Page 116 of Beautifully Scarred Omega

“Victor’s clean,” I say, turning to face him.

The smile fades. He shifts slightly in his seat, angling toward me, his green eyes sharp in the dark.

“Clean how?”

“Clean as in he’s not the mole. He’s married.” I lean my head back against the seat, the adrenaline of the performance draining out of me, leaving that particular exhaustion that comes after being someone else for two hours. “Tan line on his ring finger. He removed his wedding band before dinner—recently enough that the skin hasn’t evened out. He picked a restaurant far enough from home that his wife wouldn’t see him. He sat facing away from the window because he doesn’t want to be recognized from outside. It’s not espionage. He’s cheating on his wife.”

Max looks at me for a second longer than he needs to.

“So the military-grade encryption⁠—”

“Is hiding dick pics, not data.” I pause. “Well. Presumably. What a...” I search for the word. “Dick.”

Max laughs. The sound fills the car and I feel it in my chest the way I felt it in the hallway with the cleaning closet, a warmth that spreads through me and makes me smile in response.

And then he’s smiling back at me and our eyes meet. His eyes linger too long before he pulls them away, and the air in the car feels thicker by the second.

He starts the engine and pulls onto the road. The city lights slide past, amber and white, painting the interior of the car in slow, shifting stripes. The radio is on low, and I close my eyes and let the hum of the engine and the warmth of the car pull the last of the tension out of my body. For the first time all evening, I feel myself relax.

Then a song comes on. The opening guitar of “Landslide.”

I open my eyes. Max’s hand is on the volume, turning it up.

Stevie Nicks’s voice fills the car, quiet and aching. Max opens his window. Wind moves through the car, mixing with the music and catching my hair. He drives with both hands on the wheel, his eyes dark and far away.

“This was her favorite song,” he says quietly.

I turn my head to look at him.

“Whose?”

“My mother’s.”

I remember Lucy at lunch, leaning in. Mr. Cavill’s parents were killed in a car crash years back. I’d looked it up that night. Read the articles, saw the photos. He was twenty-two. And I’d stared at my screen in the dark and wondered what that does to a person—losing both parents at once, at that age.

I want to say I’m sorry, Max. I’m so sorry for what happened.

But I don’t. Because I know what it’s like to have someone say I’m sorry about something they can’t possibly understand, and I know how the words feel—well-intentioned and completely fucking useless.

So I just look at him. And I wait.

The song plays. And Max, without looking at me, begins to speak.

“She used to play it in the kitchen,” he says. “When he wasn’t home. She’d turn it up and sing along and for a few minutes she looked...” He stops, his mouth tightening like he’s remembering exactly what she looked like. “Happy.”

When he wasn’t home. I hear what he’s not saying—that happiness in Max’s house was conditional, and it only existed in the spaces where his father wasn’t. My chest aches, because I grew up in a different version of the same house.

“She had a beautiful voice,” Max says. His voice is rough and raw and so human.

He swallows. “She deserved a bigger life than the one she got.”

The song plays. Stevie’s voice fills the car, and the wind carries it, and I am looking at Max’s profile—the sharp jaw, the softness around his eyes, the way he’s watching the road without really seeing it—and I feel like I’m seeing him for the first time.

Because I know what it looks like when someone carries a ghost. I carry my own. I’ve carried mine for so many years—my mother’s face, the last time I saw her, and the years of my stepfather’s voice telling me she left because she didn’t love me enough to stay.

And I’m looking at Max Cavill and seeing, for the first time, not the CEO, not the alpha, not the man who pinned me to a wall. But a boy who listened to his mother sing in the kitchen and knew, even then, that the happiness was borrowed.

The song ends and Max reaches over and turns it down.