Page 206 of Beautifully Scarred Omega

Griffin’s arm comes around me. Nolan is looking at the ceiling in the way he does when he’s trying not to feel something. Declan is smiling like he expected this.

Ethan slides the band onto her finger. Sophie looks down at it, turns her hand in the light.

“The large one is going back,” she says.

“It’s already gone,” Ethan replies.

Sophie looks up at us—at me, at Griffin, at all of them—smiling, and I don’t think I have ever seen her look so completely at peace.

She found her pack. She found herself.

And I know, without a single doubt in the world, that Sophie has finally, truly, found her reason to live.

CHAPTER 52

Max

When Sophie enters the atrium tonight, she looks nothing like the woman who first set foot in Synthera.

Her hair is loose around her shoulders in dark waves, the way she wears it at home now. The green dress catches the light as she moves, fitted through the waist before falling in a long, elegant line to the floor, and a silk scarf is draped across her throat, concealing the three marks beneath it. She’s in heels, moving through the crowd with an ease I’ve never seen from her before.

But it’s her eyes that stand out most.

She’s not wearing the brown contacts. For the first time, she’s standing in a room full of people with her real eyes uncovered, pale, clear green, matching the dress and unmistakably her mother’s, from the photograph she finally showed us. And she looks like herself.

Completely, unapologetically herself.

It wasn’t hard to convince her to come tonight. We all knew it made sense. The bond, the engagement, our wedding plans that Finn has more or less taken over, the ceremony only three months away. Soon enough, all of it will be public, and Sophie knows there’s no real way to keep the world from finding out forever.

Better to let them find out on our terms.

As if she can feel me watching her, she looks up, and our eyes meet across the atrium. Just like always since I marked her, the bond pulses between us, a thread running beneath everything and connecting us even from opposite sides of a crowded room. I feel her through it as naturally as I feel my own heartbeat.

Hello, little one.

Her emotions wash through the bond and into me.

Excitement. Happiness. Just Sophie, completely here with me.

I can’t help smiling at her, and she smiles back before turning to Evie, who’s saying something animatedly with both hands.

“It’s time,” Finn says, appearing at my shoulder.

He’s in black tie, looking every bit the part, and the grin on his face belongs to a man who has been waiting for this moment and has absolutely no intention of wasting it.

I straighten my jacket and glance at Ethan. He nods, steady as always.

I step up to the microphone.

Conversations fade as faces turn toward me, and the crowd gradually settles into silence.

“Thank you for joining us,” I say. My voice is even and clear, carrying easily through the atrium. “I’ll keep the formalities brief, because I think most of you would rather be drinking.”

A ripple of laughter moves through the room.

I talk about Equinox—the trials, the disruption to our research and the fact that we’ve now fully recovered from it. I talk about the threat to Synthera carefully, without names, giving them only the facts. An insider attempted to sabotage the project. They were caught and they are now in custody.

And as I watch them listen, I think about Sophie sitting on the floor of a storage room, telling us she should have been better.