Page 109 of Beautifully Scarred Omega

“Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.” The words fall out of me like a prayer, breathless and broken, my hips rolling against the device in a rhythm my body has found on its own.

Then Ethan is beside me, his lips at my ear, his voice low and devastating. You’re so close, Sophie. I can see it. Don’t fight it—let your body have what it wants. His hand moves across my breasts, his fingers finding my nipple, and I mirror the motion with my own hand, squeezing, rolling, the sensation making my vision go white at the edges.

I think I need to punish you, Max breathes against my throat, driving deeper, and his voice has that same tremor it had in his office. And I don’t think you want me to stop.

All three of them, surrounding me. Max inside me, filling me. Finn’s mouth on my skin, whispering I’ve got you, Soph against my neck. Ethan’s hand on my breast, his voice in my ear, telling me how beautiful I am, how good I feel, how once Max fills me with his cum, Finn will go next.

Then me, Ethan whispers. Then me.

The expansion is slow, pressing against me from the inside, growing larger with each second. In my mind, it’s Max’s knot—swelling inside me, locking us together, his green eyes burning into mine as his hips stutter and still.

Somehow, I don’t mind it when you do it, he says, and his thumb traces a circle against the inside of my wrist, and I feel the tremor move through me like a current.

The knot finally locks and fills every inch of me and holds there, and the orgasm arrives like a detonation at the base of my spine and it erases every thought in my head and replaces them with nothing but heat and pressure and the three voices tangled together in the dark.

I come with my hand pressed over my mouth and it is the most intense thing I have ever felt.

My body arches and trembles, and for a few shattered seconds, there is nothing but the staggering truth that my body can still feel something other than pain.

When I’ve pulled the device free and I’m lying in the dark with the aftershocks moving through me like small earthquakes, the tears come.

I cry and it takes over my entire body until I’m shaking and gasping and curling onto my side with my arms wrapped around myself.

I cry for the girl in the shelter. The one who lay in a narrow bed, willing her body to stop wanting. The one who was so afraid of what wanting meant that she swallowed every pill they gave her to make sure she’d never have to find out.

I cry for the girl in Detroit. The one on the floor with a knife in her shoulder and a man behind her who thought her pain was his to enjoy.

Those girls deserved this. They deserved to feel what I just felt—the overwhelming pleasure of a body being given what it wants instead of what it has to endure.

I press my face into the pillow and cry until there’s nothing left, and then I lie in the quiet and breathe, and the breath is different now. Slower. Deeper. Like something that was clenched for a very long time has finally, finally let go.

CHAPTER 30

Max

Since that night at Aurelia, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about what Finn told us.

Sophie’s scar and the way she reacted when he grazed it, her forearm across his throat. He said it was like watching a woman relive something terrible, something so terrible it made her want to kill the other person.

And I pinned her against a wall. I took her wrists and held them above her head and pressed my body into hers, like a goddamn fucking animal. She kissed me back, I know that, and I thought she wanted it. But now I’m not so sure anymore, and the guilt sits in my chest like something with teeth.

Because the worst part is that, looking back and knowing what I know now, I recognize it. I know the way trauma can rewire you. The way you build your entire life around a wound you never talk about, and create a version of yourself so competent and controlled, so untouchable that no one ever thinks to look underneath.

In the past week, we’ve fallen into a routine. Since she moved to research, her five o’clock updates come to me instead of Finn, and somewhere along the way those meetings stopped feeling like briefings. She’s not open, not exactly. She’s still Sophie, but she’s not as guarded as she was when she first arrived here. She argues with me when she thinks I’m wrong, which is often. She rolls her eyes when I overthink something, and she doesn’t hide that she’s doing it. Last Wednesday she called one of my theories “impressively wrong,” and when I asked her to elaborate, she did, for twenty minutes, and she was right about every point.

And then there was her humor. It comes out in flashes, dry and quick and gone before you can catch it, like she’s testing whether it’s safe to be funny around me. I’ve started looking forward to it the way you look forward to the first crack of sunlight after days of rain, not because the rain was unbearable but because the light makes everything look different.

It’s early evening and Synthera is emptying. I’m heading to my office for my scheduled update with Sophie. My laptop is under one arm, my phone in my hand, when I round the corner of the fourth-floor corridor and stop.

Sophie is standing in the middle of the hallway.

She’s completely still, one hand raised at her side, her body angled toward a cleaning closet halfway down the corridor. Her posture is coiled, the careful stillness of a person who has heard something and is assessing it before she moves.

She turns her head and sees me. Her dark eyes lock onto mine and she raises a single finger to her lips.

Shhh.

Then she points at the closet door.