29. Sophie
Sophie
The device in my drawer is slowly burning a hole through my nightstand.
I’ve been trying to ignore it, trying not to think about it, but it’s like that chocolate bar you know you have in the back of the kitchen cupboard—you can go about your day, do your job, have a conversation, but somewhere in the back of your mind, you just know it’s there.
I’ve never used one before. I was lucky—my heat didn’t come during the months I spent at the shelter after Sentinel rescued me.
The heat-blockers I’d stolen from nursing school were still in my system, and by the time they wore off, I was on Sentinel’s military-grade suppressants.
Those stopped my heats entirely. And I was grateful—more grateful than I’ve ever been for anything—because it meant I never had to find out what my body would do if I let it want something.
And then there was Pack Thorne.
The truth is, while part of me knows that they did things to my body, I can’t really remember them, at least not clearly.
It’s as if my mind decided, at some point during those months, that the memories were too dangerous to hold in one piece, and so it shattered them.
Broke them into fragments and scattered them across a darkness I can’t navigate.
I used to get flashes. In the early years, sudden, violent bursts of sensory memory that would hit without warning—a smell, a sound, the weight of a hand—and leave me gasping on whatever floor I happened to be on.
Declan found me once, curled in the corner of the training room, shaking so badly I’d bitten through my own lip.
He didn’t ask what I’d seen. He just sat on the floor beside me and waited until I could breathe again.
But I haven’t had a flash in years. The suppressants help. And burying it so deep I can pretend it doesn’t exist helps most of all.
Until Finn touched my shoulder.
In that moment, I was back in that basement.
Marek was holding me down, one hand on my shoulder, his fingers digging into my skin hard enough to bruise, and the blade was going in—slow and deliberate, as if he was savoring the process—carving deep into my shoulder as he took me from behind.
And then the pain came—a white-hot flash that merged with the old one until I couldn’t tell the difference between Finn’s gentle fingers and Marek’s knife.
I was on Finn the next second, acting completely on instinct, forearm to his throat.
But Finn didn’t even move.
“Hey. I’m not going to hurt you, Sophie.”
And he just looked at me with eyes so steady and so blue and so achingly sincere that the scream in my head went quiet.
“I would never hurt you.”
Five words. And for some reason I believed him.
Maybe because he pressed his own shirt to my wound without hesitation, looking at me like he was the one in pain. Maybe because of what he did for Angela’s mother. Or maybe because the man I met at the gala—guileless and kind and sincere—is exactly who he’s turning out to be.
And that’s what makes the rest of it so confusing. Because if Finn is safety, then Max is the opposite.
He pins me to a wall for thirty seconds and I’m on fire.
The memory instantly warms my entire body.
God, I need to stop thinking about this.
But I can’t. Every second replays in my head and I can still feel his lips against mine, his cock against my heat, and my hand instinctively goes down and I moan at the contact, feeling the wetness through my underwear.
I open the drawer before I can think about it and take the device into my hand.
It feels soft and hard at the same time—and instantly, my mind goes to that moment with Ethan, when he was holding it between us, turning it slowly, his voice dropping low, and I could feel every word vibrate through me, and my body was leaning closer to him as if it had a mind of its own.
I touch the button on the side.
When you press this—the knot inflates.
And then he watched me watching it swell in his hands, and in that moment, my core pulsed, as if my body was already anticipating something it had never been allowed to want. Not just the device. Ethan.
I move my underwear aside and my breath catches.
I’m wet. After all these years of feeling nothing, of being convinced my body had forgotten how to want—I’m drenched.
My fingers find the slick heat and I spread it slowly, tentatively, and every nerve ending fires like it’s too much and not enough at the same time, my body starving and terrified of being fed.
The moment I touch my clit, my whole body jolts.
My back arches off the mattress and a sharp, involuntary sound escapes my mouth—and I realize that a decade of suppression has not killed what lives underneath.
And I’m back in that moment when Max had me against the wall and I could feel his hardness graze against me through our clothes. Everything in me comes alive at once, the same flood of need filling every cell, every fiber, until my entire body is screaming for more.
I move the device against my clit and gasp.
I’m starting to think you mean something different by it, Max whispered against my jaw, and I moan out loud as the vibration meets the bundle of nerves that’s been dead for so long and is suddenly, violently alive.
Max is kissing me against that wall, his mouth brutal and his hands unyielding and my body arched into his like it wanted to fuse with him. His hardness pressing against me, grinding against my clit through the fabric of his pants, and I move the device in the same rhythm.
I need more. I need so much more.
I move the device lower, feeling a need so intense my body tenses in anticipation, every muscle bracing for the pain that always comes next.
But it doesn’t come. The device enters smoothly, adjusting to my body the way Ethan described, and the sensation of being filled is—
“Fuck,” I whisper into the darkness.
It feels so good. So, so good. A warm, steady, vibrating fullness that presses against walls that haven’t been touched like this... ever.
But in my mind, it’s not the device anymore.
It’s Max. Our clothes are gone and my back is against that wall and his green eyes are locked on mine, dark and intent, watching my face with absolute, consuming focus. His cock enters me slowly, filling me the way the device is filling me, inch by inch, and his voice is in my ear.
Look at me.
I press the device deeper. The vibration intensifies and a sound tears from my throat that I muffle with my free hand, biting into the flesh of my palm.
Then Finn is there. Behind me, his mouth on my neck, his lips trailing along the curve where my shoulder meets my throat, kissing me softly.
I will never hurt you, Sophie. I turn my head and his mouth finds mine, and the kiss deepens instantly, his tongue sliding against mine while Max drives deeper inside me.
The two of them holding me between them, whispering against my skin, Max stretching me open while Finn swallows every sound I make.
“Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.” The words fall out of me like a prayer, breathless and broken, my hips rolling against the device in a rhythm my body has found on its own.
Then Ethan is beside me, his lips at my ear, his voice low and devastating.
You’re so close, Sophie. I can see it. Don’t fight it—let your body have what it wants.
His hand moves across my breasts, his fingers finding my nipple, and I mirror the motion with my own hand, squeezing, rolling, the sensation making my vision go white at the edges.
I think I need to punish you, Max breathes against my throat, driving deeper, and his voice has that same tremor it had in his office. And I don’t think you want me to stop.
All three of them, surrounding me. Max inside me, filling me. Finn’s mouth on my skin, whispering I’ve got you, Soph against my neck. Ethan’s hand on my breast, his voice in my ear, telling me how beautiful I am, how good I feel, how once Max fills me with his cum, Finn will go next.
Then me, Ethan whispers. Then me.
The expansion is slow, pressing against me from the inside, growing larger with each second. In my mind, it’s Max’s knot—swelling inside me, locking us together, his green eyes burning into mine as his hips stutter and still.
Somehow, I don’t mind it when you do it, he says, and his thumb traces a circle against the inside of my wrist, and I feel the tremor move through me like a current.
The knot finally locks and fills every inch of me and holds there, and the orgasm arrives like a detonation at the base of my spine and it erases every thought in my head and replaces them with nothing but heat and pressure and the three voices tangled together in the dark.
I come with my hand pressed over my mouth and it is the most intense thing I have ever felt.
My body arches and trembles, and for a few shattered seconds, there is nothing but the staggering truth that my body can still feel something other than pain.
When I’ve pulled the device free and I’m lying in the dark with the aftershocks moving through me like small earthquakes, the tears come.
I cry and it takes over my entire body until I’m shaking and gasping and curling onto my side with my arms wrapped around myself.
I cry for the girl in the shelter. The one who lay in a narrow bed, willing her body to stop wanting. The one who was so afraid of what wanting meant that she swallowed every pill they gave her to make sure she’d never have to find out.
I cry for the girl in Detroit. The one on the floor with a knife in her shoulder and a man behind her who thought her pain was his to enjoy.
Those girls deserved this. They deserved to feel what I just felt—the overwhelming pleasure of a body being given what it wants instead of what it has to endure.
I press my face into the pillow and cry until there’s nothing left, and then I lie in the quiet and breathe, and the breath is different now. Slower. Deeper. Like something that was clenched for a very long time has finally, finally let go.