Chapter 8
Finn
For the first time in thirty-eight years, my head shuts up.
Jess sleeps against my chest, her cheek pressed to the spot above my heart, one leg hooked over mine, her arm draped across my torso like she's pinning me down in case I get ideas about leaving.
The cot dips under our combined weight, the canvas stretched thin, and I don't care.
I'd sleep on broken glass right now and call it the best night of my life.
Her heartbeat lives inside mine.
Not a metaphor, not a feeling, not something I'm imagining because I want it too much.
Her pulse threads beneath my own, a second rhythm running half a beat behind.
Knox told me about this. Sat across from me in the garage months ago with grease on his hands and Sarah's heartbeat in his chest and tried to explain what a claiming bond feels like from the inside.
He used words like permanent and anchored and she's part of me now, and I nodded and said all the right things and understood none of it.
I understand now.
She dreams. I feel it, not images, not sound, but flickers of emotion rolling through the bond in uneven waves.
Safety first, the kind that comes from unconscious trust. Then a contentment so pure it catches in my throat, I tighten my arm around her shoulders and breathe through it because nobody has ever felt safe enough with me to sleep like this.
Not once. Not in thirty-eight years.
The storm faded an hour ago, the wind dropping from a scream to a groan to something closer to heavy breathing.
Rain still hits the windows in scattered bursts, but the structural shaking stopped, and the generator caught and finally stayed on.
The emergency lights cast the break room in dim amber that catches the edge of her jaw, the curve of her ear, the claiming mark on her neck.
I press my mouth against it. The skin runs hot, swollen at the edges where the bite broke through, the center darker where the punctures sank deepest. Already scarring over, raised ridges mapping the shape of my jaw, a permanent record of the moment she grabbed the back of my neck and said claim me and I stopped being a man with an ache in his bones and became a man with a mate in his arms.
She shifts in her sleep. Her fingers curl tighter, bunching the fabric against my chest, and the edge of her dream changes, still settled, still safe, but with something warmer underneath, an awareness of me even in unconsciousness.
She knows I'm here. Her body knows it, her blood knows it, and the feral thing behind my ribs that spent eight months clawing at the cage of my self-control drops onto its haunches and goes quiet.
Mine. She's mine, and I'm hers, and the word permanent doesn't make my skin itch the way it used to. It fits. Like a socket wrench clicking onto the right bolt after years of reaching for the wrong size.
The ceiling stares back at me while my mind races, but different from the usual churn, not the spiral of you're not enough, you'll never be enough, Knox would've done this better.
The thoughts that kept me awake at two in the morning rebuilding engines I'd already fixed because my hands needed work and my brain wouldn't stop tallying the ways I fell short.
Instead, my mind builds.
I'm going to marry this woman. The certainty sits in my gut like a stone I swallowed, smooth, heavy and immovable.
Not because Knox married Sarah and I'm following the pattern, not because the club expects it, not because claiming bonds lead to weddings the way rivers lead to the sea.
Because I want her name attached to mine.
Because I want to stand in front of my brothers and say this one chose me and mean it with every cell in my body.
I think about the apartment above the garage.
My place. One bedroom, a kitchenette that doubles as a workbench, a bathroom where the hot water runs out after ten minutes.
Bare walls except for the small painting tacked above the couch—me and Knox as kids, maybe six and ten, our mother standing behind us with her hands on our shoulders.
I grabbed it when I left the Bloodstone Mountains.
Rolled it up, shoved it in my jacket, carried it across two state lines, and hung it on the first wall that belonged to me.
I want her in my apartment. Her scrubs thrown over the back of a chair. Her medical textbooks stacked on the counter because she reads them in the morning with her coffee, not because she has to, because she can't stop learning. Her shampoo in the shower. Her boots by the door.
Her heartbeat skips beneath mine. A small flutter, the rhythm catching for half a second before it rights itself, and through the bond her dream shifts, the ease thinning, cooling at the edges, a thread of tension pulling taut.
A shutter slams.
Somewhere down the hallway, a piece of plywood works loose from its frame and catches the wind, cracking against the exterior wall with a sound like a rifle shot.
Jess flinches.
Her whole body jerks, a sharp, involuntary contraction that drives her elbow into my ribs and her face into my neck.
Through the bond, the spike hits like a fist to the solar plexus.
Fear. Not startled-by-a-loud-noise fear.
Old fear, the kind that tastes like dust and burning metal and the silence that follows an explosion, the one where your ears ring and the world goes white and you don't know yet if you're alive or dead.
I tighten my arms around her. Pull her closer until her head tucks under my chin and my body wraps around hers, broad enough to block everything, the sound, the dark, whatever ghost found her sleeping.
Knox made this sound once, when Sarah woke screaming the first week after Peter attacked the clubhouse. I heard the rumble through the wall, felt it in my bones from two rooms away. I didn't understand it then.
I push through the bond. Not words, because it doesn't carry language, but feeling: safety, presence, the frequency of I'm here and nothing will touch you while I'm breathing.
Her breathing stutters. Hitches and then evens out.
The fear recedes. I sense it pulling back into whatever recess it lives in, coiling down, banking itself for the next time a loud noise catches her. No claiming bite erases what the desert burned into her. But tonight, in this room, on this cot, she doesn't have to fight it alone.
She reaches for me without waking. Her fist curls into the fabric over my heart and holds on, knuckles pressing against bone, her face burrowing deeper into my neck.
I press my lips to the claiming mark and hold them there until the heat seeps from her skin into my mouth.
The feral thing in my chest lifts its head, watches through my eyes, and lies back down. Ours, protected, safe.
Our mother died well before we left the mountains. Years later, Father tried to force Knox into an arranged marriage, and Knox told him to go to hell. The old man cast him out. Knox walked down the mountain alone, and I followed, because a throne without my brother held nothing I wanted.
Knox built the club. Built the compound, the garage, the family Sarah fits into like she grew there.
I tagged along. Stood behind him, beside him, two steps back and one to the left like a good VP, a good brother, a good second.
Let the grin do the work. Made the brothers laugh, kept the bar stocked, handled the jobs Knox needed handled without asking questions, without asking for credit, without asking for anything because asking meant admitting I wasn't enough on my own.
Jess shifts in her sleep and something rolls through the connection—not a dream this time.
A feeling, half-conscious and unguarded, aimed at me the way a compass needle aims north.
Want. Not just desire, though that's there too, banked low and warm.
The want beneath the want to be near me, specifically me, the ache of reaching and finding me here.
Nobody has ever reached for me like that. Not as the brother who came with the package. Me.
I run my thumb along the scar on Jess's neck, my scar, my mark, my mate.
She kissed me first.
In the garden behind the clubhouse, fairy lights in the trees, Knox and Sarah's wedding reception thumping bass through the walls.
She grabbed my cut and pulled me down and kissed me with her whole body, her fists in the leather, her mouth fierce and certain, and I tasted champagne, gunpowder and lost track of everything else.
She chose me. Not Knox, not the position, not the club's VP or the president's brother. The man with the broken tusk and the jokes that run too long and the ache he's carried since he followed his brother out of the mountains because he didn't know who he'd be if he stopped following.
She saw through all of it. Every joke, every grin, every deflection. Looked past the charm and found the wound underneath and loves me anyway.
The bond hums between us. Her pulse layered under mine, steady now, the dream easing back.
Not second. Not to her. Not anymore.
The radio crackles at 5 a.m.
I reach for it without lifting my head, my fingers finding the handset on the floor beside the cot. Jess doesn't stir, her breathing deep and even against my throat.
"You two okay?" Knox's voice, rough with static and exhaustion.
I keep my voice low enough not to wake her. "We're good. Real good, you know."
"You claimed her."
Knox can hear it, the change in my voice, the settled quality that the claiming bite writes into your vocal cords when your mate's pulse runs beneath your own. He sounded the same way the morning after Sarah.
"Yeah."
When he speaks again, his voice scrapes raw. "Good. That's good, brother. Mom would've loved her."
My throat closes. The painting on the wall, the way she smelled like woodsmoke and the mountain wildflowers that grew outside our door.
"Yeah." The word comes out rough. "She would've."
"There's something we need to talk about when the storm clears." His tone shifts, guarded now. "The packages from Father."
My teeth clench. "I know."
"It can wait. Hold your woman. Be happy tonight."
"Planning on it."
The radio clicks off. I set the handset on the floor and press my face into Jess's hair.
Breathe her in. Her scent hits different now—the familiar base notes layered with the copper undertone of the bond in her veins, the claiming mark rewriting her scent to include mine, to mark her as taken in a language every orc on this coast can read.
The packages from Father. The clan reaching across years of silence with gifts nobody asked for, pulling at threads Knox wants to burn.
We'll deal with it. After the storm, after the cleanup, after I put a ring on this woman's finger and figure out how to build a future that doesn't depend on the mountain I came from.
But that's tomorrow's problem. Tonight I hold my mate and listen to her breathe.
"Finally."
Jax's voice carries from the trauma bay when I ease the break room door open. Dawn pushes gray light through the gaps in the plywood, pale and rain-washed, the color of a storm that spent itself overnight and left nothing but the mess behind.
I cross the hall and lean against the doorframe.
Jax grins at me from his cot. He looks like hell—bruised, bandaged, his left side strapped with enough tape to gift-wrap a motorcycle.
But his color holds pink instead of gray, and his eyes track clear, and the grin spreads wide enough to pull at the cut on his lip.
"Sarah owes me twenty bucks."
I flip him off.
He laughs. Then winces, his hand flying to his ribs, his face crumpling into a grimace that wipes the grin sideways. "Ow. Don't—don't make me laugh, VP. Everything's broken."
"Then stop being funny."
"I'm not. You're the one sneaking out of the break room looking like that." He shifts on the cot, careful of his ribs, settling onto his back with a hiss. "Knox is gonna lose it."
"Knox already knows and I was coming to check you were still alive."
Jax goes quiet. When he speaks again, the grin is gone from his voice. "She saved my life."
"Yeah."
"You picked a good one, VP."
"I know."
I push off the doorframe and head back down the hall. The break room door creaks when I slip through, and Jess shifts on the cot, blinking against the gray light. I ease down beside her and she rolls into me without fully waking, her cheek finding my collarbone, her fingers curling into my shirt.
Then her eyes open. Green and gold in the morning light, unfocused for a second before they find me.
She touches the claiming mark with her fingertips. Traces the edge of the scar where my teeth broke through.
"It's over," she murmurs. Her voice thick with sleep, her hair a mess, her face creased from the seam of my shirt.
I brush the hair off her forehead. Press my mouth against her temple.
"No, Kitten." I breathe the words into her hair. "It's just beginning."