Chapter 5
Jess
The silence wakes me.
Not a sound, not a voice, not the radio—the absence of everything.
The hurricane's roar cut through my dreams for hours, a relentless shredding howl that rattled the walls and turned the clinic into a tin can in a blender.
Now the air sits heavy and still, pressing against my eardrums like a held breath.
I roll off the cot and plant my boots on the linoleum. The generator coughs back to life somewhere in the guts of the building, and amber emergency lights flicker on, casting the break room in a dim glow.
The eye of the storm. The calm between the walls of wind, the pocket of dead air that buys us an hour, maybe two, before the back half swings through and tries to finish what the front half started.
I learned about hurricane eyes in a meteorology brief at Camp Leatherneck, sandwiched between an IED refresher and a lesson on heat-stroke triage. Funny, the things that stick.
I check my watch. Six-twelve AM. The patients need vitals. The spinal case needs his IV swapped, the woman with the broken arm needs another round of pain management, and the teenager should have fluids by now.
Finn's cot sits empty. Sheets rumpled, pillow dented with the impression of his head, his leather cut draped over the foot rail. I stare at the dent for two seconds longer than I should.
The supply closet door stands open at the end of the hall, and I duck inside to check what we have left. Three IV bags. Two rolls of surgical tape. The saline reserves hold, but the morphine supply runs thin enough to make my stomach clench. I'm counting ampules when his shadow fills the doorway.
"Patients are stable." Finn leans against the frame, arms crossed, filling the opening the way he fills every space he enters.
"Checked their vitals ten minutes ago. Dean's pressure is holding.
Linda's sleeping, and their kid Mike drank two bottles of water and asked when he could go home. The Bradleys are doing okay."
The Bradleys. He knows their names. When they came through the door last night, I triaged injuries—spinal, compound fracture, walking wounded. Three problems to solve as fast as possible, three bodies to stabilize before the pain got ahead of me. I didn't stop to ask who they were.
But Finn did.
I line up the ampules on the shelf and keep counting. "You checked vitals?"
"I watched how you did it last night. I paid attention."
My fingers hesitate on the last ampule. Of course he did. He's been paying attention for months, noticing things about me I didn't realize I let show. I keep trying to chalk it up to charm, the warmth he turns on for everyone, but the excuse stopped fitting weeks ago.
"How's Dean's pain?" I keep my voice clinical. "Scale of one to ten, what did he say?"
"Didn't ask a number. But he's grinding his teeth in his sleep and his hands keep fisting the sheets." Finn pauses. "That's bad, isn't it."
It's bad. I count the morphine ampules one more time, hoping the number changes.
It doesn't. Four left. Dean needs a dose every four hours to keep ahead of the spinal pain, and we're at least twelve hours from medevac routes reopening.
The math doesn't work. I can manage his pain or I can keep a reserve for emergencies, but I can't do both.
"I can cut his dose in half and supplement with the ibuprofen," I say, more to myself than to Finn. "It won't hold him, but it's—"
"There's a vet clinic two blocks south." Finn straightens off the doorframe. "Animal-grade painkillers. Same compounds, different packaging. I passed it on the ride in—front window's boarded but the side door looked flimsy."
I look at him. "You want to break into a vet during a hurricane."
"During the eye of a hurricane." He holds my gaze. "Tell me what you need and I'll get it."
He means it. He'd walk into that storm for a box of medication because I need it, and the simplicity of that offer sits in my chest like a stone I can't swallow around.
"Ketamine," I say. "Tramadol if they have it. Grab anything with a dosage chart on the label—I can calculate the conversion. And Finn." He stops in the doorway. "Be back before the eye passes. I mean it."
He grins. "Miss me already?"
"I'll miss your blood type if someone starts hemorrhaging."
He's gone before I can take the words back, and the clinic feels too big without him in it.
He returns in fourteen minutes with a bag stuffed with vials and a laminated dosage chart he pulled off the vet clinic's wall. Rain darkens his shoulders and plasters his hair flat against his neck, but the eye still holds—pale gray sky visible through the gap in the plywood over the front door.
I sort through the vials on the counter, checking labels, calculating conversions in my head. The ketamine is clean. The tramadol will bridge the gap between morphine doses. Dean Bradley will make it through the night without me choosing between his pain and someone else's emergency.
"This works." I line the vials up beside the morphine ampules. My hands tremble, and I flatten them on the counter. "This actually works, Finn."
"Good." He leans against the counter beside me. Close enough that his arm brushes mine. "You had that look."
"What look?"
"The one where you're doing math in your head and the answer keeps coming up wrong." His voice drops the teasing edge. "I don't like that look."
I squeeze past him in the doorway. His arm doesn't move. I have to turn sideways, and my shoulder drags across his chest, and his scent hits me full force—warm and deep and entirely inhuman. The one my hindbrain chases even when my forebrain screams at me to stop inhaling.
His henley hangs past my hips. Black and soft, the collar stretched. I should have changed hours ago. The supply closet holds extra scrubs. I didn't reach for them.
I know why I didn't. I'm not ready to name it.
The break room closes around us. Two cots eating up the floor, one narrow aisle between, the vending machine glowing blue-white in the corner, its compressor humming in the quiet. Finn follows me in and the room shrinks by half.
I drop onto my cot and press the heels of my hands against my eyes. Sixteen hours since the first patient came through the door. My shoulders ache. The adrenaline that carried me through the night drained out somewhere around four AM and left nothing behind but a bone-deep exhaustion.
"You should sleep," he says.
"Can't."
"Jess—"
"If I close my eyes right now, I'll hear it.
" I don't mean to say it. The words fall out of me the way confessions do when you're too tired to hold the door shut—loose and unguarded, landing in the quiet between us like shrapnel.
I drop my hands from my face, and Finn stands a few feet away with an expression I've never seen on him. No charm. No humor. No deflection.
"The convoy," I say, because apparently my mouth has disconnected from the part of my brain that knows how to shut up. "Every time something hits the roof, I'm back in that vehicle. Twelve hours of holding it together and my body still thinks a falling branch is an IED."
He doesn't move toward me. Doesn't reach for me. He crouches down the way he did during the flashback—bringing himself to my eye level instead of towering over me—and rests his forearms on his knees.
"The last guy I was with told me that my PTSD was too much to handle.
" The words taste bad. "The nightmares, the flinching, the way I'd freeze in a parking lot if a car backfired.
He stuck around for four months and then he said I was exhausting to love.
" I stare at the floor between my boots. "He wasn't wrong."
"He was wrong."
"You don't know that. You've seen one flashback, Finn. One bad night. There are hundreds of them. They don't stop. They don't get smaller or easier. And eventually everyone gets tired of—"
"I love you."
The words hit the air between us and detonate.
No big speech. No buildup. Three words that fall out of him, his face registering the shock of it half a second after his mouth moves—like his body committed before his brain caught up.
I stop breathing.
"You—" I can't finish the sentence. My pulse roars so loud I can barely hear my own voice over it.
"I love you." He says it again, slower, like he's testing the weight of it. His hands hang between his knees. He doesn't reach for me. "I've loved you for months, since before the storm. And I am not going to get tired of you."
"You don't know me." My voice cracks on the last word. "You've seen me stitch wounds and bark orders. That's not—you haven't seen what it's like at two AM when I can't stop shaking and I can't explain why and there's nothing you can do to fix it."
"I sat on a floor and talked about motorcycle chains for twenty minutes while you came back from wherever the blast took you.
" He holds my gaze. "I've seen war too, Kitten.
The clan wars in the mountains—orcs don't fight clean.
I know what it leaves behind." His voice drops. "I didn't run. I'm not going to."
The denial sits in my throat. Because he did sit on that floor.
He crouched in front of me and he stayed, and he didn't touch me when every other man would have grabbed, he didn't ask me to explain, and he didn't look at me like I was broken.
He looked at me like I was the only thing in the room that mattered.
"This is a terrible idea," I say.
"The worst." His mouth doesn't smile, but his eyes shift—fierce and open, cracking through the charm like a fist through drywall.
Suddenly, I throw myself at him and kiss him.
Not a soft first-time kiss. Not the champagne-blurred press of mouths in Sarah's garden weeks ago.
I grab the front of his shirt with both fists and haul him down to me, and the sound he makes against my mouth—a sharp, bitten-off noise of surprise that dissolves into a groan—breaks eight months of denial in a single breath.