48. Sophie
Sophie
The heat is extraordinary.
It’s vast and overwhelming, rising through me in waves that make rational thought feel like trying to hold water in cupped hands. Every part of me feels like it’s on fire. My skin feels too sensitive for the air in the room. My pulse is loud in my ears and everywhere at once.
I look at them.
Max, crouched in front of me, his green eyes dark, sweat tracking down his jaw, the tendons in his neck standing out with the effort of staying still.
Ethan beside me, his breathing slow and controlled, his hand steady where it holds the pill, his forearm rigid with the effort.
Finn, whose blue eyes are almost black, whose jaw is set so hard it looks painful.
They’re barely holding on.
If they feel even a fraction of what I feel right now—this overwhelming pull, every instinct dragging me toward them—then what they’re doing in this moment is almost impossible.
They’re giving me a choice when every instinct in them is telling them to claim me.
They’re kneeling on the floor of a warming storage room, sweating through their shirts, and waiting for me to decide.
For me.
They’ve always been waiting for me.
I look at the pill in Ethan’s palm. This is what they’ve spent over a decade building, something meant to free omegas from exactly this moment—from biology making decisions that belong to people.
It would work. I know it would work. The heat would ebb.
My omega designation would be erased. I would walk out of this room as free as I’ve ever been, and they would still be here, and they would still love me, because that’s who they are.
I think about everything that brought us here. About getting to know them and all the quiet, impossible things that made me fall in love with them.
The shelters. Equinox. The dream of giving omegas like me a choice. Three men who keep doing good quietly, for people who will never know it was them.
I think about the way they listened when I gave them the ugliest parts of my life. How they never looked away. Never tried to make me smaller or easier to hold. They just held me. Loved me.
Stayed.
And somehow, with them, I learned what it felt like to be safe.
I’ve never wanted to belong to anyone.
My entire life has been built around the deliberate avoidance of belonging. Because belonging to someone meant depending on them, and depending on people only ever gave them something to take from me. I learned very early what it felt like to lose.
So I made myself into something that couldn’t be taken from me.
Something that belonged only to me.
And then these three men spent the last months patiently, without ever demanding anything, making me want to give them everything.
They aren’t trying to own me. They never were.
If anything—I press my lips together against the feeling that rises in my chest—if anything, they make me feel safe enough to be completely myself around them.
More free. More accepting of my own edges and my own worth.
They have looked at every scar and stayed.
They have heard the worst of my history and moved closer.
And now they are giving me Equinox.
Even when the rut has them shaking.
My mother’s words echo in my mind. Live, my darling. Be brave.
“Sophie?” Ethan’s voice is strained but steady.
The tears come then and I don’t try to stop them.
“I choose you,” I say, and my voice breaks on the last word.
“I’ll always choose you.”
Max reaches for me before I finish speaking. He takes my face in his hands and they’re shaking, and his green eyes search mine.
“Are you sure?”
“I have never been more sure of anything in my life.” I hold his gaze. “You gave me the choice. That’s all I ever needed.”
Ethan closes his hand around the pill and sets it aside.
Their scents begin to change. Warm bourbon and dark chocolate, cedar and old paper, sunlight and honey begin to soften into one another at the edges, weaving through rain and crushed rose petals.
The beginning of a bond.
I breathe it in and feel it settle in the center of my chest like it was always supposed to be there.
“My alphas,” I whisper.
Max’s arms come around me. He pulls me against his chest and I curl into him. His skin is warm through his shirt and his heartbeat is loud under my ear and he’s solid and real and here.
Finn takes my hand and kisses my palm once, slowly, his blue eyes on mine, and then turns my wrist and presses his mouth to the pulse point there.
Ethan’s hand settles on my thigh, his thumb tracing slow circles.
“Sophie.” Max’s lips graze my neck, finding the place where my pulse jumps hardest. “We’re going to mark you.”
“Yes,” I breathe.
“You’ll belong to us.” He pulls back just enough to look at my face, and his green eyes are dark and certain, but there’s a softness in them too. “Just like we belong to you.”
“Yes,” I say again. Nothing in me hesitates.
He kisses my throat, his mouth warm and open against my skin, lingering just below the place he’ll eventually mark. The touch sends a shiver through me.
Finn captures my lips in a kiss that is thorough and edged with desperation, the kiss of a man who has waited long enough. His free hand comes up to cup my jaw, his thumb tracing my cheekbone with that familiar tenderness.
“We’re yours, sweetheart,” he says against my mouth.
Ethan turns my face toward him. His kiss is slower. One hand cradles the back of my head, and I feel him exhale against my lips like something finally released.
“Let us take care of you, sweet girl,” he says quietly.
I reach for them both at once—one hand in Finn’s hair, one hand finding Ethan’s jaw. Max’s mouth is still at my throat, all three of their scents weaving into mine, and the heat in my blood is enormous and bright and, for the first time in my life, something I want.
I am choosing this.
I am choosing this.
The lock disengages with a sound like a gunshot.
Max pulls me behind him and Finn is on his feet in an instant. Ethan wraps the blanket around my shoulders before rising beside them. The three of them form a wall between me and the door so fast that it would have been impressive if I weren’t still half-dazed from the heat.
The door swings open, and cooler air rushes in from the corridor.
Griffin.
He takes in the room in one sweep—the blankets on the floor, all three alphas in varying states of dishevelment standing shoulder to shoulder between him and me, me in nothing but a blanket, and the quality of the air which, in a room this enclosed, I am fairly certain speaks for itself.
“Sophie.” His voice is even. His eyes are not. “What the hell is going on?”
“She’s going into heat.” Max’s voice comes out as a growl.
I watch him decide how to play this. Then his face settles into the one I know best—the head of Sentinel taking over.
“Get away from her,” he says.
“How did you find us?” I ask.
His eyes find mine over Max’s shoulder. “Ethan called us. The line cut out before he could say anything, so we figured we’d come by. Just to be safe.” He glances at the three alphas around me. “We got here as fast as we could.”
Nolan and Declan appear behind him in the doorway. Nolan’s face is carefully blank. Declan looks around the room, then at me and the three alphas standing between us, and his expression softens.
“Move.” Griffin takes a step forward.
“I’d strongly recommend against that.” Ethan’s voice is quiet, but it carries a warning that makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up. He steps forward, putting himself between Griffin and me. “She is going into heat. She has chosen to bond with her pack. If you interrupt that process now—”
“Her pack?” Griffin repeats, the question edged with skepticism.
“Her pack,” Max says, with a certainty that leaves no room for doubt.
“Griffin.” I step forward. Max’s arm moves automatically, but I press my hand against it and he lets me through, reluctantly, staying close enough that I can feel his warmth at my back.
I look at Griffin. At Nolan. At Declan, who watches me with the same quiet protectiveness he has since that basement when I was twenty-one.
“I’m okay. I promise.”
Griffin looks at me and sees all the signs I know he knows how to read. I can see the understanding forming in his eyes, the acceptance following more slowly.
“Sophie—”
“I’m okay,” I say again.
The heat crests in another overwhelming wave, and suddenly my body is done holding me upright. I have just enough time to think oh, that’s—before the room tilts.
Max catches me before I hit the floor.
I hear Griffin say my name. Declan moving. Finn saying something sharp and fast that I can’t make out as the heat closes over me like warm water.
The last thing I’m aware of is Max’s arms around me and the scent of bourbon and dark chocolate, rain and crushed rose petals, all of it wound together into one thing, and the thought—
I’m not afraid.