Page 142 of Beautifully Scarred Omega

“Sophie—” I step toward her.

“No!” She steps back, and the anger is back—the last wall she has. Her hands go to the hem of her wet shirt and she pulls it over her head.

She’s standing in front of me in her bra, her skin damp, and she turns and points at her shoulder angrily.

The scar.

The one Finn told us about.

It’s long. A raised line, silvery-white against her skin, starting at the top of her shoulder blade and curving down toward her spine.

“They cut me,” she says. Her voice rises with anger. “Scarred me. Over and over again.”

I don’t flinch or move or look away.

She watches me, as if waiting for the horror and disgust. The step backward that will confirm everything that was ever told to her.

It doesn’t come.

She unbuttons her jeans and steps out of them. She stands in front of me in her underwear, shaking, and points at her stomach. Three deep gouges, angry pink, low on her abdomen. And then her thighs. Thin lines, parallel, deliberate, tracing the soft skin of her inner thighs like a map of everything that was done to her.

“How can you love me?” she whispers. Her voice is trembling. The anger has burned itself out and what’s left is a woman looking so lost that the question nearly undoes me.

I close the distance between us and take her face in my hands. Her skin is cold and her tears are warm against my thumbs.

“Easily,” I say.

My heart breaks for her. For the girl she must have been before all of this—before someone carved those lines into her skin and told her she was nothing. For the woman standing in front of me now, shaking and scarred and waiting for me to walk away. She survived what they did to her, and she’s still standing, and she has no idea how extraordinary that makes her.

“Soph, I don’t give a damn about your scars,” I say, making sure she hears every word. “No—scratch that. I do. Because they’re a part of you, and a part of what makes you you.” My thumbs trace her cheekbones, and her eyes are enormous, searching mine. “These scars don’t tell me what you are. They tell me what you survived. And none of it, not one mark, makes you less.”

Her lower lip trembles. Her hands come up and grip my wrists—not to pull my hands away but to hold them there, pressing my palms harder against her face, like she needs the contact to stay upright.

“You don’t have to show me anything else,” I say. “You don’t have to explain or earn this. I love you, and it’s not conditional. Nothing they did to you changes that.”

A small, broken sound escapes her. Her face folds in on itself, her eyes squeezing closed as the tears come, and I wrap my arms around her and pull her against me. She lets me. She just lets me hold her, and that’s how I know something has finally broken open.

She pulls back. Just far enough to look at me, her face blotchy and wet, and then she does something I don’t understand.

She reaches up and touches her own eye.

Her finger presses against the surface of her eyeball, and I almost grab her wrist before I realize what she’s doing. She pinches something between her thumb and finger and lifts it away, and then she does the other one, and she’s holding two small brown discs in her palm, and she’s looking at me, and her eyes are green.

They’re not as dark as mine. Hers are lighter, the pale clear green of shallow water over white sand, and it changes everything about her face. I realize I have been looking at a painting through tinted glass and the glass just came off.

“I wear them on every mission,” she says. She closes her fist around them. “You’ve never seen my real eyes.”

I take her face in my hands again. Her real face. Her green eyes find mine and hold, and there’s nowhere left to hide, and she’s not hiding.

“Sophie,” I say.

“Max,” she whispers, and the tears come again, different this time.

I pull her into me and we sink to the floor together, my back against the couch, her body in my lap, and I hold her. I don’t say anything, because there’s nothing to say. There’s only this. My arms around her and the sound of her finally, finally letting go.

Then I hear the door.

Ethan is standing in the doorway. Finn is behind him.