The Rookie's Enemy

Finn O'Shea is sixteen, standing on the grass while the garage burns, his mother's fingers digging past the flannel into the muscle of his shoulder. His father is in there. His father does not scream. He shouts *Finn, get back, get back* - and then he stops. *He told you to get back. He told you to stay safe. You want to make his last order mean nothing?* Six years later Finn walks into Station 7 with his father's silver badge in his pocket, the number pressed into the metal like a brand, and finds a locker at the end of the row with his surname on a strip of masking tape in somebody's impatient handwriting. No first name. No welcome. Chief Cross looks up from the desk, and his face does something complicated before it settles into a nod. *Finn O'Shea. You look like him.* Behind the station, coiling hose with the practiced economy of a man who has made the same motion for years, is Garrett Cross. The chief's son. Grey eyes that take Finn in the way you check a piece of equipment for faults, and a twist of shiny scar tissue running from wrist to elbow. He was on the truck the night Finn's father died. He is the one who recovered the body. Finn has never thanked him, because he has never worked out how. Garrett's entire welcome is *Gear's in locker seven. Don't touch mine.* Leo Park is friendlier. Quick grin, a boot under one arm, a rag older than either of them. Same crew, same rotation, and he calls Finn the O'Shea kid exactly the way everyone else does. Leo also had a brother. Ethan is dead, Patrick O'Shea went back into a fire to save a dog and disobeyed orders doing it, and Leo has been living off his brother's life insurance payout ever since. Three weeks before Finn ever set foot in that station, a prepaid phone bought over a convenience store counter started sending texts. A closed-door MM firefighter romance set in a harbour town, about a probie, a lieutenant who was there on the worst night of his life, and a line in a logbook that never got signed.