37. Max #2
“You would.” She’s crying now—furious, unwilling tears, the kind that come when the anger isn’t enough to hold the pain.
“Everyone who was supposed to love me either used me or left me or sold me. My mother left. My stepfather sold me. And the men he sold me to—” Her voice splinters.
“So don’t stand there and tell me you love me like it means something, because I know what happens next. ”
“Then tell me, Sophie.” I step closer. My voice is rough and shaking but I hold her gaze. “Tell me the thing you think is going to make me leave. Because I am not going anywhere.”
“You wouldn’t even be able to look at me.”
“Try me.”
The anger in her face breaks apart, and what’s underneath is raw and desperate and terrified. A woman standing on the edge of a cliff deciding whether to jump or whether the fall will kill her.
Please. Trust me. Please, Soph. Give us a chance.
She jumps.
“I was raped, Max.” Her voice shakes. Barely a whisper.
“Repeatedly. For months. I was sold by my stepfather to a pack of alphas and they raped me. They held me down and they cut me and they raped me and they told me I was nothing. That I was dirty and disgusting and that no one would ever want me.”
My heart stops.
A full beat of nothing. Then it slams back to life so hard I feel it in my skull.
My vision blurs. My hands are shaking. I can feel it—the foundation of everything I thought I understood about the world cracking open, revealing a darkness beneath it that I will never, as long as I live, be able to unsee.
“Sophie—” I step toward her.
“No!” She steps back, and the anger is back—the last wall she has. Her hands go to the hem of her wet shirt and she pulls it over her head.
She’s standing in front of me in her bra, her skin damp, and she turns and points at her shoulder angrily.
The scar.
The one Finn told us about.
It’s long. A raised line, silvery-white against her skin, starting at the top of her shoulder blade and curving down toward her spine.
“They cut me,” she says. Her voice rises with anger. “Scarred me. Over and over again.”
I don’t flinch or move or look away.
She watches me, as if waiting for the horror and disgust. The step backward that will confirm everything that was ever told to her.
It doesn’t come.
She unbuttons her jeans and steps out of them.
She stands in front of me in her underwear, shaking, and points at her stomach.
Three deep gouges, angry pink, low on her abdomen.
And then her thighs. Thin lines, parallel, deliberate, tracing the soft skin of her inner thighs like a map of everything that was done to her.
“How can you love me?” she whispers. Her voice is trembling. The anger has burned itself out and what’s left is a woman looking so lost that the question nearly undoes me.
I close the distance between us and take her face in my hands. Her skin is cold and her tears are warm against my thumbs.
“Easily,” I say.
My heart breaks for her. For the girl she must have been before all of this—before someone carved those lines into her skin and told her she was nothing.
For the woman standing in front of me now, shaking and scarred and waiting for me to walk away.
She survived what they did to her, and she’s still standing, and she has no idea how extraordinary that makes her.
“Soph, I don’t give a damn about your scars,” I say, making sure she hears every word.
“No—scratch that. I do. Because they’re a part of you, and a part of what makes you you.
” My thumbs trace her cheekbones, and her eyes are enormous, searching mine.
“These scars don’t tell me what you are.
They tell me what you survived. And none of it, not one mark, makes you less. ”
Her lower lip trembles. Her hands come up and grip my wrists—not to pull my hands away but to hold them there, pressing my palms harder against her face, like she needs the contact to stay upright.
“You don’t have to show me anything else,” I say. “You don’t have to explain or earn this. I love you, and it’s not conditional. Nothing they did to you changes that.”
A small, broken sound escapes her. Her face folds in on itself, her eyes squeezing closed as the tears come, and I wrap my arms around her and pull her against me. She lets me. She just lets me hold her, and that’s how I know something has finally broken open.
She pulls back. Just far enough to look at me, her face blotchy and wet, and then she does something I don’t understand.
She reaches up and touches her own eye.
Her finger presses against the surface of her eyeball, and I almost grab her wrist before I realize what she’s doing.
She pinches something between her thumb and finger and lifts it away, and then she does the other one, and she’s holding two small brown discs in her palm, and she’s looking at me, and her eyes are green.
They’re not as dark as mine. Hers are lighter, the pale clear green of shallow water over white sand, and it changes everything about her face. I realize I have been looking at a painting through tinted glass and the glass just came off.
“I wear them on every mission,” she says. She closes her fist around them. “You’ve never seen my real eyes.”
I take her face in my hands again. Her real face. Her green eyes find mine and hold, and there’s nowhere left to hide, and she’s not hiding.
“Sophie,” I say.
“Max,” she whispers, and the tears come again, different this time.
I pull her into me and we sink to the floor together, my back against the couch, her body in my lap, and I hold her. I don’t say anything, because there’s nothing to say. There’s only this. My arms around her and the sound of her finally, finally letting go.
Then I hear the door.
Ethan is standing in the doorway. Finn is behind him.
They heard. I can see it on their faces—Ethan’s is white, his jaw clenched tight, his gray eyes bright and wet behind his glasses. Finn—Finn is crying. Openly, tears tracking down his cheeks, his mouth pressed flat, his whole body rigid with the effort of not falling apart.
Sophie feels me shift. She lifts her head from my chest and sees them.
For one terrible second, I think she’s going to run. She’s half-naked and tear-streaked and two more people know everything she’s spent a decade hiding.
But she doesn’t run.
She looks up at them, and Finn stops mid-step.
“Your eyes,” he says.
His voice is wrecked from crying, but the words cut through the room. He’s staring at her like he’s seeing her for the first time and it hurts.
“They’re green,” he says.
“Contacts,” Sophie says quietly. “I use brown contacts when I’m undercover.”
“Jesus, Soph,” he whispers.
Ethan hasn’t spoken. He’s standing very still in the doorway, his gray eyes moving slowly over her face behind his glasses.
Something in her expression loosens. She still looks exhausted, still afraid, but there’s relief there too.
Finn moves first. He crosses the room and drops to his knees beside us. He doesn’t speak. He just reaches for her hand—slowly, carefully, giving her every chance to pull away—and when she doesn’t, he laces his fingers through hers and brings her knuckles to his lips.
Then Ethan. He sits on her other side, his back against the couch beside mine. He takes off his sweater and drapes it gently over her shoulders.
Sophie looks down at the sweater. Then at Finn’s hand holding hers. Then at my arms still around her. Then up—at all three of us, surrounding her, and the expression on her face—
I will remember it for the rest of my life.
Wonder. Disbelief. The tentative, trembling beginning of trust.
A woman who has just shown us the worst thing that ever happened to her and found three men who didn’t look away.
The silence stretches.
It’s Sophie who breaks it.
“My mother left when I was twelve,” she says.
Her voice is different now. Still rough from the crying, but the anger is gone.
“She was just—gone one morning. She didn’t even say goodbye. My stepfather told me she left because she wanted to get away from me and she didn’t love me. That she was weak and selfish and couldn’t be bothered to stay.”
I feel her body tense against mine.
“And he was right. She left me with him and she never came back.” Her voice is flat and matter-of-fact. “That’s the kind of person I come from. A mother who couldn’t be bothered and a stepfather who—”
Her fingers press into Finn’s.
“Henri was cruel. Every day. He made sure that I understood my place. I learned to be small. Learned to read his moods, stay out of his way, make myself invisible when the air in the house changed.” She exhales.
“And when I turned twenty-one and my heat started, he sold me to Pack Thorne for two thousand dollars.”
Two thousand dollars. The price of a human being. The price of Sophie.
Finn’s grip on her hand tightens. I can see his knuckles press white against her skin.
“There were three of them,” she says. “Rourke, Silas, and Marek. At first they gave me a room upstairs. Like I was a guest. Like they were being generous.” A bitter sound escapes her. “When I wouldn’t do what they wanted, they moved me to the basement.”
“They tried to rape me. Every day. I fought them. Every single time, I fought them.” I can see it in her face—a flash of the rage that lives underneath everything she is. “I bit, I scratched, I broke Rourke’s nose twice. They couldn’t get what they wanted. Not at first.”
She pauses and takes a deep breath.
“And they couldn’t figure out why my heat wouldn’t come.
” The ghost of a smile crosses her face.
“I’d taken heat-blockers. Before they bought me—I’d done three years of nursing school before Henri pulled me out, and I stole a supply from the dispensary.
I hid them in my clothes when they took me.
Swallowed them every chance I got.” She exhales.
“So the heat never broke. And it drove them insane.”
She swallows.
“So they decided to punish me for it.” Her voice drops. “Rourke would hold me down. And Marek—Marek had a knife.”