Page 153 of Beautifully Scarred Omega

“It can be like that,” I say quietly. “It can be like that every time.”

For a moment, we just look at each other, my thumb moving slowly over her cheek.

Then she presses her face back into my shoulder, and I feel her exhale—long, slow, like she’s finally setting down something she’s carried for years.

I wrap both arms around her, and for the first time in longer than I can remember, I feel content.

CHAPTER 40

Ethan

“The efficacy of the new centrifugal separation rates is actually quite⁠—”

Sophie walks into the atrium and I forget what I was saying.

Dr. Yoon is still looking at me, waiting for the end of the sentence. I have no idea what the end of the sentence was.

Sophie is wearing a dark red dress, the neckline sitting just below her collarbone. She’s smiling at someone from marketing, and the strands that have escaped her loose chignon move against her skin when she turns her head.

Every coherent thought I had is gone.

She’s stunning. She’s always been stunning. But tonight⁠—

Then she glances at me across the room and smiles, and I smile back before I can stop myself.

“Mr. Brooks?” Dr. Yoon says, adjusting her glasses. “The separation rates?”

“Right. Yes. Promising results.”

I excuse myself from Dr. Yoon and find Sophie again across the room. She’s moved on to another conversation, her head tilted, listening with that focused attention she gives everyone. I check my watch. Three more hours. Four, tops.

The annual Synthera gala, a necessary evil I helped design years ago and have regretted ever since. Tonight the atrium is all soft light, mirrored windows, champagne, and a string quartet Finn insisted on. The whole place glows gold and slightly unreal.

We’d discussed canceling it after the break-in. But Sophie had looked at the three of us and said, It’s still our best shot—everyone in one room, relaxed, drinking. People say things at parties they’d never say in a meeting. Let me be in the room for that. And so we agreed.

The evening moves and I track her without looking directly at her. I keep thinking about the day she read my half-life model from across the room.

Two years of pharmacology. A long time ago.

Nursing school. That’s how she’d known the notation, why she’d asked all the right questions. None of it had been part of her cover.

She could have been brilliant in a lab.

I look down at my drink and think about the life she would’ve had if she’d finished school. If her stepdad hadn’t taken it from her. And then I think about the library, and the scars, and the way she looked when she said I was twenty-one, and my hand tightens around the glass.

Don’t. Not here. Not now.

After an hour, the noise starts to get to me. The overlapping conversations, the music, the sheer volume of people in one space—my brain tries to process all of it at once, and eventually I hit my limit.

I slip out through the corridor and take the elevator up to the fourth floor. The music fades behind me as the doors close. The motion-activated lights flicker on as I walk through the research wing, one strip at a time, illuminating the empty desks and dark monitors. Everyone’s at the party. The wing is deserted.

My office door is closed. But there’s light coming from underneath it—a thin strip of gold at the base.

What the⁠—?

I push the door open.

Sophie is sitting in my chair.