36. Sophie #2
“She told me about the shelters,” I say quietly. “About the funding. About what Synthera is really working on.”
Max doesn’t speak. He’s waiting, every line of his body held taut with the effort of not asking the question I can see burning behind his eyes.
“Why?” I ask him. “Why all of this? Why does it matter so much to you?”
He’s quiet for a moment, his gaze fixed on some point beyond the windshield.
“My mother’s name was Margaret Elaine.”
The words take a second to reach me. And then they do, and the ground shifts beneath my feet.
Margaret Elaine. Elaine House.
Oh God. He named them after her. All of them. Every single shelter.
I look at him, and the strain in his face tells me how hard that was for him to say. His jaw is rigid and his knuckles white around the steering wheel.
“Max,” I say, inhaling sharply. “I didn’t know.”
He looks away, out through the driver’s side window, at the shelter that bears his mother’s name.
“I’ve never told these things to anyone outside of my pack,” he says.
“If it’s too painful—”
“No.” He turns back to me, and his green eyes are fierce. “I need you to know the truth.”
And I need to hear it.
“My father wasn’t a good man. Everyone thinks he was this great man.
” His grip on the steering wheel tightens.
“But at home, he was a monster. He controlled my mother—isolated her, diminished her, broke her down piece by piece until there was nothing left. And he hurt her. Physically. She would cover the bruises, tell people she was clumsy, and he would stand there and let her.” His jaw clenches.
“She spent her entire life trapped by a man who treated her like property. And I watched it happen, and I was too young to stop it.”
I don’t move. I know what it costs to say these things out loud, to hand someone the ugliest truth about your life and trust them not to weaponize it.
“When they died in the car crash, I was twenty-two. It took me years to find out the full extent of what he’d done to her. Letters she’d hidden. Medical records. Things she’d never told anyone.”
The car is very quiet. The evening presses in against the windows.
“I built the shelters in her memory,” he says. “All of them. Every one named for her. And Equinox—the compound—that’s for her too. Because she deserved to have a choice, and she never got one. And I swore that if I couldn’t save her, I’d make damn sure I saved as many women like her as I could.”
I look at him, at the man who keeps the world at arm’s length and carries his mother’s name like a wound that never healed, and tenderness rises before I can stop it, vast and overwhelming. For the boy who watched his mother disappear and grew up to build her a legacy she never got to see.
“How come none of this is public?” I ask, and my voice comes out rough.
A ghost of dark humor surfaces through the pain.
“How well do you think that would go? Synthera makes heat management tools and omega products—that’s our public identity.
If word got out that we were funding omega shelters and developing a compound to erase omega designation entirely...
” He shakes his head. “Our competitors would tear us apart. The traditionalists who already think suppressants go too far would lobby to shut us down. And the alphas who like having omegas dependent on them would make it their mission to destroy everything we’ve built before it ever reaches a pharmacy shelf. ”
It makes sense. All of it—the secrecy, the carefully cultivated image of three wealthy alphas who never took much seriously. It’s a cover. The same way my pink blouses and sweet smiles are a cover.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I’m so sorry, Max. I saw those files and I—”
“You got angry on behalf of omegas being hurt.” His voice is gentle in a way that makes my eyes sting. “Don’t apologize for that.”
He’s echoing Marcia’s words. Or maybe she was echoing his. Either way, the kindness of it—the fact that I accused him of something terrible and he’s sitting here absolving me—is almost more than I can bear.
We sit in silence for a moment, and then I say the thing I’ve never said to anyone.
“Max.” My voice is barely above a whisper. “I stayed at an Elaine House. Almost eleven years ago.”
Max’s head snaps toward me.
“It was after Pack Hayes got me out,” I continue, and my throat is burning now, my eyes stinging with tears I refuse to let fall. “Griffin, Declan, Nolan—they rescued me, and then they sent me to a shelter to heal. An Elaine House, just like this one.” I swallow hard. “I owe them my life, Max.”
I want to tell him everything. Detroit. Pack Thorne. The basement and the knife. The scars I still trace in the dark when I think no one is watching. I want to tell him about my mother, and the little girl who spent years believing she wasn’t worth staying for.
But the words won’t come. I’ve carried these things alone for so long that letting go of even this much feels like pulling stitches out of a wound that hasn’t finished healing.
Max is looking at me, and the controlled mask is gone. What’s underneath is recognition. The pity or horror I’m expecting isn’t there. Just one scarred soul looking at another and understanding what it means to carry that kind of weight.
He reaches out gently, his fingertips barely grazing my skin as he tucks a strand of hair behind my ear. And then his hand stays, his palm settling against the side of my face, his thumb brushing my cheekbone.
I close my eyes and lean into his touch.
I’m sitting in my car in the Synthera parking lot, staring up at the building through the windshield. Nothing about it has changed, but somehow it looks completely different now.
I was wrong.
I was so fucking wrong.
Synthera isn’t what I thought it was. Neither are the men who built it.
And the worst part is, I think I knew. Somewhere underneath the mission and the need to keep my distance, I think I already knew.
I’d needed them to be the villains. It made everything simpler. If they were dangerous, I could keep my distance and do my job and walk away at the end without looking back. And now I don’t know how to walk away.
I also know, with a certainty I can feel in my bones, that I need to find whoever is sabotaging their company and shut them down.
Because someone is trying to destroy the thing they’ve built, and the thought of anyone threatening Equinox and the legacy Max built for a mother who never got to see it—it makes me want to tear them apart.
I get out of the car and walk toward the building, the evening air cool against my face.
I cross the atrium, take the elevator up, and make my way down the corridor to my room. The door closes behind me and I press my back against the wall.
For the first time, I can see the possibility of a life beyond the one I’ve built for myself.
And I feel hope.
Terrifying, fragile hope.
I close my eyes. And for once, I don’t fight it.
That night, the nightmares don’t come. Instead, I dream of alphas with kind eyes and gentle hands who stand around me like walls that keep the dark out instead of locking it in. Max, Ethan, and Finn—steady and close and so, so real.
When I wake, the morning light is soft through the window and my cheeks are wet. But this time, the tears aren’t from fear.