Chapter 10
Finn
I wake up with a mouthful of Jess's hair and her cold feet press against my calves, both of them, shoved between my legs like I'm a heating pad she ordered off the internet.
Her elbow digs into my ribs and her breathing rattles with the faint whistle of someone who sleeps with her mouth open and will deny it under oath.
Best morning of my life.
Seventh best morning, technically. Every morning since she moved in has ranked higher than the one before, and the bar keeps climbing.
I lie here with her hair in my mouth, her frozen toes against my skin, the bond humming between us low and warm like an engine idling, and I think about what's different about the apartment.
Her coffee mug next to mine on the counter.
Hers reads I survived residency and all I got was this mug.
Medical textbooks line up on the shelf I cleared, alphabetized, because of course they are.
The woman organized a triage bay during a hurricane and arranges her books by author's last name.
Her jacket on the hook next to my cut. Boots by the door, laces tucked in.
Her scent woven through everything. The sheets, the couch cushions, the towels in the bathroom.
My apartment smells like us now, not me alone, and the orc in my blood hums at the difference.
Engine grease and loneliness used to fill this place.
Now it's gunpowder and vanilla and the warm copper trace of the claiming bond running through both of us.
She rolls over and her knee drives into my thigh. Through the bond, contentment radiates steady and deep, the frequency of a woman sleeping harder than she has in years. No flinching tonight. No desert dreams. No sharp fear cutting through the dark at two in the morning.
I bury my face in her hair and breathe her in.
The necklace sits in the drawer beside our bed. Mom's twin peaks pendant. I think about it every morning. Think about the woman who wore it, the one in the painting on our wall, her face soft in a way I've half-forgotten and half-invented over the years.
The anger from last week still burns, but duller now.
Low embers instead of open flame. Knox threw the war axe and armor into the fire pit without a word, he let me keep the jewelry—Mom's things—but the look on his face when I reached for them told me he'd considered burning those too.
My brother builds walls so fast he sometimes bricks himself in. Always has.
I need to talk to him. Not want to. Need to.
Jess shifts against me, mumbles a word that might be "coffee" or "don't," and burrows deeper into the pillow. I ease out from under her, tuck the blanket around her shoulders, and pull on jeans and a flannel.
Morning light cuts through the kitchen window and catches the painting above the couch.
I take the necklace from the drawer and slide it into my pocket.
The garage smells the way it always does—brake fluid and metal shavings.
Knox lies under a Chevy Silverado, his boots sticking out from beneath the chassis, a ratchet clicking in a rhythm I've heard since I first picked up a wrench.
The bay doors stand open to let the September air through.
Sawdust and salt breeze roll across the concrete.
Garrett runs a chainsaw through a downed oak at the far end of the lot, the trunk splitting clean each time he leans his weight into the cut.
The rest of the compound holds quiet, most of the brothers still running cleanup crews through the neighborhoods the hurricane hit hardest.
I grab a stool and sit without speaking.
He keeps working. The ratchet clicks. A bolt drops into a pan with a metallic ring. His boots shift as he repositions under the truck.
Five minutes pass. Ten. Fifteen.
The silence between brothers carries weight that silence between strangers doesn't. Knox and I have done this since I followed him off the mountain—sat in the same room and let the quiet do the heavy lifting.
Sometimes it works. Sometimes it festers.
Today it hovers in the middle, neither comfortable nor hostile, waiting for one of us to tip it.
Knox slides out on the creeper. Grease streaks his jaw and both forearms. He sits up, grabs a rag from the workbench, and meets my eyes for the first time in a week.
"I'm sorry I burned the clan gifts without asking you."
No preamble. Knox doesn't circle anything; he drives through it headfirst, and when he's wrong, the apology arrives the same way—blunt and unpolished and difficult to argue with.
I pull the necklace from my pocket and hold it up. The twin peaks pendant catches the light from the open bay door, throwing a faint amber glow across my knuckles.
Knox stares at it. His hands go still on the rag. His throat works once, twice, a swallow that costs him more than he'd admit.
His voice drops to gravel. "She'd want you to have it."
The pendant swings between us. Two mountain peaks joined at the base, the Bloodstone range where we grew up, where our mother planted a garden outside the royal quarters and sang songs from the border territories while the warlords sharpened their axes.
"Do you think he deserves us going back?"
Knox drags the rag across his knuckles. Doesn't look at me. "I think he's a manipulative old bastard who'd say anything to get what he wants. And I think the lung rot's been eating at him for years. So maybe."
"If he dies and we never—"
"Then that's his choice." Knox folds the rag into a square, precise and controlled, the way he handles everything that threatens to crack him open. "He had twenty years to be a father instead of a warlord. He chose the throne."
He's not wrong. Our father chose power over his sons, and the cost of that choice belongs to him. But the cost of never looking back—that one's ours.
"I'm not saying go back." I keep my voice level. "I'm saying maybe we don't have to burn everything that reminds us where we came from."
Knox meets my eyes. Holds them long enough that the hard certainty in his face gives an inch, the lines around his mouth loosening.
"You're right." He drops the rag on the bench. "I'm sorry."
The apology isn't perfect. It doesn't cover the war axe that belonged to our grandfather, or the armor etched with sigils older than the clan wars, all of it turned to smoke and ash in a fire pit while the brothers watched.
But Knox standing in the gap between his pride and my pain, handing me two words that didn't come easy—that's enough.
For now, it's enough.
I find him in the office two hours later.
The clubhouse is half-repaired after the storm, tarps covering the section of roof the wind stripped, tools and lumber stacked against the far wall.
Knox hunches over his desk, paperwork spread across the surface, a mug of coffee pushed to one side.
Sarah's cardigan hangs on the back of his chair, and the sight of it, that small domestic detail in a room built for club business, reminds me how far we've come from the mountain.
He opens a drawer before I ask.
A small box rests in his palm. Dark wood, carved with orc symbols I recognize from the royal quarters. The craftsmanship is old—pre-war, maybe older, mountain smith work from before the clan wars turned every forge toward blades and armor. He sets it on the desk between us.
I lift the lid.
A ring. Dark stone set in carved metal, the band etched with a pattern that mirrors the twin peaks pendant: the Bloodstone range, stylized, reduced to a circle small enough to fit a woman's finger.
Our mother wore it. Her mother before that, and her mother before that, back through generations of Stone women who married into the clan and carried the mountain in their blood.
Knox holds it out. His face gives me nothing, but his eyes hold steady.
"You sure?" The question scrapes past a lump I didn't expect.
"Mom pressed it into my hand the year before she died. Told me to carry it until my brother needed it." His voice stays even. "It was never mine to give Sarah. It was always yours, Finn. Mom meant it for your mate."
The words land in my chest and lodge there.
Knox carried this ring for all this time, for me.
Through the escape down the mountain. Through building the club from nothing.
Through meeting Sarah, claiming her and marrying her.
He kept it and never put it on his wife's finger because it wasn't his to give.
Because the tradition said first, and Knox, the firstborn who spent his whole life going first, held it for me.
"You found her, Finn. Take it."
I lift the ring from the box. The metal warms against my skin, heavy and smooth, and it hits me in a place I didn't know could still bruise.
My mother's hand wearing this band while she stirred a pot over the fire.
My grandmother's hand, dark-knuckled and strong, pressing it flat against her chest during the clan songs.
Generations of women who loved hard and held tight in a world that tried to grind them down.
A ring small enough to fit Jess's finger. My heritage in a circle.
"She might need more time. Humans do things different."
"Brother, you bit her. The ring's a formality." Knox cuts me off, and a smile crosses his lips. "Ask me how I know."
I choke on a laugh that comes out rough. "Your wife?"
"Yeah, my beautiful, stubborn wife."
I close my hand around the ring and hold on.
The apartment holds the dark like a warm hand when I get back that night.
Jess lies across the bed in one of my t-shirts, her legs tangled in the sheets, her hair loose against the pillow. The claiming mark peeks above the collar, silvering at the edges. Through the bond I feel her. Present, warm, a current running low and steady.
The ring sits in my jacket pocket. Twelve feet away, hanging on the hook by the door. I can feel its weight from here.
"I want kids." She says it to the ceiling, arms folded behind her head, voice casual in the way that means she's terrified. "Two at least. Maybe more."
Through the bond, I feel her nerves. The fear of wanting too much, of saying it out loud and having someone tell her she's being unreasonable, or too old at thirty-two, or too intense, or too much. The old wound from the ex who looked at her open heart and called it a problem.
I prop myself on one elbow and look at her. "Hello to you too, Kitten. Then we won't wait. Not long."
Her head turns. "Finn, it's been two weeks."
"We've been in love for eight months. We were stupid about it."
She opens her mouth. Closes it. The bond flares with surprise and then a deeper warmth, a loosening in her chest that fills the space between us with heat. A woman realizing she can ask for the life she wants and not get laughed at.
"Last guy told me I was broken. That the nightmares and the flinching and the way I can't sit with my back to a door made me too hard to love.
" She doesn't name him. She doesn't have to.
The bond tightens around an old bruise, and I feel her brace, the muscle memory of a woman who handed someone her worst scars and got told they were ugly.
"He was a pussy." I pull her toward me until her back fits against my chest. Press my mouth to the claiming mark and feel the bond carry the words deeper than my voice can reach. "You're the bravest person I know and you're perfect the way you are, Kitten."
She's quiet for a long time. Her fingers lace through mine, and the bond hums with a feeling she doesn't name but I recognize—relief. The specific relief of a woman who braced for impact and got held instead.
"We'll have all the kids," I tell her. "When, not if."
"Are you proposing?"
"Not yet." I tighten my arm around her. "You'll know when I am."
She laughs. The surprised, wet sound of someone who built an entire life around lowered expectations and keeps getting more than she planned for.
I hold her through it. Let the bond carry what I can't say with my mouth pressed against her hair—the future I'm building around her one morning at a time.
She falls asleep against my chest. Her rhythm evens out, deep and slow, her fingers still threaded through mine. The bond settles between us like a banked fire, warm and steady.
I lie in the dark and listen to her breathe and feel the ring pulling at me from across the room. A circle of carved metal holding four generations of Stone women who loved fiercely.