Chapter 30 Finn
CHAPTER THIRTY
Finn
I wake up to the deeply romantic sound of my nervous system trying to yank itself out through my throat.
Which is usually a bad sign.
For one blissfully stupid second, I don’t know where I am. Just that the ground is hard, my neck is wrecked, and I can smell metal, dust, old oil, and the faint leftover heat of a night that definitely did not happen in a place designed for romance.
Then it clicks.
Storage unit.
Middle of nowhere.
Our old world.
Aurora asleep on the couch ten feet away.
Right.
Amazing. Love that for us.
I stay still.
That’s conditioning. The body remembers things you don’t ask it to. How to wake up without announcing it. How to listen before you move. How to tell the difference between ordinary silence and the kind that’s holding its breath.
This silence?
Bad.
It’s got intent.
The inside of the unit is dark except for the pale gray line under the roll-up door. Morning, or close to it. Hard to tell. My watch is somewhere near my boot, which is not helping me currently. What is helping is the fact that I’m not the only one awake.
Ryder’s up.
I can’t see much of him from where I’m stretched half on a blanket, half on concrete, but I know. The air changes around this sort of man when they’re alert. It goes colder somehow. Sharper. The room itself understands it needs to stop screwing around.
Zane’s awake too. He’s quieter about it, if that’s even possible, but I catch the shift of his shoulders near the wall. He’s already listening.
Great.
Nothing says “healthy morning” like waking up as a pack animal.
Then I hear it.
A scrape.
Metal on metal, maybe. Gravel nudged under a boot. Loud enough that whoever made it either doesn’t care if we hear it… or wants us to.
My skin tightens.
Yeah. This is something.
I turn my head slowly.
Aurora’s still asleep, and somehow that’s the worst part. She’s here, in a place like this. While this is going on outside.
Shit.
I’m already pushing off the floor when Ryder says, “Up.”
Aurora jolts awake, breath catching as she scrambles onto her elbow, eyes wide and searching. She looks disoriented enough to hurt my chest.
I’m beside her before she can panic.
“Hey,” I murmur, gripping her arm. “You’re good. Come on.”
Her gaze jumps to the door, then to the others. The color drains from her face, but she moves.
Good.
“What is it?” she whispers.
“Company.”
Zane’s already on his feet. Ryder positions himself beside the door. His head tilts slightly, listening.
A voice cuts through the metal. “Open up, Callahan.” Silence. “Or we drag her out piece by piece. Your choice.”
Aurora goes still behind me.
Another voice, amused: “Boss says you’ve gotten soft. Thought we’d check.”
Another one. “We know you’re in there. He’s been watching your every move.”
Aurora’s fingers tighten in my shirt.
My jaw sets.
Ryder doesn’t answer.
The first hit slams into the door hard enough to rattle the entire unit.
My heart does an inconvenient skip.
Ryder doesn’t look at us when he says, “Back wall. Now.”
I guide her backward, putting my body between hers and the door without thinking about it. Finn Reilly, ladies and gentlemen. A man with commitment issues so profound they should have their own diagnosis, and yet my body has decided on a very firm moral stance regarding Aurora Harper.
No one gets through me to her.
Simple.
The first hit to the door rattles the whole damn unit.
Aurora flinches hard. Her fingers dig into me.
“Finn—”
“I know.” My voice comes out calmer than I feel. “Stay behind me.”
The door tears open, cold light floods in, and one of them steps forward slowly, like he’s enjoying this.
“Yeah. Boss was right. You’re compromised.”
Then he moves.
Zane intercepts him before I even register what he’s wearing. Just a blur of motion and then the sound of body meeting concrete in a way that definitely hurts.
Another guy comes straight in toward Ryder.
Bad choice.
Ryder moves.
One second, the man is upright, the next Ryder has him folded as if he’s bad laundry and is already on his third problem.
A fourth man comes through fast from the left.
“Grab the girl!” someone shouts.
My vision tunnels.
No.
Absolutely not.
I push Aurora farther back.
“Stay there,” I snap.
She shakes her head immediately, because of course she does. “I’m not just going to—”
“Aurora.”
My tone gets through. She stops arguing. She’s smart enough to know timing matters.
Another man appears in the opening. Followed by more…
So, yeah. Cool. Awesome. Being outnumbered before breakfast.
One guy shifts right.
Toward her.
My whole body locks onto that line of movement.
No.
He’s wiry. Fast looking. The kind of man who counts on surprise and cheap shots.
He’s got something in his hand, and suddenly all the time in the world folds into one ugly, narrow second.
I step in front of Aurora just as he swings.
I’m expecting a punch.
Instead, I get fire.
White hot, slicing fire across my side.
“Oh, shit…” The words leave me on a breath I didn’t mean to spend.
Aurora screams my name.
The guy comes again, but now the shock is gone, and all that’s left is fury. I grab his wrist, slam it hard against the metal shelf until something clatters loose, then put my fist into his face.
He drops.
I’m still standing.
Which feels worth celebrating.
My side, however, feels less enthusiastic.
There’s that weird delayed moment where your body goes, Hmm. This seems unpleasant. And then all at once the pain catches up and says Surprise, asshole.
Warmth starts spreading under my shirt.
Not ideal.
Across the unit, one of the other men tries to recover, and Ryder ends that fantasy immediately. Zane’s breathing hard, one hand braced on the wall, the other ready in case anyone else comes through the door.
No one does.
In fact, the other men seem to be backing away, if my slightly blurry vision is right.
“Ryder, that was a warning,” one of them snarls. “If he wanted you dead, you would be.”
Ryder laughs mirthlessly. “Tell Cole he won’t get another chance.”
My eyes flutter as the men seem to scatter.
This is weird…
Then she’s in front of me.
I don’t even see her cross the space. One second she’s by the wall, the next she’s grabbing my arms, my shirt, my face, trying to assess six things at once as she might actually stop breathing herself.
“Finn—”
“I’m good,” I say automatically.
I am not good.
She looks down.
Her hands are red.
That’s the moment the adrenaline leaves her face, and something else takes its place.
Horror.
She makes this tiny, broken sound I instantly hate.
“Hey.” I try for light. “It’s fine. Trust me, I’ve had uglier mornings. There was a bachelor party in Reno once—”
“Stop.”
Her voice cracks right down the middle.
I do.
Because joking is easy. Joking is my favorite thing. Joking makes space where panic wants to live. Joking lets everybody breathe. It lets me breathe.
But Aurora’s crying.
She shakes her head, staring at the blood on her hands as evidence of some crime she personally committed.
“Oh my goodness,” she whispers. “Finn…”
I catch her face in both hands, careful and firm, forcing her to look at me.
“Hey. Look at me.”
She does, barely.
Her lashes are wet. Her mouth is trembling. She looks wrecked, and that somehow hurts worse than the knife did.
“You don’t do that,” I say.
She blinks. “What?”
“That.” I hold her there, eye to eye. “That thing you’re doing right now where this becomes your fault.”
Her face crumples even more. “You got hurt because of me—”
“No,” I snap, and now there’s no humor left in it at all. “Don’t you dare think you aren’t worth this.”
I can feel my own pulse pounding against the pain in my side, can feel blood moving warm and sticky under my shirt, can feel every old instinct in me trying to shrug this off and keep things light and easy and disposable.
I’m done with that for this.
“For the record,” I say, “this?” I glance down at the mess, then back at her. “This is on them. Not you. You hear me?”
Zane appears at my shoulder, which is honestly a relief because I’m starting to get that floaty, slightly detached feeling that suggests blood loss, and I would prefer not to pass out in front of everyone. Terrible for the brand.
“Let me look,” he says.
I sigh dramatically because dignity matters. “Can I at least complain first?”
“No.”
“Wow. Hostile.”
He lifts my shirt anyway.
His expression goes flat in that way it does when he’s trying not to say something alarming in front of Aurora.
Ryder cuts in from near the door. “How bad?”
Zane presses a hand to the cut. White pain flashes through me so bright my vision stutters.
I hiss. “Okay. That stung a little.”
“It’ll keep,” Zane says, which in Zane speak means ‘not currently dying’.
Fantastic.
Aurora reaches for me again, then stops. She’s afraid that touching me will make it worse. That almost wrecks me all by itself.
I catch her wrist and pull her hand back onto my arm.
“There,” I murmur. “That’s legal. You can touch me.”
A wet laugh escapes her, half sob, half disbelief.
Good. I’ll take it.
Ryder moves past us and out into the lot long enough to check the perimeter, then comes back in looking exactly how I don’t want him to look: calm, murderous, and thinking ten steps ahead.
No sign of Cole.
No surprise there either.
He wasn’t here to fight. He was here to send a message.
Or worse.
To see what we’d do.
Zane digs into a duffel for the first aid kit because, apparently, at some point, one of us became responsible. He kneels in front of me, all business, while Aurora stays at my side, closer than ever.
Honestly? Not hating it.
Even if the wooziness is starting to get the better of me…