Chapter 6
Finn
This doesn't change anything.
The biggest lie she's told me. And Jess has told me some good ones.
I watch her from the doorway while I button the flannel I dug out of my bag.
She adjusts Dean's IV drip without looking up, her fingers quick and sure, the henley—my henley—still loose around her hips.
My scent mixed with hers, sunk into her pores, woven through her hair.
Every breath I take in this corridor fills my lungs with proof.
She knows I'm here. She doesn't turn.
Outside, the second half of the hurricane throws itself against the clinic walls, and the plywood groans under the pressure.
Jess crosses the trauma bay to check Linda's splint.
I step in to swap the empty saline bag hanging beside Dean's bed, and our arms brush.
The contact lasts a fraction of a second—her elbow grazing my forearm, bare skin on bare skin.
She doesn't pull back. Not the way she would have yesterday.
Her hand hovers near mine for a breath before she moves to the next monitor, and her scent carries a warmth she's stopped trying to bury.
I let the moment pass without pushing. Jess isn't a woman you corner. She's a woman who comes to you or she doesn't, and whatever opened between us on that cot is still too new and too fragile for me to grab with both hands, no matter how badly I want to.
The restraint costs me more than bleeding would.
A crash from the west wing splits the air. Jess goes rigid beside me, her hands locking at her sides, and for one second the acrid spike of fear cuts through her scent. Then she shakes her head once, hard, and runs toward the noise. I'm right behind her.
Water pours through a fissure in the ceiling tiles where the roof buckled, flooding the hallway and pooling around the supply shelf. Rain hammers through the gap in sheets, drenching the linens, the backup blankets, two cases of bottled water we stacked against the wall twelve hours ago.
"We need to move the patients." Jess grabs a stack of dry sheets from the shelf and shoves them into my arms. "Dean first. He can't move on his own if this gets worse."
I nod. We work fast and silent, transferring Dean on his backboard to the east corridor, Linda limping beside us on her good leg while I steady her with one arm and brace Dean's board with the other.
Their kid Mike carries the lantern ahead of us, casting a wobbly circle of light across the flooded floor.
On the second trip, hauling the last of the salvageable supplies from the west wing, Jess's boot catches a patch of standing water. Her feet go out from under her and I have her before she hits the ground, my arms locking around her waist, her back against my chest.
Her body pressed flat against mine, her ribcage expanding under my hands, the back of her head against my collarbone.
Her scent floods me. Arousal and fear tangled together, a combination that sends every orc instinct I own into freefall, and for one held second the storm disappears, the clinic disappears, and the only thing left in the world is the place where her spine meets my body.
A section of gutter rips free outside and slams against the building. The sound cracks through the wall like a gunshot. Jess flinches, pushes off me, and keeps moving.
The front door blows open twenty minutes later.
Two brothers from the club—Colt and a prospect named Dawson—stumble through the entrance carrying a body between them. Soaked through, wind-shredded, covered in blood and plaster dust, they lower their cargo onto the treatment table and Colt seizes my arm, his hand trembling.
"Building came down on him. Jax and Dawson were pulling a family out of a collapsed apartment on Birch Street.
The second floor pancaked." Colt's grip tightens.
His voice drops. "Also—those crates Knox warned about?
Showed up at the gate before the storm hit.
Nobody touched them yet. They're still sitting out there. "
My stomach drops. Father's gifts. Sitting at the clubhouse gate in the rain. I shove it down—lock it behind whatever door I keep the clan shit behind—because Jax is gray on the table and there's no room for orc politics in this room right now.
Jax Steele lies on the table, gray-faced, breathing in shallow hitches that rattle through his lungs.
The wolf shifter prospect—twenty-eight, lean, scrappy, the kid who stayed late at the garage every night teaching himself to bleed brake lines because he wanted to prove he belonged.
Blood soaks through his shirt from half a dozen lacerations, and his left side bows inward at an angle that turns my stomach.
Jess rounds the gurney and her hands move across Jax's torso, palpating ribs, checking his airway, tilting his chin to read his pupils.
"Broken ribs, at least four." Her voice drops. "Probable internal bleeding. I need light, pressure bandages, and whatever clotting agent we have left."
I'm already pulling supplies. Bandages, gauze, the clotting powder from the second shelf, the surgical kit she reorganized last night while I held the lantern. Colt and Dawson stand back, dripping water onto the floor, wearing the same lost expression big men get when there's nothing left to hit.
"Hold him." Jess nods at me. "Both hands on his shoulders. He's going to buck when I set the ribs."
I pin Jax flat. The kid's eyes flutter open and fix on me—unfocused, scared, younger than his years.
"VP?"
"Right here, Jax. Hold still."
Jess's hands press into his left side and Jax screams. His body heaves under my grip, the wolf in him surging, his muscles contracting with shifter strength that nearly rips him off the table.
I hold. Lean my weight forward, my palms flat against his shoulders, keeping him pinned while she works.
The kid's blood soaks warm through my flannel and across my knuckles.
She stabilizes two ribs with tape and packing, moves to the lacerations, sutures the deepest one while I hold a clamp on the bleeder feeding it.
Her hands don't shake. Her breathing stays even.
She works like the storm outside doesn't exist, like the monitor beeping beside us is the only sound in the universe.
I've watched combat medics on documentaries Knox plays late at night. Jess makes them look clumsy.
Then she pulls back, checks the monitor, and the color drains from her face.
"He's losing too much blood. I need O-negative for a transfusion." She looks at Colt. "What's your type?"
"A-positive."
"Dawson?"
"B-neg."
Her mouth presses into a line. She reaches for the phone and then stops, because who is she going to call? The hospital evacuated. The blood bank probably sits underwater. Every road between here and the next clinic runs under six feet of storm surge.
I roll up my sleeve.
"O-negative. Take whatever you need."
Her head snaps toward me. "How do you—"
"Orc blood. Universal donor—works for shifters, humans, any species." I drag a chair beside the table and sit, holding my arm out, inner elbow up. "Hook me up, Kitten."
She grabs the transfusion kit from the emergency cabinet and swabs my arm with iodine. The needle slides in clean, a sharp pinch followed by the slow pull as my blood drains into the collection bag. I watch the line fill—dark green-red, the color of orc blood, richer and thicker than human plasma.
The bag fills. Jess connects it to Jax's IV line and the transfer begins, my blood running into Jax's veins while his shifter healing fights to close the wounds she's packed and sutured.
The pull deepens. My fingers tingle. The edges of my vision soften and the room sways, a subtle tilt that reminds me of riding in rough seas. I lock my fingers around the armrest and focus on Jess.
She moves between Jax and the monitor, adjusting flow rates, checking his pressure, her voice steady and low as she talks the kid through it. "Stay with me, Jax. Your body's accepting the transfusion. Your heart rate's climbing back."
"You're doing great," I tell her. Not Jax. Her. She looks at me, startled, and holds my gaze a beat longer than she needs to before she turns back to her patient.
Jax's monitor stutters.
The steady beep warps into an uneven skip, then flattens into a single sustained tone that fills the trauma bay like a scream.
"He's coding." Jess locks her hands over Jax's sternum, elbows straight, and starts compressions.
"Colt, hold pressure on that laceration.
Dawson, keep his legs still." Both men move without arguing.
One, two, three—I count with her in my head, watching her shoulders drive downward with each push, watching his ribcage cave under her palms and spring back, cave and spring, cave and spring.
I'm still connected to the line. The needle in my arm, the tube running into a bag that feeds into a boy whose heart stopped beating under our hands.
Lightheadedness wraps around my skull and squeezes, and I grip the chair arm and stay seated because if I pull this needle, Jax loses his blood supply and the extra seconds might be the ones that kill him.
"Come on, kid." The words scrape out of me, rough and thin. My blood pressure drops. The room tilts. I blink and force it level.
Jess doesn't stop. Thirty compressions, two breaths, thirty compressions, two breaths.
Her mouth pulls tight, her focus narrowing to the body under her hands—a ferocity that strips everything else from the room, a refusal to let this boy die.
Her arms tremble with exertion but she doesn't slow.
Her voice counts steady and clear, and the monitor screams its flat tone into the dark.
Colt braces Jax's legs against the table.
Dawson holds the IV bag overhead. Nobody speaks.
I want to tear apart whatever collapsed that building.
I want to rip the storm out of the sky with my bare hands and feed it to the ocean.
I channel every scrap of that fury into staying still, staying conscious, bleeding into a bag while the woman I love fights death to a standstill on a folding gurney in a clinic held together with plywood and nails.
The monitor blips.
A single spike on the green line. Then another. Then a third, weak and thready, the rhythm of a heart remembering how to beat again.
Jax gasps. His torso heaves, his eyes fly open, and his hand clamps around Jess's wrist and holds on.
Jess's knees buckle.
I rip the needle from my arm and catch her before she hits the floor, blood trailing down my forearm where the puncture weeps.
My hands close around her waist and her weight folds against me, her forehead dropping to my collarbone, her body trembling with an adrenaline crash that turns her limbs to water.
"I've got you."
"You gave a pint of blood, you shouldn't—"
"I said I've got you."
Her fingers curl into my flannel. Her face presses against my shirt, and warmth soaks through the fabric—tears she'd kill me for noticing, tears she'd deny with her last breath, tears that have nothing to do with weakness and everything to do with the cost of refusing to let a twenty-eight-year-old die on her watch.
I hold on. Breathe her in. Say nothing about the dampness spreading through my shirt, nothing about the trembling, nothing about the way her hands fist the flannel like she's anchoring herself to something solid in a world that won't stop moving.
The radio crackles on the counter.
"How's my prospect?" Knox's voice, rough with static and concern.
I keep one arm around Jess and reach for the handset with the other. "Stable. Doc Cooper saved him."
"Good. You guys good?"
The question catches me off guard. Knox doesn't usually ask that. Knox assumes I'm good, because I'm always good, because that's my job. "Yeah. We're good, brother."
"Knew you would be." The line cuts out.
I set the radio down and lower Jess into the chair. She wipes her face with the back of her hand, quick and rough, and then gets up to check Jax's vitals without meeting my eyes.
An hour later, Jax opens his eyes.
He blinks against the lantern light, licks cracked lips, and his gaze finds me sitting on the supply crate beside his bed.
"Boss gonna be pissed I got hurt."
"Boss is gonna be grateful you're alive, dumbass."
That gets a grin, crooked but real. "Thanks, VP."
"Thank the doc." I tilt my head toward Jess, who's cleaning up the transfusion equipment across the room. "I just bled a little. She did the hard part."
Jax's gaze follows mine to Jess. Even drugged and half-dead, he has the decency to look impressed.
Colt and Dawson settled in the waiting area, sleeping when they can, their wet coats drying on the backs of chairs. The storm rages outside, but a strange lull has fallen over the clinic in the last hour. The constant rattling has quieted to a low groan, a brief reprieve in the hurricane's assault.
Jess finishes cleaning. She crosses the room, stops beside me, and her palm presses flat against my jaw. Her thumb settles near the ridge of my broken tusk, close enough that I feel her warmth against the rough edge. Her hand is steady now. Her face is not.
"You did more than bleed a little," she says. "Thank you."
I lean into her touch and close my eyes.
Her palm against my skin, her pulse beating in her fingertips, her scent shifting like a tide turning—the walls easing back, the warmth flooding in, less afraid than an hour ago, less guarded than this morning, a degree closer to the woman who kissed me in a dark garden and meant it.
"Anything for you, Kitten." I open my eyes and hold her gaze. "Anything."
Her hand drops. She steps back. But not as far as before.
She's starting to believe me. I can see it in the way she doesn't square her shoulders, doesn't lock her jaw, doesn't reach for the armor she's worn every minute since that cot. I'm just a man with a hole in his arm and her tears on his shirt—she's starting to believe he's real.
The hope between my ribs cuts so deep I can't breathe around it. And underneath the hope, a terror I won't name—because if she believes me and I let her down, there won't be a wall thick enough to get her back.