are a mouthguard he has to keep in place.
Kael slides his phone from his pocket. “We’ll do this by the book first. Security footage at the facility.
Escort program. Police report if you want.
If you don’t, we still log incidents. We get his numbers to IT, have them flagged.
We change your route for a while, vary your schedule, and we pair you at all times off-ice—one of us at minimum. You choose who and when.”
Wren blinks like she didn’t expect someone else to have a plan that didn’t involve fists.
“You don’t have to carry it alone,” I say, because last night taught me that repetition can be a balm when everything else feels like an alarm. “We make the load smaller. That’s it.”
Her eyes go bright. She nods once, a frayed movement that still feels like courage.
“Okay,” she whispers. “Okay.”
“You want us to know the name?” Kael asks gently.
Her mouth opens, closes. She looks at me. I tell her without words that the decision is hers, now and later and always.
“Adrian,” she says.
Atlas goes statue-still. Kael doesn’t write it down. He doesn’t need to.
“Your ex skating partner,” he says. It’s not a question, but Wren nods.
“Thank you,” Kael says, like she just handed him something sacred. “That’s enough for today.”
Wren lets out a breath that shakes all the way down. She doesn’t cry. She doesn’t have to. I can feel the tremor in the air.
“Hey,” I say, softer. “One more thing. The safety word—same as last night?”
She nods.
Kael’s eyebrow ticks. “You two have a safety word?”
“Two,” I say. “One for get me out, one for call the cavalry.”
Atlas’s mouth tugs like it wants to be a grin and can’t quite get there. “What are they?”
Wren swallows, and for the first time today there’s a ribbon of humor threaded through her voice. “Hydrate,” she says, “and Zamboni.”
Kael stares at us a second and then huffs an almost-laugh, like his nervous system finally found a place to set a glass down. “Fine. Hydrate means leave. Zamboni means I bulldoze the building.”
“Kael,” she murmurs.
“Metaphorically,” he adds, then looks at Atlas. “Mostly.”
Atlas’s eyes soften just enough that I remember why I like him more than is convenient.
A knock on the doorframe makes all of us twitch. It’s one of the defensemen on Wren’s rehab list, towel around his neck, contrite expression like he knows he’s interrupting a weather event. “Uh, you said ten minutes, Harper?”
“Give me five,” she says without looking away from us, and the kid nods and disappears so fast he leaves steam in his wake.
Kael checks the hallway. “We’ll keep the door,” he says. “You do your work. If you need out—”
“Hydrate,” Wren says.
“And if we need to end Boston as a concept,” I add, “Zamboni.”
Atlas finally, finally cracks a smile. “Copy.”
I turn back to Wren. “Do you want me to stay in here for rehab or outside the door?”
She studies my face like she’s measuring how much I mean it. “Inside,” she says. “If you want.”
If you want. My chest does something stupid and painful.
“I want,” I say.
She nods like we just settled the weather for the next hour, and the tension in the room shifts from survival to endurance—hard, but possible.
Kael squeezes the door to the halfway position again and claims the stretch of hallway like it belongs to him. Atlas plants his back to the opposite frame and crosses his arms, not a threat to the building so much as a promise to the person in it.
Wren presses her palm to mine for a second longer before she pulls away to set up the rehab bands. The tremor in her fingers hasn’t vanished, but it’s steadier now, the kind that comes after a quake when you’re counting aftershocks and realizing the house is still standing.
Better counts.
It’s not the ending I want for today. It’s not the ending she deserves. But it’s the one we have: four people in a too-bright room making space for a future where she doesn’t flinch every time her phone remembers her.
Outside, the rink hums. Inside, we build a quieter noise and make it large enough to stand inside of.
I take the first defenseman through his range-of-motion while Wren cues him, correcting angles with that calm, bossy tone that somehow makes grown men behave.
Every time the drawer in the other room buzzes in my memory, I replace the sound with her voice.
By the time the second player limps in, Atlas has shifted where she can see him through the half-open door without even turning her head.
Kael’s shadow moves on the floor like a clock hand that forgot how to hurry.
The world is not fixed. But the axes have been named, and it’s enough to keep our feet.
When the session ends, Wren leans back against the desk and looks at me like she’s waiting to fall and checking to see if I’m still there to catch her.
“I am,” I say, out loud, because some things need to be said every single time. “I’m here.”
Her eyes shine. She nods. “I know.”
Outside, someone laughs. A whistle blows. Life insists on going on. We let it. We stand in the middle of it together—me inside the room, Atlas at the door, Kael on the threshold—and for the first time today, I believe we can make it to tomorrow without breaking something we can’t fix.
Better counts. And today, better is ours.