37. Max #3
Beside me, Ethan has gone completely rigid. He’s breathing so carefully I can barely hear him.
“He was the worst,” Sophie says. “Not because he was the most violent—Rourke was worse physically. But Marek was patient. Calculated. He liked to talk while he—” She stops, fighting for the next words.
“He liked to tell me what I was. Damaged goods. Worthless. He said no alpha would ever want to bond with me. That I was made for this and nothing else.”
My arms tighten around her before I can stop them. I want to pull her closer, like holding her now could somehow reach back and protect the girl she was then. She doesn’t pull away. She leans into it.
“They raped me anyway,” she says. “The heat never came, and they raped me anyway.”
“I was down there for two months.” She pulls the sweater tighter around herself. “I stopped eating. Stopped fighting. I remember lying on the floor and thinking—this is it. This is where I die. And I was okay with it. I was ready. I just wanted it to end already.”
Her voice is so quiet now. Almost peaceful, in a terrible way, as if she’s describing something that happened to someone else.
“And then, one day, the door opened. And it wasn’t them.
” A smile flashes, brief and distant. “It was Declan. This huge alpha standing in the doorway in tactical gear. He crouched down and he cut the ties off my wrists and he said it’s over.
” Her throat works. “I didn’t believe him.
I thought it was a trick. It took me a while to believe him.
I’d still wake up for weeks after expecting to be in that dark, damp basement. ”
She wipes her cheek with the back of her hand.
“I begged them to let me work for Sentinel. It took a while, but eventually they said yes.” She pauses. “I’ve been with them for ten years. Ten years of doing the same thing they did for me. Finding omegas that are being abused and going after the alphas who—”
So that’s what Sentinel does. I’d suspected—I remember her words, I have taken down more alphas than you can imagine—but hearing her say it out loud is like watching the last piece of a puzzle fall into place and hating the picture it makes.
Then Sophie turns her head and looks at Finn, his hand still in hers, his blue eyes red-rimmed and glassy. Then at Ethan. Her chin is trembling.
“The flashbacks,” she says. “In the kitchen, and in the archive room. When I panicked, when I hurt you—it was never about you. It was never because of anything you did.” Her voice cracks. “My body couldn’t tell the difference between your hands and theirs. And I’m so sorry.”
A tear tracks down Finn’s cheek. “Don’t,” he manages, his voice wrecked. “Don’t apologize to us. Not for that.”
“We know, Sophie,” Ethan says quietly. “We know.”
And then she reaches for Ethan’s hand.
She finds his fingers and pulls his hand toward her. Her eyes stay on his face the whole time.
She moves the sweater so we can see her scar and places his hand on her shoulder.
On her scar.
Ethan goes rigid.
She holds his hand there, her hand on top of his.
“I don’t want to be afraid anymore,” she whispers.
Ethan doesn’t move his hand. He just holds it exactly where she placed it, and the tears he’s been holding back all evening spill over, tracking silently down his cheeks.
“You don’t have to be,” he says. His voice barely a sound. “You’re safe with us, Sophie.”
As his hand stays on her scar, she doesn’t flinch or freeze or disappear into whatever dark place lives behind her eyes when someone touches her there.
She just... stays. As if she’s allowing her body to feel safe with our touch.
Ethan’s other hand comes up, slowly. He cups the side of her face, his thumb resting on her cheekbone. She closes her eyes. A tear slips free, tracing a line down to where his thumb catches it.
“Eth,” she breathes.
That’s when it happens.
It’s faint. So faint I almost miss it—a whisper beneath the old paper and leather of the library. Rain. Clean, cold rain on warm earth. And underneath it, a hint of crushed rose petals, soft and barely there, like a memory of a garden you walked through once and never forgot.
Sophie’s scent. Just a trace of it, slipping through the suppressants like light through a crack in a door.
Her eyes go wide. She feels it too—the faintest shift, as if her body has loosened its grip on something it’s been holding clenched for years. Her hand flies to her mouth.
“The suppressants—I don’t know why—”
“I do,” I say quietly.
She looks at me. Then at Finn, who’s watching her with a look on his face that says he’d burn the world down if she asked. Then at Ethan, whose hand is still on her scar.
But none of us explains it because none of us has to. We all know what it means.
“Welcome home, little one,” I say softly.
Her face crumbles. Then a trembling smile breaks through, and it’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.
Finn shifts closer, his shoulder pressing against hers. Her head tips sideways until it rests against Ethan, and Finn’s thumb traces slow circles on her knuckles, and the stars wheel above us through the skylight.
“I don’t know how to do this,” she whispers.
“You don’t have to know,” Finn says.
“Together,” Ethan adds quietly. His hand moves from her shoulder to her hair, and she lets him. He strokes it and her eyes close.
I don’t know how long we sit there. Long enough that the room goes quiet and the only sound is her breathing, growing slower. The small muscles around her eyes relax and her lips part slightly. Her hand, still holding Finn’s, goes slack.
She’s asleep.
And that’s how I know, for the first time, that she trusts us.