Page 107 of Beautifully Scarred Omega

I should be disturbed. Part of me is—a small, principled part that understands what Ethan is describing, that recognizes the line he crossed and knows he knows it too.

But a larger part, a part I’m not proud of, feels something else entirely.

It turns me on.

I take a long drink of whiskey and try to pretend I’m not thinking what I’m thinking.

But I am. And looking across the table at Max—at the way his jaw has gone tight and his green eyes have gone dark and his fingers are gripping his glass with a pressure that suggests he’s holding himself very carefully in check—I know he’s thinking it too.

Three alphas in a booth. One omega living rent-free in all three of our heads.

Max, who has never so much as looked at someone he works with and who treats control and boundaries like gospel, kissed a woman against the wall of his own office.

Ethan, who has only ever been respectful to omegas and wrote a thesis on ethical consent practices in alpha-omega dynamics, stood in his product lab and gave an omega a live demonstration of a knotting device because he wanted to see Sophie lose control.

And me. Who treated her like the enemy because it was easier than admitting that she wasn’t, and that I would give anything, anything, to go back to that night and finish what we started.

None of us are acting like ourselves, drawn to the same woman by a pull so strong it’s dragging all three of us across lines we never thought we’d cross.

I look around the table and it’s obvious we’re all thinking about the same thing.

Sophie.

There is only Sophie now.

I finish my whiskey, set the glass down, and look at my packmates.

“We are completely fucked,” I say.

Nobody disagrees.

CHAPTER 29

Sophie

The device in my drawer is slowly burning a hole through my nightstand. I’ve been trying to ignore it, trying not to think about it, but it’s like that chocolate bar you know you have in the back of the kitchen cupboard—you can go about your day, do your job, have a conversation, but somewhere in the back of your mind, you just know it’s there.

I’ve never used one before. I was lucky—my heat didn’t come during the months I spent at the shelter after Sentinel rescued me. The heat-blockers I’d stolen from nursing school were still in my system, and by the time they wore off, I was on Sentinel’s military-grade suppressants. Those stopped my heats entirely. And I was grateful—more grateful than I’ve ever been for anything—because it meant I never had to find out what my body would do if I let it want something.

And then there was Pack Thorne.

The truth is, while part of me knows that they did things to my body, I can’t really remember them, at least not clearly. It’s as if my mind decided, at some point during those months, that the memories were too dangerous to hold in one piece, and so it shattered them. Broke them into fragments and scattered them across a darkness I can’t navigate.

I used to get flashes. In the early years, sudden, violent bursts of sensory memory that would hit without warning—a smell, a sound, the weight of a hand—and leave me gasping on whatever floor I happened to be on. Declan found me once, curled in the corner of the training room, shaking so badly I’d bitten through my own lip. He didn’t ask what I’d seen. He just sat on the floor beside me and waited until I could breathe again.

But I haven’t had a flash in years. The suppressants help. And burying it so deep I can pretend it doesn’t exist helps most of all.

Until Finn touched my shoulder.

In that moment, I was back in that basement. Marek was holding me down, one hand on my shoulder, his fingers digging into my skin hard enough to bruise, and the blade was going in—slow and deliberate, as if he was savoring the process—carving deep into my shoulder as he took me from behind. And then the pain came—a white-hot flash that merged with the old one until I couldn’t tell the difference between Finn’s gentle fingers and Marek’s knife.

I was on Finn the next second, acting completely on instinct, forearm to his throat.

But Finn didn’t even move.

“Hey. I’m not going to hurt you, Sophie.”

And he just looked at me with eyes so steady and so blue and so achingly sincere that the scream in my head went quiet.