30. Max #2
At the way her eyes narrow when she’s working through a problem, the way her fingers tap against the page when she’s found a thread.
“What?” she asks.
“Nothing.” I look away and back to the files. “Continue.”
“I’m having dinner with Victor tomorrow night.”
That snaps me right out of my thoughts.
“Dinner,” I repeat.
“I’ve been talking to him in the cafeteria, and he asked me out,” she says matter-of-factly, like it’s no big deal.
She seduced him. She flirted with him. The thought makes something dark twist in my gut.
But Sophie is already continuing. “It’ll be good to get him out of his environment. People reveal things in social settings that they’d never reveal at work.”
I’m sure he would, Sophie. I’m sure he’d reveal plenty over dinner.
She pauses.
She’s still looking at the page. “Declan might not be able to crack the encryption, but I can crack him.”
“I see.” My heart is pounding and I try my best to keep my voice even. “And this dinner. Where would it take place?”
“It’s called Il Vecchio. Seems to be a small Italian place, roughly forty minutes away.”
I know that place. Small, candlelit, the kind of restaurant where the tables are far apart to give privacy and the lighting is designed to make people lean in.
“Alone,” I say, unable to stop myself.
“That’s generally how dinner works, Max.”
“Are you sure that’s safe?” I lean back, trying to seem casual.
Sophie finally looks up at me, her jaw tight. “You don’t think I can defend myself?”
“I know you can. But this is different.” I’m leaning forward now, my elbows on the desk. “You’ll be in a public space. He could put something in your drink. He could overpower you, Sophie, in ways that—”
I stop. I am listing threats to a woman who fought an armed intruder with her bare hands. I am rambling. And I do not fucking ramble.
And yet.
The image is there—Sophie across a table from another man, in a restaurant I can’t see, beyond the reach of my hands—and the wrongness of it sits in my chest like a fist.
Sophie is watching me. Her dark eyes steady, her mouth set in an annoyed line. But she’s not interrupting. She’s letting me finish—or fail to finish.
“I’ll come with you,” I say.
“No, Max. He might see you.”
“Sophie.” I meet her eyes and hold them. My hands are flat on the desk, and I can feel the tension in my own shoulders, the effort it’s taking not to stand up and close the distance between us. “It’s either I come with you, or you don’t go at all.”
Her chin lifts. “Don’t you want to find out who’s behind this?”
“I do. But on my terms.” My voice has settled back into something resembling control, but the edges are rough and we both know it. “You’re not getting hurt again.”
The word again sits between us. The knife wound. The intruder. The footage I’ve watched so many times I could narrate every second with my eyes closed.
She doesn’t say anything for a moment. Then she looks at me, and for a second—just a second—her eyes soften. It’s barely there, but I catch it.
“Fine,” she says.
“I’ll drive you. Tell him you’re taking a cab.”
She looks like she’s going to argue. I can see it building—the set of her jaw, the breath she’s drawing, the slight forward lean of a woman who does not take orders, who does not let alphas dictate her movements.
“Okay,” she says softly, and her shoulders drop a fraction, some of the tension going out of her.
I wasn’t prepared for her to agree. I was ready for ten minutes of argument and knew I was going to win it.
She turns back to her laptop and starts typing, and I watch her—the way her small hands move across the keys, the slight furrow between her brows, the sharp line of her jaw.
She’s so small. I forget that sometimes, because her presence fills every room she walks into, because the fire behind her eyes makes her seem ten feet tall.
But sitting here in the lamplight, her feet barely reaching the floor, her wrists so narrow I could close my hand around both of them with room to spare, she looks like someone the world should have been gentler with.
I want to brush the hair from her face. I want to press my lips to her forehead. I want to tell her that she never has to stitch her own wounds again, that she never has to fight alone again, that I will be there—in the car, in the corridor, wherever she needs me to be.
I just want to protect you. I want to make sure no one ever hurts you, ever again.
The thought stops me cold. I don’t think like this. I have never, in my entire life, thought like this about anyone.
She looks up and catches me.
“What?” she asks.
“Nothing.” I clear my throat. “What time is the reservation?”
“Seven o’clock.” She gathers her files, slides them into her folder, and stands. “Goodnight, Max.”
She’s almost at the door when I hear myself say her name.
“Sophie.”
She turns, one hand on the frame, and the light from the corridor catches the side of her face.
I want to say something. About her smile earlier and how she made me laugh. About the fact that I watched her feet not reach the floor and wanted to burn the world down for every person who ever made her feel small.
I want to tell her that something changed in me tonight that I can’t change back.
“I’ll be there,” I say instead.
“I know,” she says.
And leaves.