by Anya Nowlan
Thirteen
Hanna
Hanna was having trouble staying detached and uninvolved after the bombshell Foster had just dropped on her. It was clear it hurt him to even say what he had said out loud, and Finn still hadn’t uttered a word.
She let the silence carry on for a moment, giving the brothers a chance to collect themselves. Losing someone so close to you was a major life-changing event. And the fact the brothers hadn’t even gotten a chance to say goodbye was tearing her up inside.
She wasn’t supposed to get emotionally attached to her patients, but it was hard not to feel for what Finn and Foster were going through.
Still, she had a job to do, and she couldn’t do it if she let her own feelings get in the way. At least now she knew why the brothers had been so out of sorts – they were grieving. Or, more accurately, they were suppressing their grief and channeling it into anger, instead.
“Thank you for telling me,” she said, looking from Foster to Finn. “I am very sorry for your loss.”
Now that they had been honest with her, she had to tread especially carefully to not betray the trust they’d put in her. From what she’d gathered by the overall confusion about their recent behavior, it was entirely possible she was one of the few people they had actually told about their mother’s death.
I don’t know what I would do if I lost my mom…
“I don’t even know anymore why we kept it a secret. At first, I thought it would be easier if no one knew… I didn’t want their pity,” Foster said.
Finn crossed his arms in front of him, clearly still uncomfortable with discussing this at all. But now that his brother had started things off…
“I thought going straight back into our lives after the funeral would help us move on,” Finn said. “At first, it seemed to work. But then… I don’t know. It all bubbled up and spilled over.”
“You tried to make it go away,” Hanna replied. “But there is no quick-fix when it comes to loss. You have to wade through it, no matter how unpleasant. Or else it starts to pop up in other areas of your life. Don’t forget you can lean on others when things get tough. That’s why I’m here,” she said with a small smile.
“I’m still not sure any of this,” Finn vaguely gestured around the room, “is going to help.”
At least his argument was half-hearted at best, this time. Hanna got the feeling she was really actually getting through to the brothers. If they could keep up this level of honesty, there was hope yet.
“It can’t hurt, can it?” she gently suggested, raising a brow at him. “You yourself said, what you’ve been doing or not doing to cope with your loss hasn’t been working. Why don’t you give me a shot? I’m the one with the fancy diplomas, after all.”
“And you sure love to show them off,” Foster interjected, wagging his brows at the framed pieces of paper on the wall.
“You do know anyone can print those off online these days?” Finn added.
Back to their old ways already, Hanna thought, suppressing a smile. Best not to encourage them.
The session with Finn and Foster had been pretty uneventful after their big reveal about their mother. Hanna couldn’t blame them for not wanting to dwell on that right after finally telling someone about it. So she let them make their jokes, and flirt, and talk about hockey, and bicker with each other.
The key here was patience, and she had plenty of that. Luckily, as angry as Matt had been after the brothers scared off Johnny, Finn and Foster hadn’t been blacklisted from the premises yet. Convincing her boss that she was actually making progress with the brothers hadn’t been an easy sell, but somehow she’d pulled it off.
Now alone in her office, going over her schedule for tomorrow, she was interrupted by a knock on the door.
“Come in,” she called out, slipping her feet back into the shoes lying on the carpet under her desk.
It was Matt that poked his head in, adjusting his glasses and smiling at her.
“Hey. Some of us our going to go out for drinks. You care to join us?” he asked.
Hanna looked around her desk, with her laptop humming softly in front of her and papers strewn all about.
“I still have some things to take care of,” she replied, biting her lip. “Raincheck?”
“Sure,” Matt said. “Don’t work too hard.”
He closed the door, giving her a little wave before disappearing. She could hear some voices in the hall, but couldn’t make out what they were saying. Letting her shoulders slump, she sank deeper into her chair.
Truth was, she was done with work. Had been for a while, actually. She had been keeping herself busy with double- and triple-checking everything, putting off actually going home.
She still didn’t feel totally safe in her apartment all alone. The door would seem too flimsy, and she’d go around checking the windows multiple times. She’d already installed two deadbolts, and had contacted a company to get a security system installed.
Some would think her paranoid, but those people hadn’t gone through what she had. They didn’t know what it felt like to feel absolutely helpless and immeasurably afraid.
So why didn’t she take Matt up on his offer and go with him, be around people? Because that scared her, as well.
Vince had connections all over the country. Criminals like him tended to stick together, for some reason. A sense of brotherhood and all that. That type of bond seemed to be especially strong in the shifter community, and Vince and his fellow thugs were no exception.
Seeing as she had stumbled onto shifters even in her neighborhood bar, she was feeling particularly cautious. She smiled as she thought back on that night, meeting Finn and Foster on the dance floor. Who would have thought she would get so attached to the men?
She was almost sure Vince was looking for her now that she’d disappeared from Florida. And she didn’t want to know what he would do to her when he found her. It would not be a happy reunion, that was for sure.
Absentmindedly twirling a finger in her hair, she killed some more time sitting in her office, organizing all the paperwork she’d filled out and looking at some cute kitten videos to get her mind off of Vince. After the third replay of a tabby seeing snow for the first time, she decided to call it a night.
Grabbing her purse and coat, she made her way outside, through the mostly dark hallway. She almost jumped when her phone suddenly rang in her pocket, and she fished it out while shouldering the glass doors open and waving to the security guard rounding the corner.
She frowned when she didn’t recognize the number on the screen, but answered the call anyway. It could be a patient in need, after all.
“Hello?” she said, her heels clicking on the asphalt as she made her way to the parking lot.
There was nothing but silence on the other end. Or maybe someone breathing? She couldn’t really tell. But in combination with her just having thought about Vince, the whole thing gave her the creeps.
Picking up her pace, she shoved her free hand into her bag and got out her keys, clutching them tightly between her fingers.
“Hello?” she repeated again, feeling the hair on the back of her neck prickle.
After no answer, she hung up. Scanning her surroundings, as if she was expecting someone to jump out of the shadows at any moment, she pressed the button on her keys and unlocked her car. Rushing to get inside, she threw her purse on the backseat and climbed in, pulling the door closed after her.
Once she got the engine going and was pulling out of the lot, she had calmed down some. Getting a hold of herself, she realized she had obviously been overreacting. Some random person probably just butt-dialed her, and she was too busy thinking about the ghosts of her past to see how paranoid she was being.
Soon, she would be home, curled up on the couch, drinking a glass of wine behind her double-dead-bolted door, and everything would be alright. That’s what she was telling herself, at least.
Yet all her reasoning aside, she still couldn’t shak
e the feeling that she was being watched.
Fourteen
Finn
Finn was sitting in the parking lot of the counseling center, staring at the phone in his hand. It was the second time today his father had called him, and the second time he wasn’t going to answer. Hearing the sadness in his dad’s voice was the worst thing to experience, and he couldn’t deal with that right now.
I’ll call him back later, he promised himself.
It’s not that he didn’t want to be there for his dad, but he never seemed to know what to say. What could he even say? There were no words that could lessen the pain of losing one’s mate.
It was pretty much the worst thing a shifter could go through, and he couldn’t imagine what his father had to be dealing with.
Relationships worked a little differently for shifters. The concept of soulmates might be the subject of sappy romantic comedies and little else for humans, but for shifters, it was all too real. When they met that one person meant to complete them, that was that. The pull would be too strong to resist, the feelings too intense to ignore.
That’s what he’d heard, at least. He had never met his mate, as far as he was aware. But he knew being so irrevocably bonded to someone meant losing that person had to be hell.
His mother’s face popped into his mind’s eye, the way she’d looked when he last saw her. Smiling, her hair falling down her shoulders as their whole family sat down at the dinner table back in Shifter Grove.
Finn pushed the image aside. Maybe someday he could find solace in those kinds of memories. Right now they only served to remind him what he’d lost. But his thoughts kept going back to shifters and mates.
He knew he and Foster would have more trouble than most finding their mate, if they would ever be so inclined. Neither of them had ever expressed any sentiments about settling down, and they definitely weren’t ready for anything serious right now. But if they were ready sometime down the line, they were all but sure to imprint on the same woman.
No one Finn had talked to really had an explanation for it. All he really knew was that twins would almost definitely end up falling for the same person. Maybe it was their shared genes, or the fact that shifter twins tended to be even closer than human twins. Whatever the answer was, it didn’t change the facts – somewhere out there was a woman who would be able to put up with both him and Foster.
Sounds pretty improbable. A loud smack against his car window shook him out of that particular line of thought. He looked up to see Foster standing there, arms crossed and eyebrows raised.
“You going to sit there all day?” he asked.
Finn quickly shoved the phone he was still holding back into his pocket and swung the driver’s side door open, nearly hitting Foster with it. He leapt out of the way at the last second.
“I’m coming,” Finn grumbled. “No need to leave your greasy handprint on my car.”
“Geez. Aren’t you in a mood today,” Foster commented as they started walking toward the center.
It was a sunny day, with the trees swaying softly in the mild wind. The rain had kept Finn up last night, but it had also cleaned the streets, making everything look shiny and new. But thinking about dad had made it so Finn barely even noticed all of that.
“Aren’t you in a mood every day?” he countered.
“Yeah, but that’s me. You’re supposed to be the cheerful one, remember?”
“I’m practicing ‘connecting with what I’m feeling’ to try and ‘understand my emotional state better’,” Finn replied, parroting Hanna’s words back at his brother.
He said it in a slightly mocking tone, but truth was, a lot of what Hanna said during their sessions made sense. Just telling her what was actually going on had already made him feel like a weight had been lifted. Thinking about mom still hurt like hell, but he didn’t feel so alone anymore.
Foster didn’t say anything to that, just rolled his eyes a little before pushing the doors open and marching right past the receptionist to Hanna’s office. Finn followed suit, giving the young woman behind the reception desk an apologetic smile. She started to get up to follow them, but seemed to give up once the brothers rounded the corner.
Knocking on the door, Foster didn’t even bother waiting for a reply before stepping inside. Hanna almost jumped out of her chair, giving both brothers an exasperated look.
“We have a receptionist for a reason, you know. I could have had someone else in here,” she said, as Foster was already making himself comfortable on the couch.
“Who?” Finn immediately blurted out.
“What do you mean who? Another patient,” she replied with a confused frown.
She looked as impeccable as ever, wearing black pants and a matching blazer. Her shirt was buttoned all the way up, and Finn couldn’t help but imagine himself undoing them, exposing more of that pale, creamy skin. Hanna was always so covered, it made his imagination work even harder.
“That’s what I meant,” he answered, quickly sitting down next to Foster so he wouldn’t be the center of attention anymore.
“Alright,” Hanna drew out, obviously picking up on how weird he was being.
But it hadn’t been what he meant. He had never even considered the fact that Hanna might not be single. It wasn’t any of his business and it didn’t affect him. There was no reason for him to even be curious about it.
But when she’d said she could have had company, he suddenly needed to know. Did she mean a boyfriend? Did she have a man in her life that would visit her at work? There wasn’t a ring on her finger, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t in a relationship.
What do you care? he asked himself, but the answer could have implications he wasn’t ready to face, so he opted for pretending the last couple of minutes hadn’t happened at all.
Not a particularly healthy approach, but what are you gonna do?
“Have you thought about what we spoke about in our last session?” Hanna asked, sitting down in her armchair, notepad in hand.
It was such a familiar picture to Finn now, just the sight of her like that seemed to reassure him. His thoughts skipped to what was going to happen when their sessions with Hanna ended, but he chose not to focus on that right now.
“I still don’t get why everyone needs to know,” Foster said, spreading his arms long the sofa’s headrest. “She was our mother. Most of the guys on the team hadn’t even met her.”
“I’d hardly categorize your closest friends as ‘everyone’”, Hanna gently amended him, before turning to Finn.
Her hazel eyes were as sharp as ever as she measured him with her gaze, her perfectly pink lips pressed together. Finn thought it entirely probable that he had never examined anyone’s face as closely as hers. Yet he still found things to admire, like the way her thick lashes framed her eyes, or the delicate curve of her jaw.
No woman had ever transfixed him like Hanna, or challenged him like she did. Hanna wasn’t one to mince her words when she wanted to drive her point home, but there was also a gentleness about her that he found intriguing.
She moved so seamlessly between confident, take-no-shit interrogator and soothing, kind listener, he couldn’t help but be impressed by her.
It’s almost like she has a degree in this kind of stuff or something, he scoffed to himself.
But it was more than her professional training. She seemed to genuinely care, and that was what made her both so effective and so special.
“How do you feel about opening up to someone other than me?” she asked him.
“I’m not going to say anything if Foster doesn’t want me to. This affects us both, so it’s not just my decision,” he replied.
“I understand that, but you are separate people. You deserve to choose your own way of dealing with your grief, one that doesn’t depend on your brother,” Hanna said.
That touched a nerve for Finn. It had mostly been Foster’s decision to not tell anyone. He had more than gone along with it at first, agreeing that some
normalcy might help. After a while he started doubting if it had been the right thing to do, but by then, it had seemed too late to change his mind.
And I wasn’t about to make things even harder on my brother by talking about something he clearly didn’t want brought up.
“She’s right,” Foster interjected, surprising him slightly. “I should have thought more about what you want to do.”
“It’s not your fault,” Finn replied. “I get why you didn’t want to tell people, and we made that decision together. I should have come to you when I started having doubts about it.”
Wow, Finn thought, listening to the words coming out of his mouth. This is probably the most adult conversation me and Foster have ever had.
“Foster, can you explain why you feel your mother’s death is something you want to deal with on your own? If someone else on your team was facing a similar loss, would you recommend they do the same?” Hanna asked.
“No,” Foster sighed. “When you put it like that, it doesn’t seem logical. I would want to be there for my friends, but I’m actively keeping them from doing the same for me.”
Hanna nodded, jotting something down on the paper in front of her.
“How about your father, have you been to see him lately?” she asked.
The question made Finn uncomfortable, and Hanna immediately zoned in on that. He hadn’t even realized he was doing anything to give his discomfort away, but then again, picking up on things like that was Hanna’s job. He wore sharp metal on his feet and chased around a puck for a living.
Different worlds, and all that.
“I’m guessing no,” she answered for them, glancing over at Foster who didn’t argue. “Have you considered that you haven’t spoken about your grief with anyone because you don’t want to face it? Talking about it makes it real, and you haven’t fully accepted that the woman who raised and loved you is gone.”
The bluntness of Hanna’s words cut through Finn, and from the pained expression on Foster’s face, he gathered his brother had to be feeling the same way. Had they just been putting off really accepting what had happened?