Page 200 of Beautifully Scarred Omega

I have never built anything that built me back.

Sophie breathes against my chest, slow and even now, the heat finally easing for the moment. The three of us stay close around her, the first permanent thread of our pack settling into place.

I look down at her and understand, with a certainty I feel in every part of me, that none of it was wasted.

Every choice that brought me here mattered.

Every one of them led to this.

CHAPTER 50

Sophie

Max is still inside me, his knot thick and swollen, holding me close while his breath moves slowly against my hair. The mark on my throat pulses with a heat that isn’t pain. It feels like presence. His presence.

The bond hums between us, woven so deeply into me it feels like part of my body, part of my soul.

I can feel him, so steady and warm, a certainty beneath everything else. I feel the tenderness he is trying not to crush me with and the enormous relief underneath it.

And his love.

That is the part that fills me with so much awe.

It is so much bigger from inside the bond.

“Hi,” I whisper.

“Hi, little one.” His voice is rough and tender. He presses his lips to my forehead, and another pulse of feeling moves through the bond, so unmistakably Max that my chest aches.

For most of my life, love has been something I understood best in retrospect.

My mother’s hands in my hair. Her voice telling me to be brave. The things she sacrificed without telling me they were sacrifices.

And then the absence afterward.

I learned early that loving someone gave the universe something to take from you.

Max shifts beside me, his knot releasing gradually, but the bond remains. The physical distance between us feels strange now, almost unreal, because some part of him is still wrapped around something inside me. He kisses me slowly, then pulls out and shifts to the side.

The heat is quiet for now. It simmers beneath my skin, a low burn moving through my blood, but the sharpest edge has dulled. I can breathe again. I can think.

“It comes in cycles,” Ethan says. He’s sitting beside the bed, watching me with those steady gray eyes. “The first peak was the worst. You have a little time before the next one.”

Finn settles in front of me, taking Max’s place. He lies on his side facing me and brushes the damp hair away from my face. His blue eyes search mine.

“Hey, sweetheart,” he murmurs. “How are you feeling?”

Even now, he’s being so gentle with me. His cock is hard against my stomach, every muscle in him straining, and I know the rut is still tearing through him. But he’s giving me a minute. Letting me breathe. Letting me choose.

My eyes well up.

I’ve already chosen them, and they’re still letting me have a choice.

I answer by pressing myself against him, closing the gap between us until his chest is flush to my breasts and his stomach is bare against mine and his cock is hard and heavy between us. The relief of skin on skin is so immediate it makes us both moan. I tuck my face into his neck and breathe him in—sunlight and honey, golden and so deeply Finn—and his arms come around me, pulling me tighter.

“I love you, Finn,” I whisper against his lips.

“Sophie,” he says softly, his voice so full of emotion it makes my heart stutter. “I love you so much.”