Page 183 of Beautifully Scarred Omega

I don’t answer. I pull out the chair across from him and sit, and I open the file on the table between us. Photographs. Transaction records. Names, dates, locations—the evidence Declan’s team has been assembling for years.

“Six states,” I say. “Thirty years. Sixty-seven confirmed victims.” I spread the pages out, one by one. “You’ve been selling omegas to packs who pay well and ask nothing. The documentation is thorough, Henri. There’s nowhere left to hide.”

He looks at the photographs. His expression doesn’t change—the same cold composure I remember from childhood, the face of a man who has never believed consequences apply to him.

“I want a lawyer,” he says, the corner of his mouth lifting, as if this whole thing is an inconvenience he’ll have sorted by lunch.

I lean back in my chair, fold my arms, and look at him. “This isn’t that kind of room.”

The amusement drains from his face. For the first time, he actually looks at the concrete walls, and I can see the moment he understands that this room doesn’t have lawyers or judges or due process. This room has a drain in the floor.

“You can’t keep me here,” he says, and his voice is slightly panicked now. “I have rights⁠—”

“You sold me for two thousand dollars.” My voice comes out level. Almost conversational. “You pulled me out of nursing school the moment my heat started building and handed me to Pack Thorne like I was livestock. So let’s not talk about rights.”

The silence that follows is heavy. Henri’s jaw tightens. I can see his mind working—how to spin this, who to call, whether there’s still a version of this where he walks out. There isn’t.

“That was business,” he says finally, like it explains everything. “You were an asset. I needed the money, you were worth something, and I took the deal. Don’t be so dramatic about it.”

“Sixty-seven omegas, Henri. At least. How many more that we haven’t found?”

He doesn’t answer. His eyes are hard and defiant, the way they always were when he’d decided a conversation was beneath him. The way he used to look at me across the dinner table when I’d said something he didn’t like—that flat, contemptuous stare that meant shut up, you’re nothing, stop wasting my time.

I hold his gaze. I am no longer twelve and I am no longer afraid.

“You know, you remind me of her,” he says suddenly. His lip curls. “That same look. That same stupid defiance. Like either of you ever had the power to change anything.”

My chest tightens. “Don’t talk about my mother.”

“Why not?” He tilts his head, his eyes narrow and full of spite. “She had that same look. Right at the end. Like she thought she was better than me.”

“She was better than you. She left because she couldn’t stand⁠—”

“Left?” Henri lets out a laugh that has no warmth in it at all. “Is that still what you think happened?”

For a moment, I forget to breathe.

“She didn’t leave, Sophie.” He says it with relish, watching my face, savoring the impact. “She was poking through my files. Copying documents. Trying to play hero. Going to take everything to the authorities—like she thought she was clever.” His lip curls. “She wasn’t clever. She was just another stupid omega who thought she deserved better than what she had.”

My hands are gripping the edge of the table. I can feel the metal pressing into my palms.

“What did you do?” I can barely get the words out.

“I got rid of her.” He says it like it’s no big deal. Like a story he’s told himself so many times it’s become boring. “She was going to destroy everything. A lifetime’s work, and she couldn’t keep her big mouth shut. So I made sure she couldn’t.”

That’s why she had a bag packed. The thought arrives from somewhere deep and old and buried. She was packing a bag. Not just for herself, but for the both of us. I remember it now.

“You told me she left.” My voice doesn’t sound like mine. “You told me—all those years, you told me she was weak, that she didn’t love me, that she⁠—”

“And you believed me.” He tilts his head, looking at me with something close to pity. “Every time. Like a good little girl.”

She didn’t leave.

The thought breaks through everything—the training, the years of armor I’ve built around the girl who came home from school and found her mother’s coat still on the hook.

She didn’t leave me. She was trying to save me.

I can see it now. All of it. The distance in her eyes those last months—but it wasn’t coldness, it was fear. She was afraid, and I was twelve, and I didn’t know what fear looked like on a mother’s face because I’d never seen it before. I thought she was pulling away.