16. Is That Blood? -Finn
Sixteen
Is That Blood? -Finn
Fiona and Lily were on us the second we cleared the threshold.
“What happened?”
“Did you get food?”
“Why are you covered in—is that blood—?”
“Are there more outside?”
Their questions, voices, and reaching hands came at once.
Fiona moved toward Libby first, not quite touching, her eyes scanning Libby’s face until whatever she saw there drained the color from her own.
Lily remained three steps back, arms wrapped around herself, her gaze methodically shifting from the knife to my hands, to my shirt, and back to the knife.
Her expression hardened with an unasked question.
“Slow down,” I said, keeping my voice level as I crouched and pulled supplies from the bags. “We made it back. That’s what matters right now.”
Fiona crouched beside me, her eyes catching on my forearm.
“You’re bleeding—”
“I’m fine; it’s not mine,” I replied.
Lily dropped to the floor near the growing pile and began sorting without being asked.
“How bad is it out there?” she asked, quiet and direct, not looking up from the cans.
“Bad. Worse than yesterday.”
No point in sugarcoating it. She deserved honesty.
I answered their questions: the flooded tunnel, the storm cover, the creatures disoriented by thunder. I omitted the body in the water, the child’s shoe, and what the crouching figure in the intersection had been doing with its hands.
But my attention kept finding her.
Libby moved slower than the rest of us, yet she hadn’t stopped. Medical supplies on the counter, food in the cabinet, a flashlight by the hallway entrance. Her hands trembled—I saw it every time she set something down—but she kept working.
That’s what struck me.
I’d seen seasoned operators, men who’d trained for years and built their identities around resilience, freeze when a situation exceeded their preparation.
Libby had been pinned to the ground by something that was once human, inches from having her throat torn out.
Now she was sorting canned goods, hands shaking, jaw set, not a word about any of it.
Something heavy settled in my chest.
I stood there with a can of beans, unable to name what I was witnessing.
I’d meant what I said on that rooftop. Adrenaline.
Proximity. The false intimacy of high-stakes situations—I’d rationalized it, and it had seemed to check out.
I’d filed it away and moved on. But standing here, I turned it over and found another side: something that had been quietly accumulating, like water finding a crack and widening it, long before any rooftop.
The half-second too long she held my gaze.
The way her scent cut through the rain and filth every time she was close enough—warm, already in my body’s memory before I’d thought to object.
I tracked her across the room. The wet fabric of her shirt clung to her shoulder blades and waist. Her hair hung in dark ropes against her neck. She straightened and pushed it back from her face, and I caught myself following the line of her throat down to her breasts before redirecting my gaze.
Not my type.
The thought surfaced more from habit than conviction. Too old. Too ordinary. Too far outside the collection of women I’d historically pursued—the obvious ones, who wore their attractiveness on the surface where I didn’t have to dig.
Libby required digging.
And every layer I uncovered made the one above it irrelevant—a clear reason to stop digging.
The way her jaw tightened when she made a decision. The way she’d curled into me on that rooftop. The way she’d said “I don’t feel brave” in a voice so small I’d been carrying it around ever since, like something I’d picked up off the ground without meaning to.
None of that had anything to do with adrenaline.
And that bothered me more than anything else happening right now—which, given the state of the world, was saying something.
“Finn?”
Fiona’s voice pulled me back. I blinked, realizing I’d been standing motionless with a can of beans, staring at the back of Libby’s head.
“Yeah.”
“You guys need to sleep,” Fiona said, glancing at Lily. “We’ll take watch.”
Lily nodded once. “We’ve got it.”
I held Fiona’s gaze for a moment, assessing her. Alert. Scared but functional.
“If anything changes—sound, movement—wake me. Don’t wait until you’re sure.”
“We will.”
A short nod. I grabbed my pack and turned towards the stairs.
Libby had already started up.
Quiet. Withdrawn. Each step slow and deliberate, one hand trailing the wall for balance. She didn’t speak. Didn’t turn around. Didn’t look at me as she climbed. I knew she was still reeling from the alley attack.
* * *
Upstairs, it was dim. The last gray light of the storm filtered through gaps in the boarded windows, casting everything in muted shadow. The room we’d designated for sleeping occupied the corner of the second floor.
She moved to her corner without a word, lowered herself onto the blankets, pulled her knees up, and turned her back to the room.
I took my spot on the opposite side, far enough to respect the boundary she’d just established, close enough to reach her in under two seconds if the door came open.
I lay back. The exhaustion was physical—a pressure behind my eyes, a slow dissolution of muscle and intention, the particular heaviness of a body that had been running on threat response for too long and had finally run out of threats to respond to.
My shoulder ached. My forearm. The hip that had taken the debris in the tunnel.
My hands had not stopped throbbing since I’d pried that rebar from the collapsed wall.
Sleep came to me. I went. Almost. Then I heard it.
Soft. Muffled.
My eyes opened.
I pushed up on my elbows and looked across the room.
She lay curled tight, back still to me, but her shoulders shook.
Small tremors she couldn’t suppress no matter how hard she pressed her face into the pillow.
One hand covered her mouth—I could see its shape in the dim light, fingers clamped across her lips, containing the sound, keeping it inside where she thought no one would find it.
I’d watched her hold it together through all of it. And now, in the dark, where she thought no one was looking—this. I became aware of my own breathing, the silence, the quiet sounds she was working so hard to contain.
I didn’t think about it.
Didn’t weigh the implications. Didn’t consult the part of my brain that maintained professional distance.
I moved.
Crossed the space. Lowered myself beside her. One breath, the decision was already made, had been made somewhere back in the dark before I’d even sat up—just to feel the full weight of it. What I was about to do. What it would cost me. What I already knew I would not take back.
Then I lay down behind her and wrapped my arm around her.
She went rigid. A sharp inhale caught and held in her throat—I could hear it stop, suspended, her entire body bracing for something she hadn’t expected.
“Shhh,” I said. Low. Close. My mouth near the back of her head. “You’re safe.”
Two seconds.
Three.
Then she simply disintegrated.
Not loud. No theatrics. Something deeper than that. Her body folded forward and then reversed, turning into me, pressing her face into my chest. Her hands found my shirt—fists balling the fabric.
The first sob came almost silently. Just the convulsion of her against me, the sudden wet heat of tears soaking through my shirt to the skin beneath.
Then the sound broke through.
Low. Wrecked. A grief so unguarded it had no shape to it, just sound pressing against my chest and finding a dent in a place I’d kept intact for a very long time.
“I thought—” she choked, her voice muffled against me, broken into fragments. “I thought it—it almost—”
“You’re here. You’re safe.” I pressed my mouth against her hair.
Not a kiss—I told myself that. Just contact.
Just presence. But my lips stayed. My hand tightened at the back of her head, and something shifted in my chest that I didn’t have a name for and wasn’t going to look for right now.
“It’s dead. It can’t touch you.” A breath.
“Nothing touches you. Not while I’m here. ”
“I couldn’t get it off me—” Her breath hitched violently. Her whole body shook against mine. “Its hands—I could—I can still,”
“You’re here now.” My mouth was against her hair, and this time I didn’t bother with the distinction.
It wasn’t a kiss, but it wasn’t just contact, either.
I registered how far past every line I’d drawn this had gone, and I didn’t pull back.
“It’s dead. Nothing in this house touches you. I promise.”
Her fingers dug harder into my shirt. I could feel her fingers against my chest, sharp and desperate, pressing into the muscle there as if she needed to verify the heartbeat underneath. I let her.
“I’ve never been that scared,” she whispered.
The admission cost her something. I heard it in her voice, the way she pressed her face harder against me afterward, hiding from her own vulnerability.
“I know,” I said. Softer. My hand moved from the nape of her neck, tracing her spine, slow and deliberate, until it came to rest on the small of her back and stayed there. Warm. Steady.
Her breath was warm on my neck.
I held her through the rest of it. Didn’t rush her. Didn’t say anything at all. Just let the grief do what it needed to do.
The sobs came farther apart. The tremors lost their violence, broke down into something smaller—a shiver, a catch, a shiver again. Her breathing changed. Still uneven. But slower. Deeper. The spaces between expanding.
She didn’t pull away.
Nor did I.
I turned us both, settling more fully onto the blankets, adjusting so her head rested on my chest. It fit there, in a space that seemed designed for exactly this, for exactly her, as if it had been waiting.
Her body pressed along the full length of mine.
Her legs tangled with mine unconsciously seeking contact, and I let them.
“You good?” I asked after a long while. My voice had dropped to something barely above a murmur, roughened by the tightness in my own throat that I refused to examine.
A small nod against my chest. The movement pressed her face closer, her lips grazing the skin exposed by my collar. A shiver ran through me.
“Yeah,” she whispered.
Quiet settled over us. The house creaked. Somewhere downstairs, Fiona moved from one window to another—I tracked the soft footsteps without fully surfacing from the half-sleep that had started dragging me under.
Libby’s breathing deepened.
Slowed.
Her body went heavy against mine—her muscles giving up their tension in stages, like a fist unclenching finger by finger. Her arm across my stomach tightened once, a reflexive clutch, then relaxed. Her breath came warm and steady against my throat, each breath ghosting across my skin.
I tightened my arm around her. Just slightly. Not enough to wake her.
Enough to close the last quarter-inch of space between us. Enough that I could feel her heartbeat through the thin layers of fabric separating her skin from mine—steady now.
I turned my head. Breathed her in—past the rain, past the tunnel, past everything the day had left on her—and underneath all of it, there it was. Something warm and all her. She slept. The weight of her. The sound of her breathing.
I went under too.