Page 61 of Beautifully Scarred Omega

This is a problem. Not a feeling. A problem. The kind that gets operatives killed. The moment you want something inside an operation, you’ve handed the operation a way to hurt you. I know this. I have watched it end people far better than me.

It’s chemistry. Adrenaline and proximity and a body that can’t tell danger from want. It isn’t real. It doesn’t mean anything.

I almost believe it.

I strip the day off, pull on the first thing I find, and sit on the edge of the bed in the dark, running the sweep back the way I would any op. It came up clean, same as the fourth floor. No devices means I’ll have to find the mole another way, on my own.

I force my mind back onto the case. It works, mostly. My pulse comes down. My hands go still.

Until I reach the part where he said Sophie, I need your help, and asked me to hold the weight with him. He asked, not ordered. Like it didn’t occur to him that I couldn’t. And for those few seconds, we were on the same side.

That’s the part that I can’t forget.

I lie back and stare at the ceiling.

Tomorrow I will walk into that building and be Sophie Dysart, and Max Cavill will be a name in an active investigation, and none of this will have happened. I am very good at deciding things haven’t happened. It’s most of what I do.

It changes nothing, I tell myself.

I almost believe that too.

Lunch is Celine’s idea, which means I don’t get a vote.

She collects me from my desk at half past twelve, sweeps up Lucy from the front desk on the way down, and steers the three of us into the canteen before I can invent a reason to stay behind.

Lucy talks the whole time, and I let her. She hears half of what gets said in this building, which makes her the closest thing I have to a listening post, so I sift the chatter as she goes and keep whatever the investigation can use.

Today the topic is yesterday.

“Honestly,” she says, halfway through a bowl of carbonara and a story I’ve already lost, “the whole building was walking on eggshells.”

“Why’s that?” I ask, because for once I’m genuinely curious.

Lucy leans in and drops her voice like she’s handing over classified material. “It was the anniversary. Mr. Cavill’s parents were killed in a car crash years back, and every year when it comes round, he’s...” She shakes her head, searching for the word.

“Difficult,” Celine says quietly, and she almost sounds like she feels sorry for him.

“Difficult,” Lucy agrees. “He’s got a short fuse at the best of times, and on that day you don’t go near him with bad news, not if you value your job. Last year someone walked in with a budget problem and apparently he—” She stops, glances at Celine, and thinks better of it. “Well. We all just keep our heads down and wait for it to be over.”

I look down at my plate so neither of them can see my face.

Everything comes back to me at once. The sweep, the cabinet, the rack, all of it happened on the worst day of Max Cavill’s year. The one day everyone who knows him braces for him to snap.

But he didn’t. Not at me. Why didn’t he?

I think about the way he seemed last night. He looked tired, high-strung, grumpy as hell. But now it all makes sense. On the anniversary of losing both of his parents at once, I’d walked into his building, pushed at him, and talked to him like I resented the very space he took up.

Any other alpha would have. That day especially, he’d have had every excuse, and no one would have blamed him for taking it out on the mouthy omega sweeping his walls.

Instead he’d come rushing to help me even after I’d stupidly refused to let him lift the cabinet.

Lucy’s voice drags me back to the table. She’s moved on already, the way she does, sliding from the tragedy straight to the men themselves.

“Three of them, and not a dud in the bunch,” she’s saying, fanning herself with a napkin. “Mr. Cavill especially. All that brooding intensity.” She props her chin in her hand and sighs. “Can you imagine getting close to a man like that?”

Yes, I can.

And suddenly, I’m back in those few seconds from last night, the ones that felt like forever. His body was pressed against mine in that narrow gap, close enough that we were breathing the same air. I could feel his heart pounding against my chest, and lower, the hard length of him pressed to my hip.