Page 82 of Beautifully Scarred Omega

Don’t touch me.

The words won’t stop echoing.

I’m standing in the middle of the kitchen, staring at the place where she just was. My back is still against the wall where she put me. I haven’t moved. I don’t think I can. The marble counter gleams dully under the pendant light. The first aid case sits open, gauze and antiseptic wrappers scattered beside it, the needle and thread still lying in a neat coil where she left them. Evidence of what happened before everything went wrong.

My throat aches where her forearm pressed into it. She could have crushed my windpipe. Easily. I have zero doubt about that. In the half second it took her to go from leaning into me to slamming me against the wall, I felt the full force of what she’s capable of, and every alpha instinct in my body lit up at once.

But I didn’t fight back. That’s the part I keep coming back to. I could’ve, but I didn’t.

Because I knew that whatever she was seeing in that moment, it wasn’t me.

Her eyes. God, her eyes. They were wide open, locked onto my face, but glazed over, like she was looking through me at something far away and terrible. The dark brown had gone almost black, her pupils blown so wide there was barely any iris left. Her mouth was open, her breath coming in these short, shallow gasps, and her whole body was shaking with memory. One that had been buried so deep that the graze of my fingers on her shoulder dragged it straight back to the surface.

She wasn’t looking at me. She was looking at someone else.

Someone who had touched her like that before. Someone who hadn’t stopped when she wanted them to.

The realization hits me like a fist to the sternum, and I have to put my hand on the counter to steady myself.

Don’t touch me.

She snarled it. Ripped from somewhere so deep and raw that it made the hair on the back of my neck stand on end.

The kitchen is quiet. Outside, the security lights have stopped strobing, the alarm silenced, the grounds settling back into stillness.

But inside my chest, nothing is still.

I keep replaying those last few seconds. The way she leaned in, her body answering mine with a want I could feel radiating off her skin. Those small, involuntary tells that no amount of training can fake—the slight hitch in her breath when I traced the inside of her arm, the way her pupils dilated when I said I still thought about that night, the almost imperceptible softening of her mouth as her lips parted, ready, willing, wanting.

She wanted me to come closer. I’m sure of it. As sure as I’ve ever been of anything in my life.

And then I touched her shoulder.

My fingers barely skimming the skin, trailing from her arm upward without thinking, the way you’d touch someone you wanted to pull closer.

But I didn’t realize that I had grazed her scar.

I’d noticed it earlier, when I helped her pull off her bloodied hoodie—hard not to, given its size. Thick and raised, the skin puckered and shiny as if it never healed right. But I figured, who cares? People have scars. I have a scar on my knee from falling out of a tree when I was twelve. Max has one on his knuckles from punching a wall during a particularly bad argument with his father. Scars are just stories your body tells whether you want it to or not.

But Sophie’s scar isn’t a story about falling out of a tree.

Based on her reaction, someone put that scar there. And whatever they did was bad enough that the brush of gentle fingers over the same spot still sends her straight back to wherever she was when it happened.

I don’t know who or when. I don’t know the details, and honestly, I’m not sure I could handle them right now. But the violence of her reaction and the bone-deep terror written across her face—that tells me everything I need to know.

I press both hands flat against the marble and bow my head, breathing through the tightness in my chest.

She came back to herself eventually. The wildness draining from her eyes, replaced by confusion, then the worst thing of all, shame. It flooded her face with color and made her look away from me like she couldn’t bear to be seen.

She dropped her arm from my throat and stepped back. Her hands were trembling at her sides, and she clenched them into fists to make them stop, but I saw it. I saw everything.

There were tears in her eyes, glassing over the dark brown, making them shine in the kitchen light.

I wanted to say something. Wanted to reach for her, to tell her it was okay, that she didn’t have to explain, that I understood. But I could see the walls slamming into place one after another, and I knew that the worst thing I could do in that moment was try to get past them.

So I let her leave, and I stood there like a fucking statue and watched her go.

Part of me wanted to follow her, to make sure she got back to the residential wing safely. If someone saw her—disheveled, emotional, wearing my shirt at one in the morning—her cover would be blown to pieces. But the louder part of me understood that Sophie needed distance more than she needed protection right now.