Page 141 of Beautifully Scarred Omega

“My God,” she whispers. “This was such a long time ago.”

Her fingers hover over the screen, not quite touching the image, as if the girl in the photo might shatter.

“This was right before I joined Sentinel.” Her voice has gone somewhere far away. Her eyes are filling, the tears rising slowly, and she closes them as if she can keep me from seeing it if she just refuses to let them fall.

I set the tablet aside.

“Soph, you don’t have to tell me anything,” I say. “Maybe one day, when you’re ready. When you feel safe enough.” I pause and choose my next words with more care than I’ve ever chosen anything. “I just want you to know that I’m here. All those parts of you, maybe parts you don’t want anyone to see, I would like to see them.”

Her face does something I’m not prepared for. The pain and the softness collide, and for a second she looks exactly like the girl in the photo—young, hollowed out, standing at the edge of something she doesn’t believe will hold her.

Then she stands.

“I can’t, Max.” Her voice is tight. “I need to go.”

She’s already at the door when I say it.

“I love you, Sophie.”

The words come out hoarse. Words that I have never said to anyone aside from my mother.

I didn’t plan to say them—didn’t know I was going to until they were already in the air, hanging between us like something thrown that can’t be caught back. But the moment they leave my mouth, I know they’ve been sitting at the base of my throat for so long now, maybe even since the first day she arrived at Synthera and all I noticed were her dead eyes.

But they weren’t dead. I know that now. They were alive, burning with so much pain that she’d learned to hide it so well I mistook it for emptiness. Pain that I knew better than anyone, because looking into her eyes was like looking into my own.

She turns around so fast her damp hair swings across her face.

“Don’t say that to me.” Her voice shakes, edged with anger. “You don’t get to say that to me.”

“It’s true.”

“It’s not.” She steps toward me, and there’s something building in her—I can see it rising, the anger climbing up through the grief like fire through dry wood. “You don’t know me, Max. You know the operative. The woman who sweeps your walls and runs your investigations and keeps everything locked down. But you don’t know what’s underneath that⁠—”

“I know you.”

“You know nothing!” The word tears out of her. Her hands are clenched at her sides, and her eyes are wild and blazing. “You don’t know what was done to me. You don’t know what I am. What they made me. And if you did—” Her voice cracks like glass. “If you knew, you wouldn’t be standing there telling me you love me. You’d be walking out that door and you wouldn’t look back.”

“I wouldn’t.”

“You would.” She’s crying now—furious, unwilling tears, the kind that come when the anger isn’t enough to hold the pain. “Everyone who was supposed to love me either used me or left me or sold me. My mother left. My stepfather sold me. And the men he sold me to—” Her voice splinters. “So don’t stand there and tell me you love me like it means something, because I know what happens next.”

“Then tell me, Sophie.” I step closer. My voice is rough and shaking but I hold her gaze. “Tell me the thing you think is going to make me leave. Because I am not going anywhere.”

“You wouldn’t even be able to look at me.”

“Try me.”

The anger in her face breaks apart, and what’s underneath is raw and desperate and terrified. A woman standing on the edge of a cliff deciding whether to jump or whether the fall will kill her.

Please. Trust me. Please, Soph. Give us a chance.

She jumps.

“I was raped, Max.” Her voice shakes. Barely a whisper. “Repeatedly. For months. I was sold by my stepfather to a pack of alphas and they raped me. They held me down and they cut me and they raped me and they told me I was nothing. That I was dirty and disgusting and that no one would ever want me.”

My heart stops.

A full beat of nothing. Then it slams back to life so hard I feel it in my skull. My vision blurs. My hands are shaking. I can feel it—the foundation of everything I thought I understood about the world cracking open, revealing a darkness beneath it that I will never, as long as I live, be able to unsee.