47. Finn
Finn
It hits me before I even realize what’s happening.
I’ve been smelling Sophie’s scent for two weeks now—rain and crushed rose petals, breaking through her suppressants in waves, stronger every time we’re close to her. I thought I knew what she smelled like.
I was wrong.
Her scent explodes into the sealed room—rain and crushed roses, amplified a hundred times over, laced with something more potent underneath that I’ve never smelled before. It pours into every corner, saturating the air until I can taste it on my tongue.
Every muscle in my body locks.
I’m on my feet before I know I’m moving, putting distance between myself and Sophie, my back hitting the shelving unit on the far wall hard enough to rattle the cases.
Across the room I see Max do the same—spinning away, one hand braced against the glass door, his jaw set so tight I can see it from here.
Ethan hasn’t moved at all, his hands flat on the floor beside him.
Sophie looks up at us. Her eyes move from one to the other, confused, still raw from crying, her cheeks flushed.
“What—” she starts.
“Sophie.” Max’s voice comes out rough. Controlled, but barely. He’s still facing the door, his shoulders rigid. “We need you to stay where you are.”
“Why are you—”
“We’re going into rut.” The words come out like gravel. He turns just enough to look at her, his green eyes dark and dilated. “Your scent. It’s—we need distance. Right now.”
“Sweetheart,” I say, and my voice doesn’t sound like mine. “You’re going into heat.”
I watch her face change as she understands. The confusion is replaced by fear, there and gone, and underneath it something that isn’t fear at all and that I absolutely cannot think about right now.
“Okay,” she says softly. “Okay.”
I move to the far end of the glass wall and press my forehead against it.
The cool of it does nothing—the room is already warming from the disabled temperature control, the air thick and close, and Sophie’s scent is inescapable.
There is nowhere in this sealed, insulated room that is far enough away.
I know this. I lean harder into the glass anyway and stare out into the empty corridor and will someone, anyone, to appear at the end of it.
Nobody comes.
“Finn.” Ethan is on the far side of the room now, both hands braced on the shelving unit, his head bowed. His voice is steady but thinner than usual. “Breathing through your mouth will reduce the olfactory input.”
“Thank you, Ethan,” I say through my teeth. “Incredibly helpful.”
I try it anyway. It makes no difference.
Sophie’s scent has already saturated my lungs, my blood, every nerve ending I have—it’s not something I can breathe around, it’s something I’m swimming in, and my body has very clear ideas about what it wants to do about that and I am using every resource I have to override them.
“Sophie.” Ethan again, still measured. “Can you tell me how you’re feeling?”
“Hot,” she says. “I feel—really hot.”
I glance over my shoulder. She’s on the floor where we left her, her knees drawn up, one hand pressed to her cheek. Her face is flushed a deep, vivid pink, and even from across the room I can see the slight shine of sweat at her temples, the rapid rise and fall of her chest.
“Hot how?” Ethan asks. He’s moved slightly closer to her, his eyes tracking her.
“Like my skin is—” She pauses, her brow creasing. “—on fire. Like every nerve is. I don’t—” She looks down at her hands, then back up, and there’s a genuine bewilderment in her face that tightens something in my chest. “Is it supposed to feel like this?”
She’s been on suppressants her whole life and she’s never experienced a natural heat. This is the real thing, unmedicated, her body experiencing it for the first time.
“This is your first real heat, Sophie,” Ethan says gently. “Your body has never been through this before.” He keeps his voice level. “It’s going to intensify. But we’re going to take care of you. Okay?”
Sophie stares at him. She suddenly looks very young, the operative and armor gone, just a woman experiencing something overwhelming and frightening for the first time with no framework to put it in. “Okay,” she whispers.
Max is still at the glass door. I can see the tension in his back from here, the effort in every breath. A bead of sweat tracks down the side of his jaw. His knuckles are white where he grips the door frame.
“Max.” I say it quietly.
“I know,” he says. Just that.
Ethan gets up and moves to the shelving unit at the back of the room. He comes back with two emergency blankets. He spreads them on the floor in the center of the room, overlapping them to make something soft out of what’s available, and crouches down beside them.
“Sophie. Come here. You’ll be more comfortable.”
She gets up slowly, a little unsteady, moving like she doesn’t quite trust her own body. She crosses to the blankets and sits down in the middle of them, pulling her knees to her chest.
Ethan starts to straighten.
Her hand shoots out and closes around his wrist.
“Ethan.” Her voice is small. “Don’t leave.”
He goes still. I watch him look down at her hand on his wrist, then at her face, and I watch him lose the battle with his own instincts right there in front of me.
“Okay,” he says quietly. “Okay, sweet girl.” He sits back down beside her, and she moves immediately—turning into him and climbing into his lap, pressing her face into his neck, breathing him in. His arms come around her, and I watch his eyes close briefly before he opens them again.
“How long?” Max asks.
Ethan checks his watch. “Before full onset? Ten minutes. Maybe less.” He glances at the door. “The room temperature is a factor. Heat accelerates with warmth.”
“Great,” I say. “Fantastic. Wonderful news.”
“Finn.” Max, warning.
“I know, I know.” I drag both hands through my hair.
My pulse is loud in my ears. The rut is a low, constant pressure at the base of my skull, a heat in my blood that has nothing to do with the room temperature, and Sophie is twenty feet away pressed against Ethan’s side making small sounds of distress that are doing absolutely nothing to help me stay on the right side of my own self-control. “I’m fine. We’re fine.”
Max looks at me. His face is sheened with sweat. “We’re really not fine,” he says.
“No,” I agree. “We really aren’t.”
Sophie’s scent intensifies.
It happens in waves—each one stronger than the last, cresting and pulling back and cresting higher, and with every wave I can feel the rut tightening its grip. My vision hasn’t narrowed yet but it will. My hands are shaking slightly and I’m not sure when that started.
Across the room, Sophie pulls back from Ethan’s neck.
“Why is it getting worse?” Her voice has changed—lower, a little unsteady, like she’s losing her grip on it. “Ethan, why does it feel like—”
“It’s the heat progressing,” he says. His voice is tight in a way it almost never is. “It’s going to keep intensifying. What you’re feeling is your body’s response to our presence—our scent is accelerating it. That’s normal. That’s—” He swallows. “That’s how it’s supposed to work.”
“I’m so hot,” she says. She reaches for the hem of her hoodie.
“Sophie—” I start.
She pulls it over her head.
None of us moves.
She’s in a thin gray t-shirt underneath. She makes a sound of frustration and peels it off too, and now she’s in her bra, the flush on her face spread down her throat and chest. Her scent surges so powerfully that I have to grab the edge of the shelving unit behind me to stay where I am.
“I’m so hot.” She presses the back of her hand to her own cheek and flinches at the heat of her skin. “Is this normal? Am I supposed to feel this hot?” Her voice wavers. “It feels like something is wrong with me.”
“Nothing is wrong with you.” Max has turned from the door. He’s looking at her like he’s barely holding it together. “Sophie. Nothing is wrong.”
Her lips part and her eyes go wide and then her whole body shudders.
She reaches for the waistband of her jeans.
“Sweetheart.” My voice comes out somewhere between a plea and a warning. “Please don’t do that.”
“I have to.” She pushes herself to her feet and shoves them down her legs, kicking them aside. Then she’s standing there in her underwear, her dark hair loose around her shoulders, and every instinct I have is screaming. “Please.” Her eyes find mine. “Please, I need—”
I’m halfway to her before I realize I’ve moved. Then I’m sitting on the blanket in front of her, her scent absolutely everywhere and the rut has its hands around my throat.
“Finn.” Her voice is desperate. “Finn, please.”
She straddles me, her hands landing on my chest.
The sound that comes out of me is not dignified.
I grab the edge of the blanket with both hands and hold on.
Every muscle in my body is rigid with the effort of not touching, not responding to the warm weight of her against me.
Her hips shift, just slightly, and I feel the contact like a current running straight up my spine.
“Sophie.” My voice is wrecked. “God. Sweetheart—”
She kisses me.
And then all the careful distance I’ve been maintaining for the last ten minutes ceases to exist.
My hands find her waist instantly—her skin is burning, fever-warm, and she makes a sound against my mouth that I feel in every part of me. I kiss her back. Of course I kiss her back.
She shifts her hips again, deliberately this time, and the moan that tears out of me is guttural and desperate.
“Jesus Christ, Sophie—”
“Finn.” My name comes out fractured. Pleading. Her hands are in my hair and her forehead is against mine and she’s looking at me with those green eyes—heat-blown, entirely unguarded—and it is taking everything I have. “Please. I need you. All of you. Please.”
I want to. God help me, I want to so badly that it’s a physical pain.
“Listen to me.” I take her face in my hands and make her look at me.
“Sophie. Listen.” She quiets, barely. Her breathing is ragged, her pulse visible in her throat.
“If we knot you now—during heat—we’ll want to mark you.
All three of us. The bond will be permanent.
” I hold her gaze. “Do you understand what that means?”
She goes still.
Not all the way—her body is still burning with heat and running on instinct that the suppressants have never let her feel before—but her eyes clear just enough. She looks at me, then at Max over my shoulder, then at Ethan.
She bites her lip.
“I—” she starts.
Ethan gets to his feet and crosses the room to one of the storage units. He pulls something from a case, then comes back and kneels beside her, opening his palm. A single pill—small and white. “Before this goes any further, you need to know you have a choice.”
She stares at it.
“That’s Equinox,” she whispers.
“Yes.” His voice is steady, even now—even with the rut pressing at the edges of his control, even with sweat on his brow and his jaw tight, he is steady.
“If you take it now, the heat stops. Your omega designation is erased. You won’t bond with us.
We won’t mark you.” He holds her gaze. “You’ll be free, Sophie.
Completely free. No heats. No biology controlling you. Ever again.”
Max moves to her other side. He takes her hand in both of his. “Bond with us,” he says quietly. “Be with us. Let us love you. Let us spend the rest of our lives making sure you never have to be afraid again.” His green eyes are wet, and I realize in that moment that so are mine. “Stay.”
“Or take the pill,” Ethan says. “And be free. We won’t love you less for it. We won’t leave. We will spend the rest of our lives being whatever you need us to be—just without the bond.” His voice doesn’t waver. “This is your body, Sophie. It has always been your body. This choice belongs to you.”
“We mean it,” I say. I’m still holding her face; her skin is burning under my hands. “Whatever you choose. We’re not going anywhere.”
Max tightens his hold on her hand. “And we’ll still love you,” he says.
“If you take the pill, if you never carry our marks or bond with us. None of that changes how we feel about you.” His eyes stay on hers.
“We want you to choose us. God, Sophie, we want it more than I can fucking say. But we want you more.”
She looks at the pill in Ethan’s palm.
She looks at Max’s hands around hers.
She looks at me.
Whatever she decides in the next ten seconds will define the rest of our lives.
She takes a breath.