Chapter 2
Finn
I hold the plywood flat against the window frame while Jess drives a screw into the upper corner, her drill whining, her mouth pressed into a line so hard the tendons in her neck stand out.
She hasn't looked at me once. Not when I carried the sheet across the parking lot.
Not when I braced it and our fingers overlapped on the edge.
Not when I said on your left and she flinched like the sound of my voice burned her.
Every time she shifts her weight, her scent rolls over me, something underneath both that I've been chasing for eight months like a dog after a car he'll never catch.
I volunteered for this. Knox asked Garrett and Rex. I said no before the names finished leaving his mouth, and my brother gave me that look, the one where his eyebrows don't move but his entire face says you're a moron and I'm going to let you prove it.
Knox is right. He's always right. He doesn't even have to try.
Three weeks I've spent trying to scrub Jess out of my head.
Picked up extra runs for the club. Rebuilt the transmission on Diesel's bike twice.
Once because it needed it, once because my hands needed something to do at two in the morning besides reaching for my phone to text a woman who won't text back.
I even went to Crabby Bill's on the boardwalk with Rex on a Tuesday night and let a redhead buy me a beer and I sat there the whole time smelling the wrong scent, hearing the wrong laugh, looking at a mouth that curved the wrong direction.
She drives another screw. Her shirt rides up as she stretches for the top corner, and a strip of skin flashes above her hip—tan, smooth, a tattoo I've never seen curling toward her spine.
My hands tighten on the plywood. I look at the wall behind her.
Think about transmission gear ratios and whether Diesel's clutch cable needs replacing.
The drill bites through the last screw and she steps back, brushing dust off her forearms.
"Next window."
Two words, flat and professional, like I'm a stranger she hired for manual labor.
I grab the next sheet from the stack and follow her down the corridor.
The clinic feels different empty. Too many rooms, too much echo, our footsteps bouncing off linoleum that squeaks under my boots.
Every step pushes her scent toward me in waves.
Gunpowder and vanilla. I caught it for the first time at one of Sarah's dinners, across a table loaded with Betty's pot roast, and I'd lost track of the conversation for a full minute trying to figure out what combination of woman smelled like a fired weapon dipped in cake batter.
Now I know. Jessica. Only her. The strangest combination, and my favorite scent in any world.
She holds the plywood against the next window. I line up a nail and drive it through with my palm, no hammer, the wood splitting around the metal, the frame shuddering.
"Impressive, right?" I flex my hand, grin at her. "Who needs a toolbox when you've got orc DNA and poor impulse control?"
Nothing. Not a flicker.
I line up the second nail. "Tough crowd."
"Why do you do that?"
My hand stops mid-swing. "Do what?"
"Act like everything's a joke."
The question sits between us like a live wire. Her eyes are on me now.
I should deflect. I'm good at deflecting. Knox calls it my superpower: the ability to steer any conversation toward a laugh so nobody looks too close at whatever I'm hiding behind it.
"Maybe because the alternative isn't fun for anyone."
She doesn't blink. Doesn't accept the easy answer. Keeps pinning me with a stare that strips the paint off every wall I've built, and the words spill out before I can stop them.
"I'm the spare brother, Jess. Always have been.
Knox is the president, the leader, the firstborn, who—.
I'm the brother who tagged along. The backup.
Second in the club, second in the family, second in every room I've ever walked into.
" My voice stays even but the nail bends in my grip.
I straighten it against the window frame.
"So yeah. I make jokes. Because if I'm funny, at least I'm something. "
Her expression shifts. Surprise first, cracking through the ice she's packed around herself, and then a softness she smothers so fast I almost miss it.
But I don't miss it, because I'm an orc, and I can smell the shift.
Defensiveness loosening, curiosity bleeding through, warmth she's trying to bury under all that anger.
I've been scenting that warmth for months. It's driving me out of my mind.
"Finn—"
My phone cuts her off. Knox's name on the screen.
"Hold that thought." I turn away, press the phone to my ear. "Yeah."
"How's the clinic?"
"Standing. Barely."
"And Jess?"
I glance over my shoulder. Jess has moved to the supply closet, pulling lanterns off the shelf, her back to me. "Alive. Hostile. The usual."
Knox's silence carries weight. "We got word from the border. Father sent packages. Could show up any day."
My grip tightens on the phone. "Here? To Nightfall Cove?"
"To the clubhouse. But if they can't get through the storm, they'll go to wherever they can find us. You're not exactly hiding, Finn."
The clinic. He means the clinic. If some courier from the Bloodstone Mountains rolls up to the front door carrying crates stamped with orc clan seals while she's standing right there —
She doesn't know. Sarah does, Knox told her, and she's kept it locked down because we asked her to.
But Jess has no idea that the VP cracking jokes and hammering plywood in her clinic is a runaway prince from a bloodline that stretches back six hundred years.
She thinks I'm a mechanic with a loud bike and a bad reputation.
"She doesn't need to deal with our family shit on top of a hurricane."
"If you're serious about her, she's going to find out eventually."
"I'm serious." The words land harder than I mean them to. Jess's shoulders tense at the supply closet—she heard the tone, not the words. I lower my voice. "That's exactly why I'm not dumping orc politics on her while she's trying to save lives."
Knox goes quiet. The kind that means he's choosing between pushing and letting me hang myself.
"Don't say I didn't warn you, brother."
The line goes dead. I pocket the phone and drive the next nail through the plywood with enough force to crack the board down the center.
Jess turns at the sound, her gaze moving from the split wood to me and staying there.
"I'll get another sheet," I say, and walk out before she can ask what the call was about.
The kid comes in around six with a gash across his scalp that's pumping blood down his face and soaking the collar of his Star Wars t-shirt. His mother carries him through the front door sideways, both of them drenched, the wind slamming the door shut behind them hard enough to rattle the frame.
Jess transforms.
I've seen it before. At Sarah's place when a neighbor's kid fell off the porch railing, at the Fourth of July cookout when a firework misfired and singed Colt's arm.
The moment someone needs a medic, the guarded woman with the walls and the sharp tongue disappears, and this other version of Jess steps forward.
Commanding. Steady. A force of nature that makes the actual hurricane outside feel like weather.
"On the table. Hold his hand and keep talking to him." She snaps her gloves on and tilts the boy's chin toward the light, parting the bloody hair with sure fingers. "Hey, buddy. What's your name?"
"J-Jayden." His lip trembles. Tears and blood mix on his cheeks.
"Jayden. Cool name. Did you know hurricanes have names too? This one's Maren. Pretty lame name for a hurricane, right?"
A wet hiccup. "Yeah."
"I bet you could name a way better hurricane. What would you call it?"
"Uh..." His face scrunches. "Destructo-nator."
"See? Way better. Hold still for me, Jayden. You're going to feel a pinch." She glances up, at me. "Gauze."
I'm already reaching for it. I have the packet open and the strip folded before her hand extends, and when she takes it our fingers brush and her scent spikes—surprise, warm and quick, because I knew what she needed before she asked.
She numbs the wound and starts stitching.
Six neat sutures while Jayden tells her about his dog and his Lego collection and the treehouse his dad built that probably blew away, she listens to every word, asks follow-up questions, laughs at a joke about his dog eating homework.
The kid stops crying by the second stitch. By the fourth, he's grinning.
His mother mouths thank you across the table, tears streaming, and Jess nods once without breaking stride.
I hand her the bandage before she reaches for it.
Afterward, the mother carries Jayden out to the waiting area where an evacuation volunteer will drive them to the shelter inland. Rain hammers the plywood we spent two hours bolting over every window on the ground floor, and the building groans under the wind.
Jess strips her gloves and drops them in the biohazard bin, washes her hands, and then rolls her shoulders like she's shaking off a weight.
"You were amazing."
She stiffens. Shakes her head. "I did my job."
"That kid came in terrified and you had him laughing while you stitched his scalp." I lean against the doorframe, arms crossed, keeping my voice steady. "That's not a job. That's a gift."
She turns. Her eyes narrow. She's trying to fit sincere-Finn into the box she's built for me. The flirt. The joker. The playboy VP who can't be serious about anything, least of all her.
"Don't do that." Her voice is quiet.
"Do what?"
"Be..." She gestures at me, frustrated. "This."
"Honest?"
She holds my gaze for two beats, and I watch the defensive anger thin out until all that's left is the curiosity she's been fighting since the garden. Her scent shifts—warmer, more open, a thread of heat winding through the caution that makes my hands itch to close the distance between us.
I don't. Because if I touch her now she'll bolt, and I'd rather stand in this hallway smelling her want and saying nothing than push her back behind a wall that took me months to get her to peek over.
The radio on the counter crackles.
"National Weather Service has upgraded Hurricane Maren to Category 4. Landfall expected within four hours. All residents in coastal zones are advised to seek immediate shelter."
My stomach drops. Not for the storm. For her.
This building. The two of us alone inside it while a Cat 4 hurricane tears the coast apart, no evacuation route, no backup, no one coming until the wind dies.
And if a single shingle flies through a window, if the roof buckles, if the storm surge floods the first floor—if anything happens to her—I'll tear this town apart with my bare hands and it won't matter because she'll already be gone and I'll already be done.
Jess reaches across the counter and clicks the radio off. Her hand trembles once before she flattens it against the surface.
"Guess we're in this together." I keep my voice light. Easy.
She has no idea how much that sentence costs me.