28. Finn
Finn
The club is called Aurelia. Private, members only, a place where packs and omegas meet on equal terms—screened, consenting, and anonymous.
It’s not a brothel. It’s more like a very expensive bar where the unspoken understanding is that you might leave with someone, and if you do, both of you chose it.
I suggested it a week ago. “We should go out,” I said. “All three of us. Like we used to. Remember Aurelia? We haven’t been in months.”
What I meant was, I need to get Sophie out of my head.
I need to stop thinking about the way she leaned into me in the kitchen before she tried to kill me, and the best way to do that is to surround myself with beautiful omegas who don’t have PTSD and a scar on their shoulder that makes me want to burn down whatever building it was given to her in.
Mostly, I meant let’s get back to normal.
Max agreed, which should have been my first warning sign, because he usually never agrees to anything social without at least two rounds of negotiation. Ethan said sure with a shrug that was too quick, which should have been my second.
We’re in our usual booth, the curved one in the back corner, elevated slightly above the main floor.
Max chose it years ago because of the sightlines, and I wasn’t complaining—the elevation gives us a view of the entire room.
The leather is burgundy and on the low table, there’s a bottle of Yamazaki between us, our usual, and none of us has had more than a sip.
The club’s lighting is warm and amber and the music low enough to allow conversation.
The omegas circulate through the space, moving between the booths and the bar and the private lounges on the second floor, dressed in everything from silk dresses to lingerie, and every single one of them is stunning.
And I don’t feel a single thing.
A tall, dark-haired omega approaches our booth. She’s wearing a sheer black bodysuit that leaves almost nothing to the imagination, but I barely notice, and I can smell her omega scent—jasmine and vanilla—filling the booth. She stops at the edge of our table and smiles, confident and genuine.
“Good evening,” she says, directing the greeting at all three of us but letting her eyes linger on Max. “I don’t think I’ve seen you here before. Are you new members?”
“We’ve been members for four years,” Max says, without looking up from the drinks menu.
The omega’s smile falters by a tiny bit, but she immediately recalibrates, shifts her attention to Ethan and me. And normally, I would have already been on my feet, offering her a drink.
But tonight I just sit there. I meet her eyes and try to summon something—interest, attraction, the basic biological response that should be happening when a beautiful omega presents herself to an unmated alpha—and I come up empty.
She’s gorgeous and exactly the kind of woman I would have spent the rest of the evening getting to know six months ago.
And all I can think is there’s a fire that’s missing in her eyes.
Ethan, beside me, isn’t even looking at her. He’s staring blankly into his whiskey glass, his mind completely somewhere else.
She reads the room and then she nods, says something gracious about enjoying our evening, and moves on to the next booth seamlessly, like someone who’s been doing this long enough to know when a table is a dead loss.
I watch her go and can’t help but feel guilty.
“Well,” I say. “That went well.”
Neither of them says anything, and I’m starting to feel like this was a terrible idea.
I lean forward and set my glass on the table. “Right. Since we’re all here, and since none of us is having any fun anyway.” My heart picks up, knowing that this conversation will be impossible to take back. “There’s something I need to tell you.”
They both look at me. Max puts the menu down and Ethan lifts his head from the whiskey glass, his gray eyes sharp behind the glasses.
“The night of the break-in,” I say. “When Sophie got cut. Something happened after that I didn’t tell you about.”
Finally, for the first time all evening, I have their full attention. I know I’m about to say something that’s going to change things, but I don’t care anymore.
“Her hoodie was soaked with blood. And when she took it off...” I clear my throat. “She was standing there in her sports bra and we had this moment.”
“Moment?” Max asks, an eyebrow raised.
I swallow, the memory coming back immediately. “Yeah. She’d just finished stitching herself up and I was close to her, really close, and there was this... tension. I thought it was just me but I know she felt it too—I could literally see it. The way her breath changed. The way she was leaning in.”
I take a drink because I need it. “It felt like we were going to kiss.”
“But you didn’t?” Max asks. He’s leaning forward now, his eyes intense.
“No,” I say, shaking my head. “I remember touching her shoulder and...”
The memory still burns.
“And?” Max says impatiently.
“When she removed her hoodie, I noticed this scar on her shoulder. It seems really old, but it was really deep. And I’d bet anything that someone gave her that scar.
” My throat tightens. “The moment I grazed it, she had me against the wall in under a second, her forearm across my throat, and her eyes were—” I exhale.
“She wasn’t seeing me. She was seeing whoever gave her that scar.
And I’m pretty sure she was going to kill him. ”
They’re both silent after that, both lost in thought. Ethan puts his drink down. Max is staring at a point on the table.
“She eventually came back to herself,” I say, quieter now. “She nearly ran out of the room. The worst part is, she seemed embarrassed.” I swallow again, trying to keep my voice steady.
I lean back in the booth and the leather creaks under me. I take a swig of my whiskey, feeling it burn down my throat. “I don’t know. I have a feeling that whatever happened to her, it’s worse than anything any of us can imagine.”
Max picks up his glass and drains half of it in one go, his throat working as he swallows. Ethan follows, tipping his own glass back with the quiet desperation of a man who just heard something he can’t unhear.
“Jesus Christ, Finn,” Max says, closing his eyes, leaning back on the couch.
“I suppose it makes sense now,” Ethan says quietly. “Why she’s so guarded and why she does what she does and why she’s so good at it.”
“The scar,” Max says, his eyes still closed. “How bad was it?”
“Bad.” I don’t elaborate. I don’t need to.
“And she stitched her own arm,” Ethan says, almost to himself. “In the kitchen. Like it was no big deal.”
“Because it probably isn’t,” I say. “For her.”
Max opens his eyes and stares at the ceiling. “Did she say anything? About what happened to her?”
“No. And I didn’t ask.”
He nods, like that was the right call.
The club moves around us and the music beats heavily in the background, but none of it touches the three of us in our corner booth, locked in our own world, our attention on someone who isn’t here.
Max looks at us, and he almost seems troubled, something I so rarely see. “I kissed her.”
I nearly drop the glass I’m holding.
“You what?” I say.
“When?” Ethan asks, at the same time.
“The day after the intruder.” A muscle works in his jaw.
“I came into the office so angry, wanting to know why she didn’t retreat when she saw the intruder.
She got so angry at me. Started jabbing me in the chest with her finger and telling me I’m a brat and I have no right to tell her how to do her job.
And I just...” He swallows. “I lost it. Pushed her against the wall. Pinned her wrists beside her head. And then I kissed her.” He pauses.
“I wasn’t exactly...” He searches for the word, and the fact that Max Cavill is searching for a word is itself remarkable. “Gentle.”
Neither of us says a word. I’m staring at him. Ethan is staring at him. The club carries on around us and neither of us moves.
“She kissed me back,” he says. “She kissed me back like she wanted to destroy me. And when I—” He stops.
His hand goes to the back of his neck, a gesture I’ve seen him make maybe three times in the twenty years I’ve known him.
“She seemed to like it. Being pinned. Being—” He cuts himself off.
“I stopped and apologized. She left immediately after.”
“Jesus, Max.” I lean back in the booth. “No wonder you two have been weird around each other. I knew something was off.”
“Yeah.” He exhales. “So I’ve been avoiding her. And I’ve been trying my fucking hardest not to think about the fact that I nearly fucked an employee against my wall on a Monday afternoon and felt absolutely no desire to stop.”
I’m staring at him. I can feel my brain trying to reconcile what he’s just told me with what I told them minutes ago—the forearm across my throat and the glazed-over eyes of a woman reliving something terrible.
Because it makes no sense. A woman who nearly kills an alpha for touching her shoulder should not respond to being pinned against a wall by kissing him back like she wanted to destroy him. It would’ve made more sense if she’d stabbed Max.
Except she didn’t.
And it means that whatever happened to Sophie, it didn’t kill the want. It buried it. And Max found the seam.
I look at Ethan. He hasn’t spoken. He’s looking at Max, very still, and I can practically hear the gears turning.
“Ethan,” I say.
He doesn’t look up immediately. When he does, his expression is careful.
Fuck, Ethan too?
“The product lab,” he says quietly.
Max and I stare at him.
“I was giving her the tour and we got to the product design lab—the display cases, the devices.” He runs his hands through his hair.
“She was trying so hard not to look, but I caught her eyes drifting to the dual-shaft model when she thought I wasn’t paying attention, and when she realized I’d noticed, she looked away so fast she practically gave herself whiplash. ”
He presses his thumb into the bridge of his nose.
“So I picked up the device.” He exhales through his nose. “I held it between us, described how it works in detail, and pressed the button and made the knot inflate while she watched.”
“What the fuck, Ethan?” I ask, my voice rising.
He doesn’t look at me. “She didn’t ask me to.
She was trying not to look at it. And I picked it up anyway.
” He takes a drink. “I could see it was turning her on. Her breathing changed, she was biting her lip, barely getting words out. And I just kept going because I wanted to see what would happen if I didn’t stop. ”
He pauses, and the image hits me before I can stop it—Sophie in the lab, her dark eyes wide, watching a knot swell in Ethan’s hands while her lips part and her breathing changes. Heat crawls up the back of my neck, and I look at the table.
“She didn’t pull away. She leaned in. And I could count the freckles on her nose she was so close, and if those footsteps in the corridor hadn’t come when they did—” He leans back in the booth and closes his eyes.
“I would have kissed her. I was inches away from kissing a woman who works for us, holding a sex toy, and I have no excuse for it.”
I should be disturbed. Part of me is—a small, principled part that understands what Ethan is describing, that recognizes the line he crossed and knows he knows it too.
But a larger part, a part I’m not proud of, feels something else entirely.
It turns me on.
I take a long drink of whiskey and try to pretend I’m not thinking what I’m thinking.
But I am. And looking across the table at Max—at the way his jaw has gone tight and his green eyes have gone dark and his fingers are gripping his glass with a pressure that suggests he’s holding himself very carefully in check—I know he’s thinking it too.
Three alphas in a booth. One omega living rent-free in all three of our heads.
Max, who has never so much as looked at someone he works with and who treats control and boundaries like gospel, kissed a woman against the wall of his own office.
Ethan, who has only ever been respectful to omegas and wrote a thesis on ethical consent practices in alpha-omega dynamics, stood in his product lab and gave an omega a live demonstration of a knotting device because he wanted to see Sophie lose control.
And me. Who treated her like the enemy because it was easier than admitting that she wasn’t, and that I would give anything, anything, to go back to that night and finish what we started.
None of us are acting like ourselves, drawn to the same woman by a pull so strong it’s dragging all three of us across lines we never thought we’d cross.
I look around the table and it’s obvious we’re all thinking about the same thing.
Sophie.
There is only Sophie now.
I finish my whiskey, set the glass down, and look at my packmates.
“We are completely fucked,” I say.
Nobody disagrees.