31. Sophie #2
Victor Hartman isn’t selling data to Nexagen.
He is married and cheating on his wife.
And based on how smooth he is tonight, I’d bet anything this isn’t his first time. He’s done this before, and I’m guessing it’s a regular thing for him. The encrypted messages are ones he needs hidden from the woman at home. He uses his work phone because it’s the one she can’t check.
What a creep.
I get back in Max’s car and immediately reach for my shoes.
“Those are the worst torture devices that have ever existed,” I say, unbuckling the first strap and pulling the heel off with the kind of relief I usually reserve for removing body armor after a twelve-hour op.
The second shoe follows. I drop them both into the footwell and curl my bare feet into the carpet and exhale.
Max glances at the shoes in the footwell and the corner of his mouth lifts.
“Victor’s clean,” I say, turning to face him.
The smile fades. He shifts slightly in his seat, angling toward me, his green eyes sharp in the dark.
“Clean how?”
“Clean as in he’s not the mole. He’s married.
” I lean my head back against the seat, the adrenaline of the performance draining out of me, leaving that particular exhaustion that comes after being someone else for two hours.
“Tan line on his ring finger. He removed his wedding band before dinner—recently enough that the skin hasn’t evened out.
He picked a restaurant far enough from home that his wife wouldn’t see him.
He sat facing away from the window because he doesn’t want to be recognized from outside.
It’s not espionage. He’s cheating on his wife. ”
Max looks at me for a second longer than he needs to.
“So the military-grade encryption—”
“Is hiding dick pics, not data.” I pause. “Well. Presumably. What a...” I search for the word. “Dick.”
Max laughs. The sound fills the car and I feel it in my chest the way I felt it in the hallway with the cleaning closet, a warmth that spreads through me and makes me smile in response.
And then he’s smiling back at me and our eyes meet. His eyes linger too long before he pulls them away, and the air in the car feels thicker by the second.
He starts the engine and pulls onto the road.
The city lights slide past, amber and white, painting the interior of the car in slow, shifting stripes.
The radio is on low, and I close my eyes and let the hum of the engine and the warmth of the car pull the last of the tension out of my body.
For the first time all evening, I feel myself relax.
Then a song comes on. The opening guitar of “Landslide.”
I open my eyes. Max’s hand is on the volume, turning it up.
Stevie Nicks’s voice fills the car, quiet and aching. Max opens his window. Wind moves through the car, mixing with the music and catching my hair. He drives with both hands on the wheel, his eyes dark and far away.
“This was her favorite song,” he says quietly.
I turn my head to look at him.
“Whose?”
“My mother’s.”
I remember Lucy at lunch, leaning in. Mr. Cavill’s parents were killed in a car crash years back.
I’d looked it up that night. Read the articles, saw the photos.
He was twenty-two. And I’d stared at my screen in the dark and wondered what that does to a person—losing both parents at once, at that age.
I want to say I’m sorry, Max. I’m so sorry for what happened.
But I don’t. Because I know what it’s like to have someone say I’m sorry about something they can’t possibly understand, and I know how the words feel—well-intentioned and completely fucking useless.
So I just look at him. And I wait.
The song plays. And Max, without looking at me, begins to speak.
“She used to play it in the kitchen,” he says. “When he wasn’t home. She’d turn it up and sing along and for a few minutes she looked...” He stops, his mouth tightening like he’s remembering exactly what she looked like. “Happy.”
When he wasn’t home. I hear what he’s not saying—that happiness in Max’s house was conditional, and it only existed in the spaces where his father wasn’t. My chest aches, because I grew up in a different version of the same house.
“She had a beautiful voice,” Max says. His voice is rough and raw and so human.
He swallows. “She deserved a bigger life than the one she got.”
The song plays. Stevie’s voice fills the car, and the wind carries it, and I am looking at Max’s profile—the sharp jaw, the softness around his eyes, the way he’s watching the road without really seeing it—and I feel like I’m seeing him for the first time.
Because I know what it looks like when someone carries a ghost. I carry my own. I’ve carried mine for so many years—my mother’s face, the last time I saw her, and the years of my stepfather’s voice telling me she left because she didn’t love me enough to stay.
And I’m looking at Max Cavill and seeing, for the first time, not the CEO, not the alpha, not the man who pinned me to a wall. But a boy who listened to his mother sing in the kitchen and knew, even then, that the happiness was borrowed.
The song ends and Max reaches over and turns it down.
He looks like he wants to tell me more but he doesn’t. Instead he asks, “What about you, Sophie? Do you have any family?”
“No.” My voice comes out softer than I mean it to. “It’s just me.”
The trees pass. The headlights cut through the dark. And I don’t know why—I don’t know what it is about this night and this man who just told me about his mother’s voice—but I keep talking.
“My mother left when I was young. One moment she was there and the next moment she was just... Gone. Then it was just me and my stepdad.” I watch the road, not him.
The words pouring out of me in a way that they never have.
“I joined Sentinel when I was twenty-one and have been on my own since then. It’s easier this way.
My assignments take me all over the country. ”
The silence that follows isn’t awkward. It’s just full. Heavy with things neither of us usually says out loud, and the strange realization that maybe we’re not as different as I thought.
But Max doesn’t say I’m sorry. He doesn’t offer platitudes or follow-up questions or the kind of sympathetic noise that people make when they don’t know what else to do.
He just keeps driving.
He parks at the same exact spot he picked me up at and turns off the engine. He gets out and comes around to my side and opens the door.
I’ve managed to get one shoe on, but I’m struggling with the other one. My fingers find the strap—the tiny, delicate buckle that was clearly designed by someone who has never worn heels in their life—and fumble. The leather slides through.
“Why do they have to make these shoes so goddamn complicated?” I mutter, staring at the strap like it’s a hostile encryption system.
“Let me,” Max says. His voice is quiet and I look up. He’s standing over me, one hand on the car door.
I should say no. I should buckle my own shoe and walk myself to the door and maintain the distance that keeps us both safe. I should do all the things that ten years of training and self-preservation have taught me to do when an alpha gets this close.
“Okay,” I say, before I can change my mind.
Max moves and I hold my breath.
He does it without the slightest indication that a man who runs a billion-dollar company might consider kneeling on dirty ground in a five-thousand-dollar suit beneath his dignity. He just goes down. One knee, then the other. Like the gravel is exactly where he should be.
He takes the shoe from my hand. His fingers brush mine in the transfer—the lightest contact, skin against skin, lasting half a second—and I feel it in my spine, like a current running from my fingertips down through my chest and into my stomach. I swallow, my heartbeat loud in my ears.
He takes my foot, his hand cupping my heel, his fingers wrapping around my ankle—long fingers, warm and completely steady.
My foot looks small in his hand. Small and pale against his broad palm, the size difference almost obscene.
The physical reality of alpha and omega, his hand large enough that his fingers overlap.
I stare at it. And the image of it—his gentleness, the sheer unlikely tenderness of Max Cavill holding my bare foot like it’s fragile—makes my throat tighten.
He slides the shoe on slowly, guiding my foot into the opening with a patience that seems so at odds with everything I know about him. His thumb grazes the arch of my foot and my breath catches before I can stop it—a small, sharp inhale that escapes before I can cover it up.
It’s such a small thing. But no one has touched my feet like this before. No one has ever handled any part of my body with that kind of care, as if my foot were something worth being gentle with.
He takes the tiny buckle between his fingers. Threads the strap through and fastens it, his touch unhurried.