On Empty -Finn
Twenty Six
Another week.
The totes were nearly empty, holding only what I’d come to think of as the escape packs.
What little remained sat on the counter—not enough, not even close. Behind me, Libby moved quietly through the room, preparing for her watch. I didn’t turn.
Staying here had become a death sentence.
“We’re out of time,” I said, my voice steadier than I expected.
She didn’t argue, didn’t try to soften the truth or find an angle I’d missed. She simply nodded once with certainty. “I know.”
I turned and met her eyes.
“Tomorrow. First light.”
Her breath caught, just for a fraction of a second, then settled again.
“Tomorrow,” she repeated.
She crossed her arms, not defensively, but thoughtfully, her gaze fixed on the middle distance as she processed it.
“Same plan? Without the storm cover?”
“Modified a bit.”
That pulled her attention back fully.
I stepped closer, lowering my voice even though the house was quiet around us, habit overriding the absence of immediate threat.
“I go for the Suburban alone. You and the girls hold here until I pull up to the stoop.”
Her jaw tightened. “That leaves you open to a lot, Finn.”
“I know.”
Too long. Every part of my training screamed “too long”—it said “abort,” said “find another way,” said a plan with that kind of exposure wasn’t a plan at all.
But the alternative was moving four people across open ground with nothing in our favor.
Stacking the two options against each other, as I’d been doing, I kept arriving at the same unwelcome answer.
“They move the second I’m in position. Fast, no hesitation, no going back for anything.”
She nodded slowly. “And if something goes wrong?”
I held her gaze. “It won’t.”
A beat passed between us, long enough for me to catch the flicker behind her eyes—not doubt, exactly, but the awareness that “it won’t” was a refusal, not a plan. She didn’t call me on it.
“What’s the modification?”
I exhaled and glanced toward the ceiling, running the sequence through my head as I had been since three in the morning.
“There’s a car sitting on the south end of the block. Visible from the roof.”
She understood before I had finished. “You’re going to set off the alarm.”
“I shoot out the window from the roof. The alarm kicks on, drawing anything in the immediate area south. That clears a line north to the Suburban and buys me time on the street.”
“And we escape while they’re chasing the noise,” she said.
“Exactly.”
She turned it over in silence, her eyes moving to the window and back. “How long does that buy us?”
“Most car alarms run for four minutes before they cycle off. I won’t need half that—the second that glass breaks, I’m already moving.”
“Four minutes.” She said it slowly, as if she could hold each second individually and test its weight. “That’s not much room.”
“It’s enough, Libby. I promise it’s enough.”
Her chin lifted. A single, sharp nod.
“Okay.”
No qualification. No conditions. Just trust—three lives worth of it: hers, Fiona’s, and Lily’s. All of it resting on desperation and the four-minute lifespan of a car alarm.
“Finn,” she said, using the tone that meant she needed me simply to be present with her.
I met her gaze.
“Come back.”
“I will.”
My voice was quieter this time, not a reassurance, but a declaration of the only outcome I intended to allow.
“Alright,” she said.
For a moment, neither of us moved.
* * *
We settled in the living room, backs against the wall, the couch still wedged against the front door where it had been since the first night.
Silence filled the house, broken only by the faint creak of old wood and indeterminate noises from the street.
Libby looked at
me, then reached over and took my hand.
I almost pulled back—not because I didn’t want it, but because she’d never done that before.
Not like this. Not outside the bedroom, where everything between us ran hot and urgent, where she opened up in ways that knocked the air out of me.
This was different. Her fingers laced through mine—smaller, softer.
I squeezed them without thinking.
Three weeks.
That’s all it had been. Three weeks since I’d walked into this house with a single objective. Three weeks since Libby had been nobody to me; a stranger, a complication, a variable I hadn’t accounted for and fully intended to work around.
And now she occupied space in my head and heart I’d kept empty for years, moving through my blood at the moments I needed to be sharp, needed to be the version of myself that kept people breathing.
I almost said it out loud, but didn’t. I swallowed it back down, where it had been living for three weeks, right alongside everything else I hadn’t found a way to be honest about yet—not with her, not with myself.
She shifted beside me, leaned forward, and kissed me.
Soft. No hands. No urgency. Just her mouth against mine, unhurried, like she had nowhere else to be and nothing left to prove.
I let it happen. That was the part I couldn’t explain away—not adrenaline, not proximity. I had all of that before. I knew what that felt like, and it didn’t feel like this.
It felt like something I was going to have to reckon with.
The old reflex kicked in, the one that had kept me alone and functional for the better part of twelve years—the part of my brain that ran threat assessments on everything, that cataloged exits and variables and liabilities before I’d even registered I was doing it.
My brain started screaming at me: This is how you lose focus.
This is how mistakes compound. This is how—
But underneath it, completely unfazed by the calculus, was the thought that this felt right.
She started to pull away.
I didn’t let her.
My hand found the back of her neck, fingers sliding into her hair. I drew her back. She came without resistance, easy and certain, as if she’d been waiting. I guided her into my lap; she straddled my hips. I wrapped both arms around her and held on.
She pressed her face into my neck, her breath warm against my skin, and one hand gripped the front of my shirt.
Neither of us spoke. The silence between us had stopped being empty sometime in the past week; it had filled itself in, grown dense with everything we hadn’t found the right words for yet.
My thumb traced a slow path along her arm without deliberate thought. She pressed closer in response.
“I don’t do this,” I said quietly.
She tilted her head just enough to look up at me, her eyes catching the thin bleed of light through the boards—dark, patient, and searching without pressure.
“Do what?”
“This. Holding someone. Staying in one place long enough for things to get—” The words caught, thick in my throat. “—like this.”
She studied my face for a long moment, unhurried.
“And yet,” she said softly.
Yeah. And yet.
I let out a breath that came close to a laugh without quite reaching it. “Yeah.”
Her hand loosened on my shirt and flattened against my chest instead—right over my heartbeat.
The silence was packed with everything neither of us had language for, with the reality waiting beyond those boarded windows, and with the knowledge that in a few hours, I’d walk out the front door into a street that had been actively trying to eat us for three weeks.
My arms tightened around her.
“I’m going to get us out,” I said, low, directed more at myself than at her.
She heard it anyway.
“I know you are.”
My jaw tightened. The plan ran its loop—the car, the roof, the four minutes, the variables I could account for and the ones I couldn’t.
I wanted to believe what I’d just said. Part of me did.
That was the part that had kept people alive before, the part that didn’t flinch at bad odds.
But I knew the difference between confidence and certainty, and I wasn’t going to lie to her, even now, even like this—except that I already had, and she’d taken it without question, and I didn’t know what to do with that.
But she said it as if she believed it completely, as if the possibility of any other outcome genuinely hadn’t occurred to her, and that trust—absolute and entirely unearned—broke me.
I pressed my lips to the top of her head.
Her body softened against mine, every last trace of tension leaving her, as if she’d finally located the single place in this broken world where she could stop bracing for what came next.
I tightened my grip and sat with that.
Fear coursed through my veins, the plan replaying in my mind, every variable scrutinized, every gap exposed.
But something else had taken root alongside it all.
I wasn’t just fighting for survival anymore.
I had something I refused to lose.
And in every way that mattered—in every way my training had ever warned me about—I now had something I could lose.
That changed everything.
Tomorrow loomed between us, unspoken.
The relentless loop had kicked in, the one that never shut off, keeping me alive and exhausted in equal measure.
So I did something I hadn’t done in a long time.
I shut it down.
Just for a minute.
I glanced down at Libby, still tucked against me, her head resting lightly on my chest. I let the silence wrap around us before changing the subject.
“So,” I said, a faint levity of humor in my voice, “I definitely know what you like in bed.”
She stiffened immediately.
There it was.
The blush crept up her neck and colored her cheeks, visible even in the dim light. I watched it spread with more satisfaction than I probably should have.
A quiet chuckle rumbled in my chest.
“Relax,” I murmured.
She huffed—half embarrassed, half amused—and pressed her face harder against my shirt as if she could hide there.
“You’re impossible,” she muttered into the fabric.
“Been told that.”
I shifted, angling down to catch her eye.
“What do you like? Or liked. Before all this.”
She hesitated.
That didn’t surprise me. Libby didn’t hand out pieces of herself easily. Every bit I’d gotten so far had come the hard way—through what she did, not what she said.
But after a second, she exhaled slowly and leaned back just enough to look up at me.
“I read,” she said.