Page 89 of Beautifully Scarred Omega

My phone buzzes on the desk. I look at it without seeing it.

Griffin’s warning echoes in my memory like a prophecy I should have listened to.

Don’t try anything with her.

Too late, Griffin. Too fucking late.

CHAPTER 24

Sophie

Ican still feel his hands around my wrists.

I’m sitting at my desk, staring at a spreadsheet that might as well be written in Mandarin, and all I can feel is the ghost pressure of Max Cavill’s fingers locked around my wrists, pinning them to the wall beside my head, holding them there while he kissed me like the world was ending and he’d decided I was the last thing he wanted to taste before it did.

My mouth is still swollen. I can feel it every time I press my lips together—the bruised-fruit feeling of having been kissed so hard and so thoroughly that my body is still reeling from the aftershocks twenty minutes later.

The spreadsheet blurs and the numbers swim. I blink and force my eyes to track across the columns, but my brain refuses to cooperate because it’s stuck on a loop, replaying the same thirty seconds over and over.

But I think I need to punish you for it.

That’s the part that’s destroying me. Not the kiss itself, because that I can explain away. Adrenaline. Proximity. Two people running hot after an argument, bodies doing what bodies do when aggression and attraction get tangled up in the same room. It’s biology. It’s chemistry. It means nothing.

Except it does. Because when Max leaned in, his lips brushing my ear, his voice dropping to that low, dangerous murmur, and told me he needed to punish me—I should have told him to go fuck himself.

That’s what I should have done.

But the strangest thing happened.

When he said those words, his voice rough, I felt warmth spread through me. And it wasn’t the sharp jolt of the suppressants wearing off. This was slower and much deeper. A heat that started low in my stomach and radiated outward, spreading through my chest, my limbs, my fingertips, until every part of my body was awake and humming with something that’s becoming harder and harder to ignore.

Want.

And I felt my body pulling me forward, wanting to lean into the heat of him, my back arching against the wall because I wanted to be closer, not further away.

He held my wrists and I let him. He trapped me and I wanted to be trapped. He pressed his body against mine, and instead of the cold nothing I’ve felt for the last decade, I felt—alive. Terrifyingly, blazingly alive.

Finn barely touched my shoulder and I nearly killed him. Max pinned my wrists to a wall and I kissed him back like I wanted to eat him alive. Maybe it was the anger. Maybe it was because I was the one who started it. I don’t know.

And that scares me more than any man with a gun.

Because I know how to fight a man with a gun. I know how to disarm, disable, evade, escape. I have protocols for that. I have muscle memory. I have a decade of training that kicks in the moment my body registers a threat.

But I have no protocol for this. For the way my pulse hammered under his fingers when he circled my wrist with his thumb. For the way my breath caught when his mouth found the spot just below my ear. For the way I kissed him back—not because I was trying to gain an advantage or because the mission required it—but because I simply wanted to. Because something inside me, something I thought Pack Thorne had killed a long time ago, surged to the surface the moment Max’s mouth touched mine and screamed more.

I close the spreadsheet. Open it again. Close it. Press my palms flat against the desk and breathe.

One moment he had me pinned against the wall, kissing me like a man possessed, and I was kissing him back with a fury I didn’t know I had in me. And then the next moment, the warmth of his body was gone.

He stepped back and dropped my wrists like they’d burned him, putting a full arm’s length between us so fast I swayed forward from the absence.

“Jesus Christ, Sophie, what the fuck are we doing?”

His voice. I keep hearing his voice. Rough and shattered and completely undone. And all I can think is, what the fuck are we doing, indeed?

The swelling on my lips has gone down, and I’ve almost convinced myself I can get through the week without thinking about it.

Lunch with Lucy, Celine, and Phoebe has become a fixture. It started as rapport-building, a way to embed myself deeper, but somewhere along the way it became the part of the day I actually don’t have to fake my way through.