Page 182 of Beautifully Scarred Omega

I took my suppressant this morning, so my scent is muted again. The ache between my legs has faded to a warm, pleasant hum. I feel rested, held, loved.

But I still have a mole to catch. And the warmth settles into something harder as I drive. I think about Diana Quinn and the data anomalies Declan flagged. I think about Equinox and how much is at stake if the wrong person gets their hands on it.

I did this last week. I can do it again. I can be theirs and still do my job.

My phone rings as I’m walking to my room in the residential wing. I glance at the screen and my stomach drops.

Griffin.

Griffin doesn’t call unless it matters, and he certainly doesn’t call at seven in the morning on a Monday unless it matters a lot.

I pick up. “Griffin.”

“Sophie.” Something in his tone makes me stop walking. “I need you to get here as soon as you can.”

Griffin is waiting in the corridor outside B2—the black ops level, two stories underground.

Declan is with him. Nolan too, leaning against the wall with his arms crossed, his expression even grimmer than usual.

“What’s going on?” I ask.

Griffin looks at me. His eyes move over my face—the flush I haven’t fully shaken, the brightness in my eyes that has nothing to do with the fluorescent lights. I know what he sees. But he doesn’t ask. That’s what I always liked about him—he never asks about things you’re not ready to say.

“We picked someone up,” he says. “Two hours ago. Anonymous tip, corroborated by Declan’s network.” He pauses. “The trafficking syndicate we’ve been tracking across the southern states. We got the man behind it. He was trying to leave the country.”

My stomach drops. I know this case. We’ve been chasing it for years—young omegas disappearing, sold to packs who pay in cash and never surface again. Dozens of victims across multiple states. We had the network mapped, the money trails flagged, but the man at the top was always a ghost.

“Who is it?”

Griffin doesn’t answer. He just opens the door behind him and steps aside.

The room is bare concrete. A single overhead light, casting everything in a flat, shadowless white. A metal table bolted to the floor, two chairs on one side, one on the other. It’s windowless, and the air is stale and cold, settling into your bones if you sit here long enough.

And sitting in the chair, his wrists cuffed to the table, his silver hair disheveled for the first time in his life, is Henri Aveline.

My stepfather.

The world goes very quiet.

He looks older. Considerably—the lines on his face have deepened into something permanent, and his jaw has gone slack in a way I don’t remember. But the eyes are the same. Cold, calculating, the eyes of a man who has spent his entire life believing he is the most important person in every room he enters. Even cuffed to a table in a concrete basement, he holds himself with that particular arrogance I remember from childhood—chin lifted, shoulders back, the posture of a man who thinks this is all temporary. Who thinks someone will come and fix this for him the way someone has always come and fixed things for him.

My hands are shaking. I press them flat against my thighs and make them stop.

“Leave us,” I say to Griffin.

“Sophie—”

“Leave us.”

He hesitates for one second. Then he nods, and the door closes behind me, and it’s just me and Henri in a concrete room with a single light and twenty years between us.

He never looked at me when I was twelve and small and afraid and still believed that if I was good enough, quiet enough, he might love me. He looks at me now—standing in front of him in jeans and a gray hoodie with my hair pulled back—and I watch the moment he places my face.

“Sophie.” His voice is flat, bored even. But his eyes flicker—the briefest flash of surprise as he realizes the girl he sold grew up to be something he never expected. “My, my. You’ve grown up.”

“Henri.”

“I have to say, I’m impressed.” He looks around the room with the kind of detached amusement of a man still convinced he’s in control. “All of this. Is this your doing?”