34. Sophie
Sophie
You’re disgusting. Look at you. Who would ever want to touch this?
Marek’s voice. Low, bored, the way he always sounded when he said things that left marks deeper than his hands ever did. I can hear it as clearly as if he were standing behind me—the patience, as if he had all the time in the world.
Look at you. You’re used up. You were never worth the money we paid for you. You’re worthless. You know that, right? Completely fucking worthless. Your cunt is the only useful part of you, and even that’s disappointing.
I open my eyes.
The gray ceiling of my room in the residential wing stares back at me. My pulse is hammering. The sheets are tangled around my legs, damp with sweat, and my tank top is clinging to my chest like a second skin.
The fifth night in a row.
Ever since the archive room with Ethan, the nightmares have come back with a vengeance. They were mostly of Marek’s voice layered over the darkness, whispering the things he used to say while I lay on the floor of that room in Detroit, too broken to move. Telling me what I am. What I’ll always be.
Ugly. Ruined. Worthless.
I thought I’d buried him. I thought the years and the training and the careful, methodical process of becoming someone else had put enough distance between me and that girl that his voice couldn’t reach her anymore.
I was wrong. All it took was one touch on my shoulder—Ethan’s gentle hand, wanting nothing from me but closeness—while I was falling apart in his arms, and my defenses came crashing down like they were built from paper.
Finn grazed my shoulder once and I put him in a chokehold. So why did Ethan’s hand on the same spot shatter me?
Because this time you were further in. The answer rises unbidden. Finn touched your shoulder while you were still deciding. Ethan touched it while you were past deciding, and your body couldn’t tell the difference between his hands and Marek’s.
I sit up and press the heels of my hands against my eyes.
In the days since the archive room, the alphas have been careful with me in a way that makes my chest ache—Max leaving extra space between us in meetings, Finn keeping his jokes light, Ethan maintaining a respectful distance that somehow hurts more than closeness would.
They’re giving me room. They’re being patient.
It makes me want to scream.
Because the distance I’m trying to maintain keeps crumbling at the edges.
So I’ve been pulling back and keeping our meetings as short as possible. Because the alternative—throwing myself at them, which apparently my body is now programmed to do—is not an option.
Get the mole. Get out.
The mantra feels thinner every time I repeat it.
And now, for the first time, I’m tempted to call Griffin and ask him to take me off the case.
I’ve never asked to be pulled. Not once.
Not during the Volkov extraction when I spent three weeks sleeping in a car.
Not during the Baton Rouge job when I took a bullet in the shoulder and finished the op on adrenaline and spite.
I don’t quit. I don’t break. That’s the deal I made with myself when I was twenty-one and Sentinel gave me a way out—I would be useful and strong and I would never again be the girl who couldn’t protect herself.
But I don’t know how to do this anymore.
I don’t know how to sit across from three men who make me feel things I’ve never felt and pretend I’m fine.
I don’t know how to sleep when every time I close my eyes I’m back in that bedroom with Marek’s voice telling me I’m nothing.
I don’t know how to be Sophie Dysart when Sophie Aveline is falling apart.
I don’t call Griffin.
Instead, I get out of bed, push the nightstand against the wall to clear space, and drop to the floor.
Push-ups first. The familiar burn in my arms and shoulders, the steady rhythm of up and down. I count to fifty, then switch to sit-ups, then burpees, then shadow boxing—jab, cross, hook, uppercut, my fists cutting through the dark air of the room, my bare feet silent on the carpet.
You’re damaged goods.
Cross. Hook.
Who would ever want to touch this?
Uppercut. My shoulder screams. I ignore it.
I keep going. Ten minutes. Twenty. Thirty. My arms burn, my lungs are screaming, sweat drips from my jaw onto the carpet, and I don’t stop because stopping means thinking, and thinking brings his voice back, and I’d rather work my body until it gives out.
By the time I finally collapse, my knuckles ache from where I gripped the edge of the bed frame during tricep dips. My tank top is soaked through. My legs are trembling so badly I almost have to crawl the three feet to the bathroom.
I stand under the shower until the water runs cold, letting it wash the sweat and the last of Marek’s voice down the drain. Then I pull on a clean shirt and climb into bed.
My head is quiet. Not empty—never empty—but quiet enough to lie down without his voice coming back.
I don’t sleep. But I don’t dream, either.
It’s enough.
The meeting is at two, and I’m sitting in Max’s office with my tablet open on my knee and my coffee cooling in my hands, trying to pretend that everything is normal. That the early hours of this morning weren’t spent doing push-ups on my bedroom floor until my arms gave out.
The briefing takes twenty minutes. Brief, factual, my eyes on the screen the entire time.
I’m pretty sure they notice. Max’s gaze rests on me a moment too long, the slight crease between his brows deepening.
Finn’s usual banter is gentler today, less teasing, like he’s worried he’ll spook me.
Ethan says nothing, but he pours me a second coffee without asking and sets it at my elbow, paying attention to things I wish he wouldn’t.
The silence starts to settle into something I’d have to acknowledge, so I leave.
The walk back to the research wing takes four minutes across the glass bridge.
Today it takes fifteen—down through the atrium, past reception where Lucy is arguing with the delivery guy about a misrouted package, through the ground-floor corridor, and back up the stairs to the research floor.
It’s the route I take when the gap between who I’m pretending to be and who I actually am feels wide enough to fall into.
Evie is standing beside my desk when I push through the research wing doors, a stack of folders under one arm that could double as a doorstop, her dark red hair catching the overhead light, her face bright with the expression of a woman who has been waiting for someone to walk through that door for the last fifteen minutes and has opinions about it.
“So?” she says, before I’ve even set my bag down. “How was it?”
“How was what?”
Evie gives me a look of such theatrical exasperation that I almost laugh. “The meeting, Sophie. In Max’s office. Breathing the same air as the three most gorgeous alphas on the planet for—” she checks an imaginary watch—“what, thirty-five minutes? How was it?”
“Twenty minutes,” I correct, and immediately wish I hadn’t because Evie’s eyebrows shoot up in a way that tells me I’m never going to hear the end of this.
I swat her arm with the folder I’ve just picked up from my desk. “It was a work meeting, Evie. We discussed the rotation schedule and reviewed some staffing projections.”
“Mm-hm. And was Max wearing the dark green shirt? Because when he wears the dark green shirt, his eyes do this thing where they look like—”
“Evie.”
“—like emeralds that are also somehow angry? It’s very specific. I’ve thought about it a lot.”
I press my lips together. She’s impossible. Completely, utterly impossible, and the worst part is that she makes me want to laugh in a way that has nothing to do with my cover and everything to do with the fact that she’s genuinely, uncomplicatedly delightful.
“It was a meeting,” I say, sitting down. “A perfectly professional meeting about perfectly boring topics. Nobody’s eyes looked like anything.”
Evie narrows her gaze. “You’re blushing.”
“I am not blushing. I’m warm. The bridge is stuffy.”
“The bridge is air-conditioned.”
“Can we please look at the files?”
She holds my gaze for another second—long enough to make her point—and then her expression becomes more serious.
She sets the stack of folders on my desk with a decisive thump.
“Right,” she says, pulling up a chair beside me.
“So. Before we start, I need you to understand something. What I’m about to show you is highly confidential.
Level-three clearance. You signed the NDA when you started, which covers everything in this wing, but the clinical documentation is a step above the rest. It doesn’t leave this floor.
It doesn’t get discussed outside of the research and clinical teams. Are we clear? ”
“Crystal.” I pull the first folder toward me and flip it open.
It takes me about ninety seconds to realize this isn’t what I expected.
The first page is a cover sheet—standard formatting, Synthera’s logo in the corner, a string of reference numbers across the top. Below that, a title in bold type:
CLINICAL TRIAL PROTOCOL—PHASE II Study Reference: SYN-EQX-0047 Subject Designation: Omega (Female)
Clinical trials. Right. I knew about these—I’d seen the feedback sessions.
This has to be more of the same.
I turn the page. Participant consent forms. Medical screening results. Dosage protocols.
Dosage protocols.
Not device testing, then. Medication.
I scan the documents more carefully now. Observation logs with entries in clinical shorthand—hormonal levels, physiological markers, response metrics. Neurological assessments.
“What exactly is being trialed here?” I ask, keeping my voice light. Curious assistant, nothing more. “I assumed it would be the heat management devices, but this looks like—”
“Medication,” Evie confirms. She leans back in her chair, tucking one leg beneath her. “It’s not the devices. Those get tested differently—more like product reviews, user feedback, that kind of thing. This is pharmaceutical. A new compound.”
“What kind of compound?”
Evie hesitates, her expression more careful now.