46. Sophie
Sophie
My apartment is exactly as I left it.
That’s the thing about a place you’ve made deliberately empty—it stays that way perfectly, with no evidence that time has passed.
The surfaces are clean, the cushions straight.
Nothing out of place because there is nothing to place.
I stand in the doorway and look at the space I’ve called home for three years and feel something I didn’t expect.
It feels like a cage.
It’s not really a home. Just four walls, a locked door, and no one in it except me, which is exactly how I’ve always wanted it. I have never once understood until this moment that I’ve been building a cage and calling it safety.
I put my bag down and walk to the window.
The city is gray and indifferent outside, and I stand there and think about the pack house—the kitchen that smells like butter and coffee, the living room with the enormous couch and photos and overflowing bookshelves.
Max kissing the top of my head like he’d been doing it for years.
Finn at the stove, humming, turning to smile at me like I was the best thing he’d seen all morning.
Ethan taking my hand and lacing his fingers through mine and just holding it, saying nothing.
I turn away from the window.
I go to the drawer at the back, behind the things I never touch—the things I keep because I haven’t been able to bring myself to throw them away. A small wooden box that closes with a brass clasp. I haven’t opened it in years.
I sit down on the floor with it in my lap and open it.
My mother’s photograph is on top. I pick it up and hold it under the light.
She’s young in it. Around the same age I am now. Dark hair loose around her shoulders. Green eyes shaped like mine. She’s looking at something outside the frame and almost smiling—not quite, just the beginning of it, the moment before.
I look at her face and I see her clearly for the first time. She’s not the woman who left her twelve-year-old daughter, but the one who died trying to get us both out.
“I’m sorry, Maman,” I whisper. “I’m sorry I believed him.”
I take the letter from my jacket and put it in the box, beside the photograph. Two things I have left of her.
If I’m gone, it’s not because I chose to go. I would never choose to leave you. Never.
I close the box and hold it against my chest and sit on the floor of my empty apartment and let myself cry—loud, coming from the bottom of my lungs and shaking my whole body.
I cry for the mother I lost and the years I spent hating her for leaving and the truth I only learned today in a concrete room from the man who killed her.
And then, when the tears slow, I think about the alphas who are probably wondering where I am right now.
I pull my phone out and text Max.
Something came up this morning. I’m okay. I’ll explain everything tonight.
I type I love you and stare at it for a long moment. Then I delete it, letter by letter, and hit send.
His reply comes in seconds.
We’re here. Whatever you need. I love you, little one.
My lip trembles. He says it so easily, so openly, like it’s just the truth.
I type back: I love you too.
I press the phone against my chest and close my eyes and breathe.
I should shower and eat something. More importantly, I should go back to Synthera and do my job and find the mole and protect the people I love.
My phone buzzes again.
I glance at the screen. It’s Lucy.
Hey girl! Where are you today?? We missed you at lunch. Also, something weird happened. There was a small fire in one of the labs. Everyone’s fine but it was SO scary. Just thought you should know! Hope you’re doing ok
I stare at the message.
A fire. In the labs. If the temperature controls in the clinical wing are compromised—if someone has got to the storage unit—
They can’t destroy Equinox.
I text Lucy back. I’m on my way.
It’s nearly five when I make it to Synthera and the grounds are quiet, the car park almost empty, the glass of the atrium catching the last gray light of the day.
I’m out of the car and moving toward the entrance before I register that I’m still in my jeans and gray hoodie, my hair in a messy ponytail.
Lucy meets me at the entrance to the underground corridor.
“Sophie!” Her face lights up, then her eyes drop to my outfit and her brow furrows. “What on earth are you wearing? And your hair—”
“I was at home,” I say. “Is everyone okay? Where’s the fire?”
“Oh, it’s all sorted, I think! But I thought you’d want to see the damage. Come on, I’ll show you.” She’s already moving, leading me down the corridor toward a part of the building I’ve never been in.
I follow her through a set of security doors, down a stairwell where the air turns cool and dry.
The corridor at the bottom is silent, lit with the harsh artificial light of a place with no windows.
Lucy swipes her card at a glass door and holds it open, and I step through into a room I recognize from the documentation—floor-to-ceiling shelving and sealed storage units.
The Equinox samples.
“Lucy?” I ask. “Where’s the fire?”
But when I turn around, she’s already on the other side of the glass door, pulling it shut.
What the—?
“Lucy? What’s going on?”
She doesn’t answer. Instead, she slowly locks it.
I stare at her through the glass. She reaches for the speaker panel on the wall and switches it on, and when she looks at me her expression has changed so completely that for a moment I don’t recognize her face.
“Sorry about this,” she says. Her voice comes through the speaker flat and calm. “I need someone to take the fall. It has to be you.”
Lucy. Cheerful, warm, bring-you-coffee-without-being-asked Lucy.
Lucy who knew everyone’s name and made the office feel like somewhere you actually wanted to be.
I think about our lunches, the corridor gossip, the times she’d leaned over and whispered something that made me laugh before I could stop myself, the quarterly presentation just days ago where she fanned herself and called the alphas delicious—and try to reconcile it with the woman standing on the other side of this glass with her hand on a panel and her face completely, utterly still.
“You,” I say. The word comes out almost disbelieving. “It was you. This whole time, it was you.”
She doesn’t deny it.
“Why me?”
“Because I’ve seen the way they look at you.” Her face twists with resentment. “Once their little pet has been found in here with everything destroyed—it’ll be even more devastating. For all of them.”
“Lucy.” I keep my voice level. “Think about what you’re doing.”
“I know exactly what I’m doing.” She tilts her head slightly, studying me through the glass with an expression that makes my skin crawl. “Do you know what Equinox actually does, Sophie?”
“Yes.”
“Then you understand why it has to be stopped.” Her voice hardens. “They want to erase omega designation. To reach into someone’s biology and remove it like it’s a flaw to be corrected. It’s an abomination.”
“It’s not, Lucy,” I say. “It gives omegas a choice they’ve never had.”
“A choice.” The word comes out bitter. “Do you know what I would give to have that designation?”
I stare at her.
“I’ve been a beta every day of my life, and I would give anything to know what it feels like to have a scent that means something. A heat. A body capable of forming that kind of bond.” Her eyes flick over me. “You were born with all of it.”
“You think that’s a gift?”
“I think you have no idea how lucky you are.”
A laugh escapes me, sharp and disbelieving. “Lucky?”
“And now Synthera wants to give people the power to change what someone is.” Her jaw tightens.
“To reach into a body and cut it out. And I won’t allow it.
So I’m going to switch off the temperature control.
Everything in that room will be destroyed.
And when they find you in here, they’ll know exactly who did it.
” A thin smile. “I’m glad you came, Sophie. I was counting on it.”
She reaches for the panel.
“Lucy—wait,” I say, wanting to keep her talking.
Behind her, a storage room door opens and Fabian backs out holding a hard drive, muttering something about file sizes. He turns around and sees me through the glass and freezes.
My eyes zero in on the hard drive in his hand. The research files.
They’re not just destroying the samples. They’re wiping everything.
“She’s here already?” he says to Lucy.
“Yeah, she was fast,” Lucy says.
The ground shifts under me. “You too?”
Fabian works in IT. Of course. He built the access system—he must’ve found a way to clone the keycard. He’s the reason Lucy got down here, and probably the reason the intruder got into Synthera in the first place.
Fabian sets the hard drive down and stands beside Lucy.
“But—” I stare at them through the glass. “The closet. You and him, I thought—”
“I know what you thought.” Lucy’s thin smile widens. “That was the point.”
They weren’t making out in that closet. They were conspiring. And Lucy knew exactly how to make me look the other way.
“The intruder—” I say, before they can leave. “Who was it?”
Lucy’s eyes widen for just a second. “How do you know about that?”
“I—I heard the bosses talking about it.”
She studies me for a moment, then shrugs. “A friend of ours. Marcel. He’s fully recovered now, no thanks to Pack Cavill’s security team.”
Marcel. So Lucy thinks Pack Cavill’s security team caught him—that must’ve been what he told her. And he was too embarrassed to tell his own people he’d been almost taken down by someone half his size.
I want to keep her talking, but she switches off the speaker.
The silence is total. The room is insulated and completely sealed—I can’t hear anything from outside except my own breathing.
Then Lucy reaches under her jacket and pulls out a gun.
She points it at me through the glass and switches the speaker back on.