37. Max
Max
The knock at the door comes during In Bruges.
It’s one of my favorite films but I haven’t watched it in years.
Finn picked it tonight—said we needed something that wasn’t work or the investigation.
So here we are, the three of us sprawled across the living room, the fire low, the whiskey out, Colin Farrell on the screen doing something reckless in a medieval city.
We’re in the middle of the bell tower scene when the knock comes.
“Expecting anyone?” Finn asks, already shifting forward on the couch.
Ethan and I both shake our heads.
Finn goes to the door. From where I’m sitting, I can only see a sliver of the hallway, the warm light from the porch, and the darkness beyond it. Then I see a small figure standing on our doorstep.
Sophie.
“Soph, what’s up?” The easy warmth in Finn’s voice sharpens into concern.
She steps inside and she’s half-soaked. It must have started raining while she was walking over—her hair is plastered to her face in dark, wet strands, and her white shirt is clinging to her skin, translucent in places where the rain has soaked through. Her sneakers squeak against the floor.
Ethan is already up, disappearing into the hallway and returning with a towel. “Come on, let’s get you dried up.”
“No, I’m fine.” She waves it off, but her hands are shaking. It isn’t from the cold. I can see that immediately. She’s nervous. Her jaw is tight, her shoulders are pulled up around her ears, and she won’t look at any of us directly.
I’ve never seen her like this. I’ve seen her angry, guarded, defiant, controlled. I’ve seen her smile and fight and lean into my hand in the dark of a car. But I’ve never seen Sophie nervous, and the sight of it does something to my chest that I wasn’t prepared for.
She’s soaked and shaking and she looks like a beautiful mess, and all I want to do is cross the room and pull her into me.
Instead, I watch her sit on the couch across from us, perched on the edge of it, spine straight, hands clasped between her knees.
Finn is already pouring her a glass of whiskey. He hands it to her without a word and she downs it in one go, setting the glass on the side table with a quiet thud.
She stares at it for a moment, and then she looks up.
“When I first got here,” she says, “I thought this was just another job. Rich alphas, fancy building, someone sabotaging their company.” She picks at a thread on her wet jeans, not looking at any of us. “Find the mole, get out. That was the whole assignment.”
She looks at Ethan. “I told you that what you were building here didn’t matter. That it was just products. Sex toys.” She swallows. “I didn’t understand.”
Ethan’s hand tightens around his glass but he doesn’t speak.
She turns to Finn. “And when you told me how important it was to find the leak, I thought—I thought you were three billionaires who were pissed off that someone had broken into your playground and touched your things. That it was about ego. About money.”
Finn opens his mouth but she shakes her head.
“Let me finish. Please.” Her voice is barely holding together now. “I’ve met a lot of alphas in my line of work. And most of them are exactly what you’d expect. So when I walked in here, I assumed the worst, because that’s what I’ve learned to do.”
Her hands curl into fists in her lap, then release, like she’s making herself let go.
“I know now that I was wrong. About all of it. About what Synthera is, about what you’re trying to do, about what Equinox could mean for omegas like—” She stops and catches herself. “For omegas.”
Like me. That’s what she almost said. Omegas like me.
“I just wanted you to know that. And that I’m sorry. For how I was in the beginning. For the things I said.”
She looks sad in a way I haven’t seen before. Her eyes are bright and her lower lip is caught between her teeth, and she looks like she’s about to cry and is furious at herself for it.
Finn moves to sit on the arm of her couch. “Sophie, you didn’t know. We don’t blame you.”
“Well, maybe you should.” Her voice cracks. “I’ve been so angry. I kept telling myself you were the enemy. That you had to be. Because if you weren’t...”
She doesn’t finish and she doesn’t have to. Because if we weren’t the enemy, she’d have to reckon with what we actually are to her, and I have a feeling that’s the thing that terrifies her more than any of it.
“And now?” I ask.
“I don’t know,” she whispers, looking down at her hands twisting in her lap. “I don’t know what I think anymore.”
The fire crackles. On the screen, Colin Farrell is still in Bruges, but nobody’s watching.
Then she stands, fast and abrupt, like a decision made between one heartbeat and the next. She’s already turning toward the door, already doing what she always does—giving just enough and then pulling back before it turns into something she can’t take back.
“Sophie, wait.” I’m on my feet before she reaches the door. “There’s something I’d like to show you.”
She turns back to me, biting her lip. “Okay,” she says quietly.
I lead her upstairs, past the bedrooms, to the library at the end of the hall—floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, a leather couch by the window, and above us, a skylight that turns the ceiling into a frame for whatever the sky is doing.
It’s where I come when the house feels too full and my head feels too loud, and tonight I want her to have it.
The rain has stopped as quickly as it started. The clouds have split open and the sky above us is scattered with stars, and when Sophie looks up, some of the tension leaves her face.
We sit beside each other on the couch, the stars pressing down through the glass above us. I can hear her breathing and the quiet tick of rain still dripping from the gutters outside.
I pick up my tablet from the side table. I’ve been carrying this for days—since she told me in the car that she’d stayed at an Elaine House. I went home that night and couldn’t sleep, and I opened the database and searched until I found her.
“When you told me you stayed at an Elaine House,” I say, “I checked our records.”
Her head turns toward me.
“I found you.” I open the tablet and hold it out to her. “I know I probably shouldn’t have.”
She takes it and looks at the screen, and the sound she makes is so small I almost miss it, a hitch of breath.
It’s a Christmas photo. Elaine House, eleven years ago. A group shot—residents and staff gathered in front of a decorated tree, paper plates and tinsel, the kind of scrappy celebration that happens in places where people don’t have much but make the most of it.
And there, near the back, half-hidden by someone’s shoulder—a girl.
Twenty years old, maybe twenty-one. Short dark hair, like she’d cut it herself.
A face so thin the cheekbones look like they might cut through the skin.
Hollow eyes staring at the camera without expression.
A girl who looked like she was already gone.
“My God,” she whispers. “This was such a long time ago.”
Her fingers hover over the screen, not quite touching the image, as if the girl in the photo might shatter.
“This was right before I joined Sentinel.” Her voice has gone somewhere far away. Her eyes are filling, the tears rising slowly, and she closes them as if she can keep me from seeing it if she just refuses to let them fall.
I set the tablet aside.
“Soph, you don’t have to tell me anything,” I say.
“Maybe one day, when you’re ready. When you feel safe enough.
” I pause and choose my next words with more care than I’ve ever chosen anything.
“I just want you to know that I’m here. All those parts of you, maybe parts you don’t want anyone to see, I would like to see them. ”
Her face does something I’m not prepared for. The pain and the softness collide, and for a second she looks exactly like the girl in the photo—young, hollowed out, standing at the edge of something she doesn’t believe will hold her.
Then she stands.
“I can’t, Max.” Her voice is tight. “I need to go.”
She’s already at the door when I say it.
“I love you, Sophie.”
The words come out hoarse. Words that I have never said to anyone aside from my mother.
I didn’t plan to say them—didn’t know I was going to until they were already in the air, hanging between us like something thrown that can’t be caught back.
But the moment they leave my mouth, I know they’ve been sitting at the base of my throat for so long now, maybe even since the first day she arrived at Synthera and all I noticed were her dead eyes.
But they weren’t dead. I know that now. They were alive, burning with so much pain that she’d learned to hide it so well I mistook it for emptiness. Pain that I knew better than anyone, because looking into her eyes was like looking into my own.
She turns around so fast her damp hair swings across her face.
“Don’t say that to me.” Her voice shakes, edged with anger. “You don’t get to say that to me.”
“It’s true.”
“It’s not.” She steps toward me, and there’s something building in her—I can see it rising, the anger climbing up through the grief like fire through dry wood.
“You don’t know me, Max. You know the operative.
The woman who sweeps your walls and runs your investigations and keeps everything locked down.
But you don’t know what’s underneath that—”
“I know you.”
“You know nothing!” The word tears out of her.
Her hands are clenched at her sides, and her eyes are wild and blazing.
“You don’t know what was done to me. You don’t know what I am.
What they made me. And if you did—” Her voice cracks like glass.
“If you knew, you wouldn’t be standing there telling me you love me.
You’d be walking out that door and you wouldn’t look back. ”
“I wouldn’t.”