Back To Her -Finn
Twenty Two
Islipped out of Libby’s arms without waking her, then stood for a moment, just looking at her.
She was curled on her side in the dim light, finally sleeping—really sleeping—as if she’d surrendered after carrying too much for too long. One hand rested where I’d been, fingers still loosely curled around the warmth I’d left behind.
I looked at her hand for a moment before looking away.
Not now.
I dressed quickly: shirt, gear check out of habit, knife, sidearm. The familiar weight settled back across my body, and I let it. I moved to the door without looking back.
The air hit me cold and sharp the second I stepped onto the roof.
The sky hung low and heavy. I scanned the horizon, and it took me less than ten seconds to find it.
Lightning flickered in the distance.
Come on, come on, come on.
“Shit,”
I breathed, barely audible. It was tracking away from us, not toward us.
The storm we’d been counting on—the one that would have handed us cover, noise—drifted steadily southwest, dragging our best window with it. I watched the last of the distant flashes dissolve behind the skyline, forearms on the ledge, jaw tense.
We’d have to wait.
Stay ready. Stay sharp. Stay patient in a situation that rewarded none of those things for very long.
Waiting had always been the most dangerous part of any operation—not because of the threats it left time to develop, but because of what it did to the inside of a person.
I understood how to hold a perimeter, how to read a skyline, manage a threat, and stay cold when everything around me wasn’t.
What I didn’t know how to do, apparently, was stand on a rooftop alone and keep my mind from finding its way back through that door.
Back downstairs.
Back to her.
I dragged a hand down my face.
What the hell is wrong with you, Ward?
This wasn’t me. It had never been me. I’d spent my entire adult life keeping things uncomplicated, temporary, purely physical, controlled.
Women came and went on terms I understood and could manage.
I liked the door closing behind them. I liked the silence that followed.
I’d built something functional out of that simplicity.
No attachments. No mess. No soft spots to exploit.
And yet here I stood on a rooftop in the middle of whatever this shitshow was, completely undone by a middle-aged mom.
Feelings made things complicated. They created liability, expectations that turned into pressure, pressure that turned into the exact kind of distraction that got people killed out here. I’d watched it happen to better men. I’d sworn I understood why.
And yet I couldn’t stop circling back to the way she’d fit against me afterward—trusting, completely and without reservation, like she’d decided my arms were the safest place she’d ever been.
The way her tears had reached something I’d spent years making inaccessible—not only locked down but decommissioned, written off, removed from the inventory of things I still carried.
And then it was there again, before I’d seen it coming.
I pushed off the ledge.
Get it together.
Because this—whatever it had become in that room—wasn’t just inconvenient.
It endangered everyone I had a responsibility to protect.
One slow decision out here, one second of hesitation, one moment where my mind landed on her instead of the threat in front of me—and Fiona ended up dead.
Libby ended up dead. Lily ended up dead.
I couldn’t carry that. I wouldn’t.
My sister had trusted me with her life since before either of us knew what that meant. Libby and her daughter had been pulled into my orbit through no fault of their own, and they needed me sharp, not compromised, not distracted by something I had no business allowing right now.
I looked back out over the city.
Storm’s gone. We wait. We watch. We move when the conditions are right. Simple. That’s what this had to stay.
But even standing there with my eyes fixed on the darkening horizon, every part of me wanted to turn around, go back through that door, and make my way down to the only place I’d stopped feeling like I existed at the edge of something I couldn’t outrun.
I didn’t move.
But I wanted to.
And that unsettled me more than anything waiting in the streets below.
* * *
I checked on Fiona and Lily before heading back down.
Their door sat cracked open, soft light spilling into the hallway. I paused outside, leaning against the wall and listened.
Fiona, mid-story—a smile threaded so thoroughly through her voice I could hear it without seeing her face.
“—and Brenna swore she could walk it off,” she said. “Full-on limping, ankle the size of a grapefruit, absolutely convinced she just needed to power through.”
Lily laughed. “That sounds like something I’d do.”
“That sounds exactly like something you’d do,” Fiona shot back without missing a beat.
I leaned against the doorframe, arms crossed, and let myself stay there a moment longer than necessary. The sound of it—laughter, easy and unhurried, completely disconnected from everything waiting outside these walls—made me reluctant to move.
“She took one step,” Fiona continued, “and just—collapsed. Completely. And Finn—” she caught sight of me in the doorway and nodded in my direction, “—ten years old, immediately goes into full panic mode.”
I pushed the door open and stepped inside. “I did not panic.”
Fiona smirked. “You absolutely panicked.”
“I assessed the situation.”
“You yelled.”
Lily looked between us, grinning wide, and the expression on her face—so openly entertained, so young—settled somewhere protective.
“What happened next?”
Fiona settled back against the wall, eyes drifting the way they always did when she landed on a memory worth keeping.
“I mean, I wouldn’t know firsthand—I’d just turned four.
Barely remember the trip at all. But Callan and Brenna told that story so many times growing up it might as well be my own.
” She shook her head, still smiling. “Every holiday. Every family dinner. Brenna would start it, Callan would interrupt with corrections, and Finn would sit there pretending he wasn’t listening, and by the end the two of them would be arguing about details as if it happened the week before. ”
“Callan had just gotten home from deployment,” she went on, quieter now.
“It was the first trip we’d all taken together in a long time.
Brenna slipped on loose rock, twisted her ankle—turned out it’d broken—and we’re miles from the trail head.
Middle of nowhere, no signal, no way out except on foot. ”
The memory surfaced sharper than I expected. “She tried to stand up again.”
“She’s stubborn,” Fiona said.
“She’s an idiot,” I said.
Lily laughed softly.
“So what did you do?”
Fiona glanced at me, her smile going softer at the edges before she answered.
“Finn and Callan carried her. The whole way back.”
I shrugged. “Callan did most of the work.”
“Not true,” Fiona said immediately. “Brenna always made a point of saying that when she told it. Said you refused to switch out, even when your arms shook so hard you could barely keep your grip.”
I exhaled quietly. “I managed fine.”
“You were ten,” she said, her voice dropping just enough to change the weight of it. “And you wouldn’t put her down. Not once. Not the whole way.”
Lily studied me from across the space—quiet, careful, working something out behind her eyes, like she tried to line up this ten-year-old who wouldn’t quit with the man standing in front of her now.
“Why?” she asked.
The question sat there, simpler than it had any right to be.
I shrugged again, but the gesture came out heavier this time, weighted. “She was hurt.”
Fiona held her gaze on me a beat too long.
“That’s just who he is,” she said to Lily. Not loud. Not for effect. Just steady and certain, the way she always delivered the things she actually believed.
I broke her gaze first.
“Yeah, well.” I cleared my throat. “Don’t go breaking any ankles while we’re here. I’m not hauling anyone through those streets.”
Lily smiled, but something heavier moved in behind it—reality settling back over the room, quiet and inevitable.
I straightened up, letting my focus sharpen.
“I’m going to grab a few hours. Libby and I have the night watch. Someone stays up at all times, with no gaps. Next storm is our window—we move then.”
Lily nodded, absorbing it. “We’ll stay ready.”
“Good.”
I turned to leave—and caught it.
Fiona’s look.
Subtle, but completely unmistakable. The expression she’d inherited directly from our mother. She knew exactly what Libby and I had been doing.
I looked away.
“See you in a few hours,” I said and turned for the door.
“Yeah,” she said, a slow, dangerous smile pulling at the corner of her mouth. “You too, Finn.”
I didn’t answer. Just pulled the door shut behind me, quicker than I needed to—and stood in the hallway for one second with my hand still on the frame.
Because that was the last thing I needed right now—the absolute last thing—
Fiona had always been able to see straight through me.
Some things, apparently, didn’t change.
I stepped back into Libby’s room and closed the door quietly behind me.
She hadn’t moved. Still curled exactly where I’d left her—one arm tucked beneath her head, the other resting loosely against her chest, her breathing deep and even. The sheet had slipped and pooled at her waist, leaving one breast exposed, pale in the low light, the nipple flushed pink.
I felt myself harden.
I should have looked away faster. Should have already been looking somewhere else. A low heat coiled in my gut, immediate and completely indifferent to the list of reasons I’d been building why none of this was a good idea.
Stop.
I dragged my eyes away.
Every rational part of me said to take the chair. The floor. The other side of the room. Anywhere that wasn’t this—anywhere that put back what she’d somehow crossed without even meaning to.
My body ignored all of it.
Traitor.
I stripped down to my boxers, quiet and efficient, and slid in behind her, careful, keeping the mattress as still as possible.
The second I drew her closer, she responded.
Not awake. Not even close. Just instinct—a soft, sleepy sound, and then she was pressing back into me, easy and unthinking, like the question had already been answered.
There it was again. That pull. Stronger now, and a hell of a lot harder to dismiss than it had been on the roof.
I settled my arm around her waist, and her warmth bled into my skin until I stopped being able to locate the boundary between us. Her breathing stayed steady against me.
Whatever this was, it didn’t operate by any rules I recognized. No urgency. No sharp edges. Just warmth and weight, and the slow, creeping certainty that if I didn’t move soon, I’d stop wanting to.
My thumb traced a slow trail across the bare skin of her hip. Her breath shifted—barely, just a soft catch at the edge of sleep—and something low in me responded to that. I let my thumb continue its path anyway. Some part of me had already stopped pretending it intended to stop.
For now, I told myself. I needed sleep—real sleep, not the shallow, vigilant half-rest I usually managed. The next storm would come, and when it did, we’d need to move fast. I couldn’t do that running on empty. This line of thinking served no tactical purpose, not while she was warm against me.
That’s what I told myself.
I let my eyes close.
Her breathing had gone slow and even against my chest—she had no idea what that did to me—and with her tucked against me, I stopped fighting it.
And let myself drift.