24. Sophie
Sophie
Ican still feel his hands around my wrists.
I’m sitting at my desk, staring at a spreadsheet that might as well be written in Mandarin, and all I can feel is the ghost pressure of Max Cavill’s fingers locked around my wrists, pinning them to the wall beside my head, holding them there while he kissed me like the world was ending and he’d decided I was the last thing he wanted to taste before it did.
My mouth is still swollen. I can feel it every time I press my lips together—the bruised-fruit feeling of having been kissed so hard and so thoroughly that my body is still reeling from the aftershocks twenty minutes later.
The spreadsheet blurs and the numbers swim. I blink and force my eyes to track across the columns, but my brain refuses to cooperate because it’s stuck on a loop, replaying the same thirty seconds over and over.
But I think I need to punish you for it.
That’s the part that’s destroying me. Not the kiss itself, because that I can explain away. Adrenaline. Proximity. Two people running hot after an argument, bodies doing what bodies do when aggression and attraction get tangled up in the same room. It’s biology. It’s chemistry. It means nothing.
Except it does. Because when Max leaned in, his lips brushing my ear, his voice dropping to that low, dangerous murmur, and told me he needed to punish me—I should have told him to go fuck himself.
That’s what I should have done.
But the strangest thing happened.
When he said those words, his voice rough, I felt warmth spread through me.
And it wasn’t the sharp jolt of the suppressants wearing off.
This was slower and much deeper. A heat that started low in my stomach and radiated outward, spreading through my chest, my limbs, my fingertips, until every part of my body was awake and humming with something that’s becoming harder and harder to ignore.
Want.
And I felt my body pulling me forward, wanting to lean into the heat of him, my back arching against the wall because I wanted to be closer, not further away.
He held my wrists and I let him. He trapped me and I wanted to be trapped. He pressed his body against mine, and instead of the cold nothing I’ve felt for the last decade, I felt—alive. Terrifyingly, blazingly alive.
Finn barely touched my shoulder and I nearly killed him. Max pinned my wrists to a wall and I kissed him back like I wanted to eat him alive. Maybe it was the anger. Maybe it was because I was the one who started it. I don’t know.
And that scares me more than any man with a gun.
Because I know how to fight a man with a gun. I know how to disarm, disable, evade, escape. I have protocols for that. I have muscle memory. I have a decade of training that kicks in the moment my body registers a threat.
But I have no protocol for this. For the way my pulse hammered under his fingers when he circled my wrist with his thumb.
For the way my breath caught when his mouth found the spot just below my ear.
For the way I kissed him back—not because I was trying to gain an advantage or because the mission required it—but because I simply wanted to.
Because something inside me, something I thought Pack Thorne had killed a long time ago, surged to the surface the moment Max’s mouth touched mine and screamed more.
I close the spreadsheet. Open it again. Close it. Press my palms flat against the desk and breathe.
One moment he had me pinned against the wall, kissing me like a man possessed, and I was kissing him back with a fury I didn’t know I had in me. And then the next moment, the warmth of his body was gone.
He stepped back and dropped my wrists like they’d burned him, putting a full arm’s length between us so fast I swayed forward from the absence.
“Jesus Christ, Sophie, what the fuck are we doing?”
His voice. I keep hearing his voice. Rough and shattered and completely undone. And all I can think is, what the fuck are we doing, indeed?
The swelling on my lips has gone down, and I’ve almost convinced myself I can get through the week without thinking about it.
Lunch with Lucy, Celine, and Phoebe has become a fixture. It started as rapport-building, a way to embed myself deeper, but somewhere along the way it became the part of the day I actually don’t have to fake my way through.
Lucy is talking, her blonde ponytail bouncing as she gestures with her fork.
“—and honestly the whole thing was embarrassing because he literally just stood there, didn’t say a word, and everyone was watching, and I’m like, are you going to order or—”
“Speaking of being seen in public,” Celine cuts in, twirling a cherry tomato on her fork, a grin tugging at the corners of her mouth. “Who was that silver fox I saw you with on Saturday? That restaurant on Linden?”
Lucy’s cheeks flush pink. She picks up her water glass too quickly, takes a sip, sets it down. “What? Oh—that was just a friend.”
“A friend.” Celine’s eyebrows climb. “A friend who had his hand on the small of your back as you walked in?”
“He was being polite!” Lucy laughs, high and bright, swatting Celine’s arm. “Honestly, you see one dinner and suddenly it’s a whole thing. He’s a family friend. My parents know him. It’s completely innocent.”
“Mmhmm.” Celine pops the tomato in her mouth, clearly unconvinced but willing to let it go. “If you say so.”
I turn to Phoebe. “What about you? Are you seeing anyone?”
She looks up from her plate, and her fork slows. “No,” she says, and picks at the edge of her napkin, folding it into a neat crease. “No time, really.”
“No time.” I smile. “That’s what I say too. It’s usually not true when I say it.”
It’s a small thing to offer. A crack in the door, wide enough that people step through without noticing they’ve been invited. Give a little, get a little back. It works on almost everyone.
Phoebe laughs, and doesn’t step through it. “It’s true for me,” she says, and goes back to her salad.
I let the silence sit for a moment. Most people can’t stand a gap in a conversation, and they’ll fill it with whatever comes to mind, which is usually where the useful thing is hiding.
Phoebe fills it by reaching for the pepper.
“What do you do with yourself, then?” I ask. “Outside of here.”
“Oh, nothing exciting.” She shakes her head, still smiling. “I’m very boring.”
“Nobody’s boring.”
“I really am.” She says it without a scrap of self-pity. “I watch a lot of TV. I go to bed early.”
“Family nearby?”
“Not really.” She tilts her head at me. “What about you? Lucy said you moved here for the job.”
And there it is. She’s handed the question back to me, and the strange part is that I don’t think she meant to do it.
“Something like that, yeah,” I say, and I’m still deciding how to steer it back when Lucy leans across the table.
“Oh my God, Phoebe, have you started My Love from the Star yet? You said you were going to.”
Phoebe’s face brightens instantly. “I did! I’m on episode seven and I’m obsessed. The alien is so—”
And that’s that. Phoebe is talking about K-dramas and Lucy is squealing about her favorite episode and Celine is rolling her eyes, and I go back to my salad.
Halfway through lunch, Phoebe’s phone buzzes on the table. She glances at the screen, and her whole body changes. Just for a second. Her mouth tightens before she flips the phone face-down and picks up her fork like nothing happened.
After that, she checks it constantly. Every few minutes, her hand slides under the table and the screen lights up in her lap before she locks it again, and each time her smile takes a second longer to come back.
“Everything alright?” I keep my voice casual. “You seem distracted.”
She looks up from her phone, and she smiles. “Oh, I’m fine! Just waiting on a delivery notification. You know how it is.” She touches my arm. “Have you tried the new salad dressing? It’s so good.”
She’s deflecting, but I let her.
I’ve been sitting near this woman every day since I got here, working her the way I’d work anyone, and the only thing I have to show for it is a watchlist.
The next day I go to Finn’s office for our five o’clock, and he opens the door himself.
When he sees me, the corners of his mouth lift, as if he’s genuinely pleased to see me but trying not to let me know how much.
“Hey.” His voice is warm. Much warmer than before. “Come in.”
These five-o’clock updates used to be strictly professional, but something about him has been different since the night of the intruder.
He steps back to let me pass. His hand rises as I walk by, an instinctive gesture, reaching for the small of my back the way people do when they’re guiding someone through a doorway.
But he catches himself. I see his fingers curl inward, his hand dropping back to his side before it makes contact, and he turns toward his desk like nothing happened.
I sit across from him. He settles into his chair and leans forward on his elbows, his blue eyes finding mine. His sleeves are rolled to his forearms.
“How’s the arm?” He asks it casually, but I can see right through it.
Of everything he could have asked, he picked the arm. His gaze drops to my sleeve for half a second.
“It’s fine, Finn. No sign of infection.”
“Did you change the dressing?”
“This morning.” I keep my voice light, like we’re discussing a paper cut.
He nods and squares the folder against the edge of the desk. When he looks up again, his eyes are steady, but I can tell the arm isn’t what he really wants to ask about.
“And the rest of you?”
He leaves the question open, and I want to ask him, what do you mean? But I know what he means, of course. He’s being nice enough to give me space.
“I’m fine.” I bite my lip, trying not to let my eyes drift to his throat. The bruise I left there must have faded by now, but I can still feel the pressure of my forearm against it, and the memory makes my stomach turn.
He holds my gaze for a long moment, and I think he’s going to push. But then he just nods and opens the folder.
“Okay. Where are we?”