Page 123 of Beautifully Scarred Omega

She looks up. “I think she’s in the archive room. She said something about filing reports.”

“Thanks.”

I walk down the corridor. My footsteps echo in the empty wing—most of the researchers are in the main lab, and the archive room is at the far end, in the quiet corner of the building that is usually deserted.

The door is open. Sophie is inside, sitting on the small desk in the corner with her shoes on the floor, one leg tucked under her, the other dangling.

I stand in the doorway for a moment, taking her in.

She’s wearing a frilly pink blouse that the real Sophie would probably set on fire, a black skirt with the hem riding up where her leg is tucked beneath her, and a strand of hair that’s escaped her ponytail falling across her forehead. She’s immersed in a green folder open in her lap.

“Hey,” she says, looking up. She straightens, uncurling her leg, and slides off the desk to step back into her shoes. “I got caught up in reading this report.” She closes the folder and reaches to put it back on the shelf behind her.

“What were you reading about?” I lean against the doorframe, keeping my voice casual, like I’m the scientist asking a question and not the man who’s been thinking about the pink flush on her cheeks for a week straight.

“The results of the trial you did on the suppressants. The latest cohort—the extended-release formulation.” She pulls the folder back down, opens it, flips to a page of charts. “How much safer they are now. How much longer they last.” She pauses, her finger tracing one of the charts. “I’ve just realized that I’m on them. The Synthera suppressants. I didn’t know you supplied Sentinel.”

“We do,” I say.

She looks at me. “You knew? That I was on them?”

“Yeah.” I push off the doorframe and step into the room, pulling the door shut behind me. “I smelled it that night we checked for bugs on the executive wing. When you first arrived here.” The memory comes back—the two of us in a darkened corridor, running a scanner along the baseboards, and the faint chemical signature in her scent that told me exactly which formulation she was on. “It feels like a lifetime ago,” I add. Because somehow it does. Somehow it feels like Sophie has been here forever—like the time before her was a different era, a sepia-toned version of my life that I can barely remember.

She’s quiet for a moment, then she looks at me, thoughtful and open, like she’s working something through.

“Ethan, can I ask you something?”

“Go ahead.” I move closer.

“What motivated you to create Synthera?” She tilts her head, studying me. “Aside from the money.”

She moves to sit on the small desk in the corner again, setting the folder down, opening the next file she needs to shelve. I move to stand beside her, leaning against the desk rather than sitting. Close enough that I can see the dark fringe of her lashes. The faint freckles the foundation doesn’t quite cover.

“What do you think, Sophie? Based on everything you’ve seen so far?”

“I asked you first,” she says, looking at me sideways. The ghost of a challenge in her voice.

“Fine.” I fold my arms. Her question is simple, but it’s one that people rarely ask me. Everyone assumes it’s just a business, that it’s about the money.

The truth is, it’s the thing I care about most in the world, and saying it out loud to her, in this room, feels like handing her something I’ve never handed anyone.

“It was never about the money,” I say. “When I was in university, I wrote my thesis on ethical consent practices in alpha-omega dynamics. Three hundred pages about how the system fails omegas at every level. And what I learned while writing it changed my perspective on what it means to be an alpha. After that, all I wanted was to build something that actually fixed it.”

Sophie is watching me, and for a reason I can’t explain I want her to know the truth. The full story.

“And what does it mean to be an alpha?” she asks.

“That it’s our job to protect omegas. Being stronger doesn’t give us the right to use that strength to take what we want. Every advantage we have comes with a responsibility, not permission.”

“And so you created Synthera,” she says quietly.

“We created Synthera. We wanted to build something that would help omegas regain agency over their own bodies. Over their own biology. That’s it. That’s the whole mission, stripped down to its core.”

She doesn’t say anything. She just watches me with those dark eyes, and so I keep going.

“We wanted to build tools that gave omegas control,” I say. “Real control. Not the kind that comes from being managed by an alpha or a system or a society that’s decided their bodies are public property. The kind that comes from choosing. From being able to say this is what I want or this is what I don’t want and having the technology to back it up.”

My voice is getting rougher and I don’t care.