Page 143 of Beautifully Scarred Omega

They heard. I can see it on their faces—Ethan’s is white, his jaw clenched tight, his gray eyes bright and wet behind his glasses. Finn—Finn is crying. Openly, tears tracking down his cheeks, his mouth pressed flat, his whole body rigid with the effort of not falling apart.

Sophie feels me shift. She lifts her head from my chest and sees them.

For one terrible second, I think she’s going to run. She’s half-naked and tear-streaked and two more people know everything she’s spent a decade hiding.

But she doesn’t run.

She looks up at them, and Finn stops mid-step.

“Your eyes,” he says.

His voice is wrecked from crying, but the words cut through the room. He’s staring at her like he’s seeing her for the first time and it hurts.

“They’re green,” he says.

“Contacts,” Sophie says quietly. “I use brown contacts when I’m undercover.”

“Jesus, Soph,” he whispers.

Ethan hasn’t spoken. He’s standing very still in the doorway, his gray eyes moving slowly over her face behind his glasses.

Something in her expression loosens. She still looks exhausted, still afraid, but there’s relief there too.

Finn moves first. He crosses the room and drops to his knees beside us. He doesn’t speak. He just reaches for her hand—slowly, carefully, giving her every chance to pull away—and when she doesn’t, he laces his fingers through hers and brings her knuckles to his lips.

Then Ethan. He sits on her other side, his back against the couch beside mine. He takes off his sweater and drapes it gently over her shoulders.

Sophie looks down at the sweater. Then at Finn’s hand holding hers. Then at my arms still around her. Then up—at all three of us, surrounding her, and the expression on her face⁠—

I will remember it for the rest of my life.

Wonder. Disbelief. The tentative, trembling beginning of trust.

A woman who has just shown us the worst thing that ever happened to her and found three men who didn’t look away.

The silence stretches.

It’s Sophie who breaks it.

“My mother left when I was twelve,” she says.

Her voice is different now. Still rough from the crying, but the anger is gone.

“She was just—gone one morning. She didn’t even say goodbye. My stepfather told me she left because she wanted to get away from me and she didn’t love me. That she was weak and selfish and couldn’t be bothered to stay.”

I feel her body tense against mine.

“And he was right. She left me with him and she never came back.” Her voice is flat and matter-of-fact. “That’s the kind of person I come from. A mother who couldn’t be bothered and a stepfather who⁠—”

Her fingers press into Finn’s.

“Henri was cruel. Every day. He made sure that I understood my place. I learned to be small. Learned to read his moods, stay out of his way, make myself invisible when the air in the house changed.” She exhales. “And when I turned twenty-one and my heat started, he sold me to Pack Thorne for two thousand dollars.”

Two thousand dollars. The price of a human being. The price of Sophie.

Finn’s grip on her hand tightens. I can see his knuckles press white against her skin.

“There were three of them,” she says. “Rourke, Silas, and Marek. At first they gave me a room upstairs. Like I was a guest. Like they were being generous.” A bitter sound escapes her. “When I wouldn’t do what they wanted, they moved me to the basement.”