17. Sophie
Sophie
Idon’t remember the walk back.
One moment I’m stepping out of the surveillance room with my backpack over my shoulder and a this room is clear still hanging in the air behind me.
The next I’m standing in the middle of my room, with no memory of the corridors, the elevator, my own door swinging shut.
Just my heart going like I’ve sprinted the whole way.
That’s the first thing that’s wrong. I always remember the walk back.
I set my bag down, and my hands aren’t steady.
I hold one out in front of me, flat, and watch it betray me. A fine tremor I can’t will still. I’ve held a blade steadier than this with a bullet in my shoulder. And now, over what. A man. A badly bolted server rack. A situation any competent agent could have prevented.
He put his body in the way.
The thought surfaces before I can stop it, and once it’s there I can’t get rid of it.
The rack sliding, the whole weight of it starting to come down, and instead of letting go, instead of doing the sensible thing and getting clear, Max Cavill drove himself into the gap and took it on his own back so it wouldn’t crush me.
Alphas save themselves. In my experience that’s practically the definition of one.
And then there was no room left. Only the wall at my spine and steel on one side and him on the other, and the only way out was through him. His chest against mine. His breath at my temple. The heat of him bleeding through everywhere the suppressants should have dulled and didn’t.
For one second, I stopped moving.
For one second, I didn’t want out. I wanted to close the last inch. I wanted to know whether all that control would finally break, and I have never in my life wanted anything so stupid.
I make myself breathe.
This is a problem. Not a feeling. A problem. The kind that gets operatives killed. The moment you want something inside an operation, you’ve handed the operation a way to hurt you. I know this. I have watched it end people far better than me.
It’s chemistry. Adrenaline and proximity and a body that can’t tell danger from want. It isn’t real. It doesn’t mean anything.
I almost believe it.
I strip the day off, pull on the first thing I find, and sit on the edge of the bed in the dark, running the sweep back the way I would any op. It came up clean, same as the fourth floor. No devices means I’ll have to find the mole another way, on my own.
I force my mind back onto the case. It works, mostly. My pulse comes down. My hands go still.
Until I reach the part where he said Sophie, I need your help, and asked me to hold the weight with him. He asked, not ordered. Like it didn’t occur to him that I couldn’t. And for those few seconds, we were on the same side.
That’s the part that I can’t forget.
I lie back and stare at the ceiling.
Tomorrow I will walk into that building and be Sophie Dysart, and Max Cavill will be a name in an active investigation, and none of this will have happened. I am very good at deciding things haven’t happened. It’s most of what I do.
It changes nothing, I tell myself.
I almost believe that too.
Lunch is Celine’s idea, which means I don’t get a vote.
She collects me from my desk at half past twelve, sweeps up Lucy from the front desk on the way down, and steers the three of us into the canteen before I can invent a reason to stay behind.
Lucy talks the whole time, and I let her. She hears half of what gets said in this building, which makes her the closest thing I have to a listening post, so I sift the chatter as she goes and keep whatever the investigation can use.
Today the topic is yesterday.
“Honestly,” she says, halfway through a bowl of carbonara and a story I’ve already lost, “the whole building was walking on eggshells.”
“Why’s that?” I ask, because for once I’m genuinely curious.
Lucy leans in and drops her voice like she’s handing over classified material. “It was the anniversary. Mr. Cavill’s parents were killed in a car crash years back, and every year when it comes round, he’s...” She shakes her head, searching for the word.
“Difficult,” Celine says quietly, and she almost sounds like she feels sorry for him.
“Difficult,” Lucy agrees. “He’s got a short fuse at the best of times, and on that day you don’t go near him with bad news, not if you value your job.
Last year someone walked in with a budget problem and apparently he—” She stops, glances at Celine, and thinks better of it.
“Well. We all just keep our heads down and wait for it to be over.”
I look down at my plate so neither of them can see my face.
Everything comes back to me at once. The sweep, the cabinet, the rack, all of it happened on the worst day of Max Cavill’s year. The one day everyone who knows him braces for him to snap.
But he didn’t. Not at me. Why didn’t he?
I think about the way he seemed last night. He looked tired, high-strung, grumpy as hell. But now it all makes sense. On the anniversary of losing both of his parents at once, I’d walked into his building, pushed at him, and talked to him like I resented the very space he took up.
Any other alpha would have. That day especially, he’d have had every excuse, and no one would have blamed him for taking it out on the mouthy omega sweeping his walls.
Instead he’d come rushing to help me even after I’d stupidly refused to let him lift the cabinet.
Lucy’s voice drags me back to the table. She’s moved on already, the way she does, sliding from the tragedy straight to the men themselves.
“Three of them, and not a dud in the bunch,” she’s saying, fanning herself with a napkin. “Mr. Cavill especially. All that brooding intensity.” She props her chin in her hand and sighs. “Can you imagine getting close to a man like that?”
Yes, I can.
And suddenly, I’m back in those few seconds from last night, the ones that felt like forever.
His body was pressed against mine in that narrow gap, close enough that we were breathing the same air.
I could feel his heart pounding against my chest, and lower, the hard length of him pressed to my hip.
I swallow, trying to clear my mind. The warmth climbs my throat anyway.
“Sophie?” Celine tilts her head, studying me. “You’ve gone pink, dear. Too warm?”
“The room,” I say. “It’s stuffy in here.”
Lucy, delighted to have a fresh subject, launches into the saga of the third-floor air conditioning, and I nod in the right places and taste none of my lunch and think, against my will, about a man I have no business thinking about at all.