Chapter 27 Finneas
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Finneas
The new assistant set my morning briefing on the edge of my desk like she was feeding an animal at the zoo. Quick, careful, ready to pull her hand back.
“The client call is at ten,” she said, not making eye contact.
“Fine.”
“And there’s a scheduling conflict with the quarterly review and the...”
“Handle it.”
“Which one should I prioritize?”
“I said handle it.”
She flinched. I heard it, the small intake of breath, the half-step backward, and I hated myself for it because Andrea never flinched.
Not once, not even on her first day when I was at my worst. Andrea would have set the briefing down, told me to figure it out myself since I was a grown man, monitored my coffee intake, threatened me with pink wallpaper, and the day would have started and it would have been fine.
The assistant left. I stared at the briefing without reading it.
She sat at Andrea’s desk. HR had cleared it before the new hire started, swept the dead peonies into a trash bag, wiped down the surface, removed the personal touches.
I’d come in the morning after and the desk was clean, the vase gone, the pink pen that had rolled underneath picked up and discarded.
The only thing left was the chair, pushed back at the angle Andrea had left it, and even that had been adjusted for someone new.
I stood there staring at the clean desk for ten minutes before I could make myself walk into my office.
My wolf hadn’t spoken to me since the rejection.
The silence where he used to be was worse than any howling.
I’d tried to shift three times in the past week.
Nothing. My body refused. He’d shut himself behind a wall and I could feel the emptiness of it like a room that used to have furniture, the outlines still visible on the carpet but the thing itself gone.
I hadn’t slept properly since she left. Every time I closed my eyes I saw her face, not the angry one from the last day, the one before the anger.
The one when she was holding the magazine with shaking hands and hadn’t figured out what it meant yet, the confusion crossing her features, the trust still there, the moment before it shattered.
That face woke me at 3 am every night and wouldn’t let me go back to sleep.
The bond pain was constant. A dull ache under my sternum that spiked when I thought about her, which was always. The healers told me rejection pain could last months, sometimes years. They looked at me with barely disguised pity when they said it and I wanted to put my fist through the wall.
Lorraine called on a Tuesday.
“We need to set a date, Finneas. The venue wants to know.”
“I don’t care about the venue.”
“Well, you need to care because we’re getting married and married people have weddings and weddings need venues.”
“Pick whichever one you want.”
“I want you to be involved. This is supposed to be our day.”
I almost laughed. Our day. I was sitting in my office with dead flowers on my mate’s desk, my wolf locked behind a wall, my chest aching every time I breathed, and she wanted to talk about venues.
“Lorraine, I said pick one. I’ll be there.”
“You could at least pretend to be excited.”
“I could. I won’t.”
She hung up on me. I put the phone down and felt nothing about it.
That was the worst part, the nothing. Lorraine was supposed to be my future wife and all I felt when she hung up was relief that I didn’t have to listen to her voice anymore.
I tried to remember if I’d ever felt anything when she called, even before Andrea.
Obligation, maybe. Annoyance. Never warmth.
Never the chest-tightening anticipation I felt when Andrea’s name lit up my screen.
Andrea could text me a single word and my whole body responded.
Lorraine could talk for thirty minutes and I couldn’t recall a single sentence afterward.
I visited my mother that afternoon. She was sitting up in bed, monitors beeping, IVs in both arms, but she was animated.
Color in her cheeks, hands moving while she talked.
She told me about the florist Lorraine had selected, the guest list that needed trimming, how the seating chart had to be rearranged because the Ashtor family needed to be at the front.
“You look better today,” I said, and I meant it.
She looked stronger than she had in days.
Her voice was fuller, her grip on my hand firmer, and I felt a cautious loosening in my chest because if she had good days like this, maybe the timeline wasn’t as short as they said.
Maybe there was more time. Maybe I didn’t have to rush this.
“Good days and bad days, sweetheart. Today is a good day.” She patted my hand. “Now, about the venue. Lorraine wants the grand hall at the estate but I think the garden would be more elegant, don’t you?”
“Mother, I was thinking we could push the date back a bit. Give you more time to recover, make sure you’re strong enough to enjoy it.”
Her face fell. She pulled her hand back, pressed it against her chest, and coughed. Hard, her shoulders curling forward, the monitors spiking. I reached for her and she waved me off.
“I’m fine, I’m fine.” She caught her breath. Her eyes were wet when she looked at me. “Finneas, I don’t have the luxury of time. Please. Don’t take this from me.”
I couldn’t say no. My jaw locked around the word, my throat closed, and what came out instead was surrender.
I took her hand back. “Okay. We won’t push it.”
She squeezed my fingers and smiled through the tears. “Thank you, sweetheart. You’re a good son.”
A good son. I’d been hearing that my whole life. Every time I heard it I was giving away another piece of myself.
I stayed for another twenty minutes while she talked about flowers and tablecloths. When I left she kissed my cheek, told me to eat. I drove back to the estate with my hands tight on the wheel. She pushed, I caved. My whole life, the same pattern.
Pack business suffered. The first council briefing I missed, I was sitting in my car in the estate parking lot with my forehead on the steering wheel, the bond pain spiking so hard I couldn’t see straight.
I told myself I’d go in after it passed.
It didn’t pass. I sat there for two hours and drove home.
The second briefing I was in my office, staring at the glass wall where Andrea used to sit, and the alarm on my phone went off reminding me about the meeting, and I looked at it and turned it off and kept staring.
Luca covered for me both times. He handled the territory patrols, mediated a dispute between two families that should have been my call.
He didn’t complain. But I could see the strain on his face when he dropped by the office with updates, the careful way he delivered bad news, the questions he was holding back behind his teeth.
One evening I drove to her house. I didn’t plan it. I was driving home from the office and my hands turned the wheel before my brain agreed to it, muscle memory pulling me down her street the way it had hundreds of times when I was Fin.
Her street was quiet. I parked across from her house and looked up and my chest went cold.
A sign on the lawn. For Rent.
The windows were bare. Curtains gone. The front door had a lockbox on the handle. The porch where I used to lie beside her while she read was empty, the rocking chair gone, no book left on the railing, no blanket draped over the back.
She was gone. Not just from the office, not just avoiding me. She’d packed up and left the city.
I sat in my car staring at the dark house and my hands were shaking on the steering wheel.
Where did she go? Whitebrook, probably, to her grandmother, but I didn’t know for sure and the not knowing was its own kind of torture.
She could be anywhere. She could be hurting, alone, and I’d done this to her.
I’d driven her out of her own city, away from her friends, away from the shelter, away from the life she’d built.
The porch was dark. I stared at it, at the spot where I used to lie beside her in wolf form while she read to me, her voice filling the night, the Scottish accent terrible, the commentary between chapters better than anything in the book.
I missed her so badly it felt like a physical weight pressing on my ribs.
Not the bond pain, which was constant and dull.
This was sharper, more specific. I missed the sound of her voice.
The way she said my name when she was annoyed, two syllables loaded with exasperation.
The way she scratched behind my ear without thinking about it while she talked, her fingers absent in my fur.
Those nights were the only time my wolf was ever truly calm.
Now my wolf was gone, the porch was dark, and she was somewhere I couldn’t reach.
I sat there until my phone died. Then I drove home.
Three in the morning. My office at the estate. Reports on the screen I couldn’t focus on, the words blurring, the ache in my chest spiking every few minutes when my brain cycled back to her.
Luca showed up at the estate at three in the morning. I heard the front door, then his footsteps down the corridor. He appeared in the doorway of my office in his jacket, keys still in his hand, looking like he’d driven here on impulse.
“Your phone is off,” he said.
“Battery died.”
“I called six times. Figured I’d check you weren’t dead.” He looked at me, at the dark office, the reports I hadn’t read. “You look like shit, Finn.”
“Thanks.”
He walked in and dropped into the chair across from my desk. He looked at me the way he’d been looking at me for weeks, worried underneath the casual front.
“You need to get her back.”
“I can’t.”
“Why?”
“You know why.”
“Yeah, I do. Your mother is sick. You made a promise.” He rubbed his face. “But I’ve been covering your council briefings, handling your territory disputes, watching you walk around the office like a ghost. Something has to give.”
I didn’t respond.
“I’m not sure I should say this,” he said.
“Then don’t.”
“I’m going to say it anyway.” He leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “Lorraine wouldn’t make a good Luna.”
I looked at him.
“She’s an Alpha from one of the most prominent families in the pack. She’s been around pack politics her entire life.”
“Yeah, she has. And in all that time, name one person in the pack who actually respects her.” He held my gaze. “Not fears her, not tolerates her because of her family name. Respects her.”
I opened my mouth. Nothing came out.
“A Luna isn’t a title you hand out because someone’s family has money,” Luca said.
“A Luna is the emotional center of the pack. She’s the person people go to when they can’t go to the King.
She’s the one who holds things together when you can’t.
She needs the pack’s trust, Finn. Their actual trust. Not their compliance. ”
“Lorraine has...”
“Lorraine has been telling betas she’s the incoming Luna and using the title to push people around for months.
That’s not trust. That’s authority nobody gave her.
” He paused. “You know who the pack would trust? Someone who treats everyone the same regardless of rank. Someone who pushes back when you’re being unreasonable. Someone who isn’t afraid of you.”
The name he didn’t say filled the room louder than if he’d shouted it.
I looked away. The ache under my sternum spiked, sharp, relentless.
“She’s gone, Luca. She left the city.”
“I know.”
“She doesn’t want to see me.”
“Probably not.”
He didn’t continue afterward, and then he stood. At the door he stopped, hand on the frame.
“You’re sitting in the dark at 3 am with your phone dead.
I’ve been running your council meetings for two weeks.
You missed a territory dispute yesterday that three families are furious about.
” He looked at me over his shoulder. “I’m not going to tell you what to do.
But think about what you actually want. Not what your mother wants, not what Lorraine wants, not what the pack expects. What you want.”
He left. The hallway went quiet.
I sat in the dark. The screen had gone to sleep, the room lit only by the crack of light from the corridor.
Name one person who respects her.
I couldn’t. I ran through the pack in my head, family by family, Alpha by Alpha.
The Webbers tolerated her. The border families ignored her.
The council elders were polite to her face because of her family name, but behind closed doors I’d heard the way they talked about her, the eye rolls, the careful silences when her name came up.
She’d been telling people she was Luna for months and not a single person had treated her like one.
They treated her like a woman with a title she hadn’t earned, wearing a crown nobody put on her head.
I thought about Andrea. Andrea at the shelter, kneeling on a dirty floor, hand-feeding a traumatized dog.
Andrea at my desk, pushing back on my decisions with a confidence that had nothing to do with rank or status.
Andrea on the porch, reading to a wolf she didn’t know was a king, treating him exactly the same as she treated everyone: with kindness, with honesty, without fear.
What do you actually want?
I opened the top drawer of my desk. Under a stack of papers, there was a pink Post-It note. Small, square, Andrea’s handwriting.
Third cup. Don’t push it.
She’d stuck it on my coffee mug the morning after three days of ice, the first crack in the wall she’d put up after she found out about the shift. The first sign that she was coming back to me.
I peeled it off the mug that morning and put it in this drawer. Never threw it away.
I took it out. The paper was soft from handling, the edges curled. Her handwriting was neat, the i’s dotted with circles. I ran my thumb over the ink.
Luca’s voice in my head: what do you actually want?
I pressed the Post-It against my chest and closed my eyes. The paper was warm against my shirt, small enough to fit under my palm, and I held it there the way I used to hold her hand, tight, desperate, like the thing I was holding was the only proof that what we had was real.
I was still sitting like that when the sun came up.