Page 58 of Beautifully Scarred Omega

“I’ve got it.”

“It weighs more than you do.”

Sophie’s eyes flash and her jaw tightens.

“Max.” She doesn’t use my name like a courtesy. She uses it like a warning. “I have taken down more alphas than you can imagine.” She straightens slowly. “I am strong enough to lift a fucking cabinet.”

She holds my gaze, daring me to argue.

What the hell is her problem?

I offered to help, and she’s acting like I reached for her throat, not the cabinet.

I look at her. At the tremor in the hand she keeps pressed to the cabinet. At the way she’s breathing, too steady, too controlled.

I know that feeling. I’ve been doing the same thing all fucking day.

Fine. She can lift the goddamn cabinet herself.

“I’ll go get some coffee.”

I leave the door open behind me and make my way down the corridor to the small kitchen at the end of the floor. Moonlight comes through the window over the sink, enough to see by. I start the coffee machine and stand at the counter, watching it drip.

I roll my shoulders as I wait for the machine to finish. They are knotted into something past tension at this point, hard and tight under my shirt, and I make a mental note to hit the bag for an hour when I get home tonight.

The coffee machine finishes. I pour a cup and carry it to the window, where the Synthera grounds stretch out into the dark below. Everything looks so quiet and calm, the opposite of everything inside my chest right now.

I have taken down more alphas than you can imagine.

Yes, Sophie. I absolutely fucking can.

I’ve watched her play the cute little assistant, and I have no doubt she could walk into a room full of alphas twice her size and draw every one of them to their demise.

Is that what you do, Sophie? Lure them in with that sweet smile and the cute little body you hide under those prim blouses?

I always understood Griffin to run a security company. It never occurred to me that his people might do the opposite of protecting alphas. But if anyone were capable of it, it would be her.

What kind of life does she live? Does she go from one assignment to the next, taking down men who never see it coming? What kind of alphas end up on her list, and what is she, exactly, some kind of assassin?

The cup is halfway to my mouth when the crash comes.

It rolls down the corridor like a thunderclap, the sound of something large hitting a hard floor.

I tear down the corridor at a run, the only thought in my head that I shouldn’t have left her alone in there. By the time I shove through the door of the surveillance room, my heart is hammering so hard I can hear it in my throat.

A server rack is wedged at an angle, one end on the ground, the other leaning against the wall. Sophie is pinned underneath it, pressed flat against the wall in the narrow space where the rack used to stand, the steel frame angled across her chest like a cage.

“Jesus Christ.”

She’s not hurt. That’s the first thing I register. She looks furious as she pushes uselessly against the rack, her dark eyes blazing, like she should be able to move it herself and her body has failed her.

“Don’t,” she says, before I can speak. “Don’t say a fucking word.”

“Are you hurt?”

“No.”

“Are you sure?”