45. Sophie
Sophie
“Max, I really need to go.”
He kisses me again. Slow, thorough, his hand cupping the back of my neck, and I’m on my tiptoes, pinned against the doorframe of the pack house. It’s seven in the morning and the sun is barely up and I’ve been trying to leave for fifteen minutes.
“One more,” he murmurs against my mouth, his hands sliding under my shirt and settling on my bare waist, his palms warm against my skin.
“You said that three ‘one mores’ ago.”
“I’m rounding up.”
I laugh against his lips and push at his chest, but it barely moves him. He smiles—that private, devastating smile that I’m starting to get used to—and kisses my forehead, then the tip of my nose, then my jaw.
“People are going to wonder if I show up late to the office,” I say, even as I tilt my head to give him better access to my neck.
“Let them wonder.”
“Max.”
“Fine.” He pulls back, his green eyes warm and reluctant, his thumb tracing my lower lip one last time. “Go. Before I change my mind.”
I kiss him once more, quick and firm, and walk to my car.
The drive to Synthera is barely five minutes. I roll the window down and let the cool morning air hit my face, and even in that short drive, the last two weeks replay behind my eyes.
The best two weeks of my life.
It was hard enough leaving them the first time—going back to the residential wing, keeping my distance, pretending my skin didn’t ache for them every second of the day. This time is worse. And I’m afraid that it’ll only get worse over time.
I took my suppressant this morning, so my scent is muted again. The ache between my legs has faded to a warm, pleasant hum. I feel rested, held, loved.
But I still have a mole to catch. And the warmth settles into something harder as I drive. I think about Diana Quinn and the data anomalies Declan flagged. I think about Equinox and how much is at stake if the wrong person gets their hands on it.
I did this last week. I can do it again. I can be theirs and still do my job.
My phone rings as I’m walking to my room in the residential wing. I glance at the screen and my stomach drops.
Griffin.
Griffin doesn’t call unless it matters, and he certainly doesn’t call at seven in the morning on a Monday unless it matters a lot.
I pick up. “Griffin.”
“Sophie.” Something in his tone makes me stop walking. “I need you to get here as soon as you can.”
Griffin is waiting in the corridor outside B2—the black ops level, two stories underground.
Declan is with him. Nolan too, leaning against the wall with his arms crossed, his expression even grimmer than usual.
“What’s going on?” I ask.
Griffin looks at me. His eyes move over my face—the flush I haven’t fully shaken, the brightness in my eyes that has nothing to do with the fluorescent lights. I know what he sees. But he doesn’t ask. That’s what I always liked about him—he never asks about things you’re not ready to say.
“We picked someone up,” he says. “Two hours ago. Anonymous tip, corroborated by Declan’s network.” He pauses. “The trafficking syndicate we’ve been tracking across the southern states. We got the man behind it. He was trying to leave the country.”
My stomach drops. I know this case. We’ve been chasing it for years—young omegas disappearing, sold to packs who pay in cash and never surface again. Dozens of victims across multiple states. We had the network mapped, the money trails flagged, but the man at the top was always a ghost.
“Who is it?”
Griffin doesn’t answer. He just opens the door behind him and steps aside.
The room is bare concrete. A single overhead light, casting everything in a flat, shadowless white. A metal table bolted to the floor, two chairs on one side, one on the other. It’s windowless, and the air is stale and cold, settling into your bones if you sit here long enough.
And sitting in the chair, his wrists cuffed to the table, his silver hair disheveled for the first time in his life, is Henri Aveline.
My stepfather.
The world goes very quiet.
He looks older. Considerably—the lines on his face have deepened into something permanent, and his jaw has gone slack in a way I don’t remember.
But the eyes are the same. Cold, calculating, the eyes of a man who has spent his entire life believing he is the most important person in every room he enters.
Even cuffed to a table in a concrete basement, he holds himself with that particular arrogance I remember from childhood—chin lifted, shoulders back, the posture of a man who thinks this is all temporary.
Who thinks someone will come and fix this for him the way someone has always come and fixed things for him.
My hands are shaking. I press them flat against my thighs and make them stop.
“Leave us,” I say to Griffin.
“Sophie—”
“Leave us.”
He hesitates for one second. Then he nods, and the door closes behind me, and it’s just me and Henri in a concrete room with a single light and twenty years between us.
He never looked at me when I was twelve and small and afraid and still believed that if I was good enough, quiet enough, he might love me. He looks at me now—standing in front of him in jeans and a gray hoodie with my hair pulled back—and I watch the moment he places my face.
“Sophie.” His voice is flat, bored even. But his eyes flicker—the briefest flash of surprise as he realizes the girl he sold grew up to be something he never expected. “My, my. You’ve grown up.”
“Henri.”
“I have to say, I’m impressed.” He looks around the room with the kind of detached amusement of a man still convinced he’s in control. “All of this. Is this your doing?”
I don’t answer. I pull out the chair across from him and sit, and I open the file on the table between us. Photographs. Transaction records. Names, dates, locations—the evidence Declan’s team has been assembling for years.
“Six states,” I say. “Thirty years. Sixty-seven confirmed victims.” I spread the pages out, one by one. “You’ve been selling omegas to packs who pay well and ask nothing. The documentation is thorough, Henri. There’s nowhere left to hide.”
He looks at the photographs. His expression doesn’t change—the same cold composure I remember from childhood, the face of a man who has never believed consequences apply to him.
“I want a lawyer,” he says, the corner of his mouth lifting, as if this whole thing is an inconvenience he’ll have sorted by lunch.
I lean back in my chair, fold my arms, and look at him. “This isn’t that kind of room.”
The amusement drains from his face. For the first time, he actually looks at the concrete walls, and I can see the moment he understands that this room doesn’t have lawyers or judges or due process. This room has a drain in the floor.
“You can’t keep me here,” he says, and his voice is slightly panicked now. “I have rights—”
“You sold me for two thousand dollars.” My voice comes out level. Almost conversational. “You pulled me out of nursing school the moment my heat started building and handed me to Pack Thorne like I was livestock. So let’s not talk about rights.”
The silence that follows is heavy. Henri’s jaw tightens. I can see his mind working—how to spin this, who to call, whether there’s still a version of this where he walks out. There isn’t.
“That was business,” he says finally, like it explains everything. “You were an asset. I needed the money, you were worth something, and I took the deal. Don’t be so dramatic about it.”
“Sixty-seven omegas, Henri. At least. How many more that we haven’t found?”
He doesn’t answer. His eyes are hard and defiant, the way they always were when he’d decided a conversation was beneath him.
The way he used to look at me across the dinner table when I’d said something he didn’t like—that flat, contemptuous stare that meant shut up, you’re nothing, stop wasting my time.
I hold his gaze. I am no longer twelve and I am no longer afraid.
“You know, you remind me of her,” he says suddenly. His lip curls. “That same look. That same stupid defiance. Like either of you ever had the power to change anything.”
My chest tightens. “Don’t talk about my mother.”
“Why not?” He tilts his head, his eyes narrow and full of spite. “She had that same look. Right at the end. Like she thought she was better than me.”
“She was better than you. She left because she couldn’t stand—”
“Left?” Henri lets out a laugh that has no warmth in it at all. “Is that still what you think happened?”
For a moment, I forget to breathe.
“She didn’t leave, Sophie.” He says it with relish, watching my face, savoring the impact.
“She was poking through my files. Copying documents. Trying to play hero. Going to take everything to the authorities—like she thought she was clever.” His lip curls.
“She wasn’t clever. She was just another stupid omega who thought she deserved better than what she had. ”
My hands are gripping the edge of the table. I can feel the metal pressing into my palms.
“What did you do?” I can barely get the words out.
“I got rid of her.” He says it like it’s no big deal. Like a story he’s told himself so many times it’s become boring. “She was going to destroy everything. A lifetime’s work, and she couldn’t keep her big mouth shut. So I made sure she couldn’t.”
That’s why she had a bag packed. The thought arrives from somewhere deep and old and buried. She was packing a bag. Not just for herself, but for the both of us. I remember it now.
“You told me she left.” My voice doesn’t sound like mine. “You told me—all those years, you told me she was weak, that she didn’t love me, that she—”
“And you believed me.” He tilts his head, looking at me with something close to pity. “Every time. Like a good little girl.”
She didn’t leave.
The thought breaks through everything—the training, the years of armor I’ve built around the girl who came home from school and found her mother’s coat still on the hook.
She didn’t leave me. She was trying to save me.