{IMP Note: It's Max's POV (yay!) starting from where he took Sofia to Hayden's house to pack her clothes.}

He realized he had been underestimating his feelings for Sofia, or rather the growth of them. That was what he experienced when he accompanied her to Hayden House as she packed her belongings to bring home.

The proximity, the intimacy, as he held her close while helping her down the stool, while she straddled him as he laid underneath, her lacy red bra in his hand, those silky manes surrounding his face, it had all had dissolved his self-control around her.

He didn't worry that she became aware of the physical proof of the desire for her. He stressed, for the beast inside him had threatened to come out, ripping the chains it was tethered with. The lustful beast had only been feeding from his fantasies regarding his Sof, and those fantasies were far from being decent but were downright perverse in every way.

It was intriguing seeing her reacting to their proximity. He had seen the desire in her eyes too, had seen her skin flush, lips part, and her bosoms perk.

But did she know what he craved to do with her? How did he want to trail her flushed skin with his tongue? Kiss those lips until she could not breathe? Suckle on those perked-up bosoms while rejoicing her arousal, knowing he was the reason for it?

He wanted to sate her, mark her, love her. And he wanted to keep doing all of that until she became absolutely delirious with his ministrations.

It was a primal requisite.

He needed to claim his woman.

And while it did not scare him, he feared it would scare away his Sof. He felt paralyzed by the thought of her running for the heels as he proved himself to be a sexually frustrated barbarian.

For God's sake, it was not long ago she had to go through molestation in the hands of that scoundrel Mevil! She was injured, not only physically but mentally as well. Bloody hell, she had been having nightmares because of that incident!

What if he damaged her further with his disobedient desires for her?

And why would she even let him near her after how he had hurt her so many freaking times!

Her body may give in, but Max wanted so much more than that. He wanted her heart before that.

Sofia might have said she had forgiven him, but he understood that the past couldn't be forgotten that easily, memories remain, and bitterness may return.

What free will can bring, selfish manipulation can never.

--

Sof was helping her aunt Marla do some last-minute things with the cooked dishes when Grampa put a wrinkled hand on Max's upper arm from where he sat in the wheelchair beside him at the dining table.

"It is one thing that Marla has changed greatly, but our Sofia has changed, too, so much in the years, don't you think?" Grampa smiled, reminiscing. 

Max nodded slowly. 

Truly, she had changed. And for so long, he had been too blind with vengeance to notice it.

"Despite her fiery self being still the same, I must say she used to be totally a different person during her teenage years," Grampa said in a faraway tone. "I guess being her best friend. You are aware why?"

Max's brows furrowed.

Grampa raised a brow at that. He shook his head and sighed. "It was after her elder brother, Sage, died of cancer. Sofia's parents—they were under so much debt for his treatment; it's not cheap, you know. They tried their best and put up one hell of a fight, but still, he could not be saved. They could not save Sage."

Max listened quietly. All of this he knew, except for Sofia's parents falling into debt because of her brother's cancer treatment bit. This was new information. But where was grampa going with it?

"And after that peril fell upon the family after Sage was gone, everything changed. It all changed into a nightmare." Grampa seemed to be dazed with old memories—the bitter ones.

Max leaned forward, eyes narrowing in concentration.

"They couldn't bear the blow of their son dying, and then there was the humongous debt they didn't know how to repay. To make matters worse, Sofia's father lost his job as well. Mary, Sofia's mother..., fell into depression, and her father submerged into alcohol, drinking until he was oblivious to reality. Sofi, the poor child, was suddenly so lost. Not only had she lost a brother but her parents as well." The lines of age on Albert Hayden's face are enhanced with grief.

Max's heart was beating in speed towards a crash.

There is always more to someone's story, always hidden, always severe.

"And right when one thinks things wouldn't—couldn't turn any worse, they suddenly do," Grampa spoke up again, his voice breaking into Max's chaotic thoughts, escalating realizations and stinging dismay. "Losing all senses, conscience, and sanity to his bottles, Sofia's father turned abusive. It was only Mary who used to bear his marks of violence on her skin at first. But then...," his voice trembled, and his eyes watered with horror. "Then, one day, his fists turned to my Sofia!"

It was like a set of stones had hit him square in the face out of the blue. Max jerked back in shock. He had lost his voice a while ago, and now he found that with this nightmarish revelation, he had also lost his breath.

"It was the—" grampa paused, looking as though he was straining his mind to remember the details. "The night of her prom. I remember her talking to me over the phone that morning..." he trailed off again, his shaky hand coming up to rub one side of his face. 

Albert Hayden seemed exhausted. He seemed spent, unable to speak any more of the past. But Max barely noticed any of it. In fact, Max was barely there anymore in the present. He was somewhere lost in time, in the past, and suddenly was given a chance to look at everything from the other side of the excruciating tale.

He suddenly realized he had never had the entire picture. The worst thing was he wasn't even aware that it existed until now.

Prom night. The very same night, she was supposed to be his date. The same night he had stood in front of her house, and she had refused to go with him over the phone.

Shoulders stiff as ice, eyes turning red—wanting blood, he asked in a voice that was so opposite to his emotions, "What happened that night?" It was the simple demand to get straight to the point—the point where he knew he would be damned.

The senior Hayden clutched the armrests of his wheelchair. "Sofia had an argument with her father when she stopped him from hitting Mary. It didn't end well for her. She turned up later that night at my doorstep—covered in bruises, bleeding, crying, and barely hanging by a thread to consciousness."

She had not stepped out of the house that night. He had not seen her.

Was it on purpose she didn't come out? Of course, it was. 

She had hidden herself, and she had hidden all her wounds from him. And while he was busy making a fuss over the rejection served out to him, his Sof was in there, bruised and battered. The bloody reason—her own fucking father.

"Why didn't you think to call the cops on that—" Max let out a sharp breath to get a reign on his language. "Her father?"

"I did. Even Sofia did many times when he would hit her mother. But Mary always protected that man." He shook his head in a frustration that was years old. "She would always blame it all on her own clumsiness. Mary was too lost in depression—"

"But Sofia—"

Grampa cut in, "I wanted her to—I so wanted her to. But Sofia said she was planning to move out of her parents soon and come live here, in my house. She got accepted to a college and was soon going to turn eighteen. She said she just wanted to move on. At least that was what she said, or that was what she wanted me to think—I don't know—" He paused and closed his eyes, hiding the flash of pain and regret beneath closed eyelids. "And I had to give in. I was ready to agree to her any decision as long as she got out of that hellhole and moved into my house."

Sometimes, we all make those decisions we know we will regret making for the rest of our lives. 

Max was breathing heavily at this point. He was stuck in a miserable place between anger and regret.

Grampa blinked rapidly to drive away the extreme emotions and the liquid slowly erupting from them in his eyes. He looked at Max, seeming to be a bit calmer now. "This is why I believe she built that strong, impenetrable shell around her, hiding the petrified, lost child craving a safe, sane home. Her reaction was not justified—true, but a troubled soul she was. She hid her hurt and her troubles. And then, she began making the wrong kind of friends who did not want to see beneath her surface. She was running after a false sense of strength. Her feeble self slowly breaking away was secretly caged inside," Grampa paused and tilted his head wistfully. "But then, there you were, threatening that mighty shell of hers. It did not stay unnoticed by my old eyes, and I kept pushing you towards her—to help her with studies, to assist her to places—it was all for a solid reason, Max. I thought you would be able to see through her walls, I thought she would let you. I thought maybe she would be saved from completely withering away. But things only got worse for the both of you, didn't it?"

Max was ice cold. His hands trembled under the table, his head spinning a little.

"I was scared that my Sof would also lose herself completely someday, just as her entire family," Seeming unaware of his predicament, however, Grampa continued, "But that is until the said parents died in a house fire. With you leaving for London around that time, too, Sofia kind of broke down completely. I've never seen someone so broken before. It pained all the more seeing not anyone else but my most beloved granddaughter like that."

Max's head spun with all the information, all the revelations. 

All those years of resenting her had been based on nothing.

He had been living a lie. His mortification was complete.

"It took her some time after that to gather herself, but she did. She broke apart to be rebuilt into the woman she is now." There was now pride in Sofia's grandfather's eyes. "She rose from the ashes and became the light for herself and all of us."

She did become all that and more, didn't she? She was enough for herself. No one would ever be able to match that kind of strength. Her grandfather was right. Sofia had constantly been rising from the ashes like a phoenix—each time stronger than before. His Sof, his hell dog, was one of her kind.

A sweet pain started somewhere in Max's chest. He was filled with rage, pain, and pride—quite an odd mixture to bear in one's self.

"She—" Max managed to find his voice finally. "She never said a thing. She even never looked like...," he trailed off.

"She still has got that habit of masking her personal sufferings, her struggles," The old man had a knowing look. "Hasn't she?"

If he had been scared earlier that Sofia might run for the heels if he let out the incredible amount of desire he possessed for her, he felt that she should do just that after this revelation from grampa. For, apparently, he had not been as much attention to his best friend as he thought he had been. He, clearly, had been the pretty negligent thing with such a one-track mind, obsessing with his feelings for her and not seeing anything else past it. The epiphany hit hard, and it shook his entire being.

For more than a decade, he just kept... and kept... and kept on accusing her of hurting him, of being insensible and a cold-hearted freak. Had he thought to dissect why she had slowly become all those frigid things, had he set his mind to peek in more profound than what she let on, had he chosen to search for reasons... he could have, perhaps, had a chance to save her from her own damn darkness. He could have protected them both from all the hurt, all the bloody pain of so many freaking years.

But he did none of that, did he?

He wanted everything from her, not seeing how much she needed from him.

Sofia was the rose he had stomped upon so uncaringly and not just once because he had only seen the thorns all along.

The dinner came to an end with the entire Hayden family chattering around. Max joined in every now and then, trying his best to hide the heavy weight of guilt and repentance settling in the middle of his chest.

He could not bring himself to meet Sofia's eyes, knowing he had never understood her.

But the raging lust for her was still there as he sat in the passenger seat of her little white tin-can of a car. Her smell of utterly female drove him crazy, and the love he felt for her continued its never-ending expansion, so much that he feared his heart would not be able to hold such implausible quantity.

He doubled over internally with the grief for her childhood, the disgrace he felt for leaving her during the most vulnerable time, his remorse for coming back only to hurt her, his repentance for ruining her dreams of a wedding, and all this while loving her still, increasingly every damn second.

Would she ever be able to see him more than a friend? Ever?

And if she would not, would he be able to survive? Without her?

It was the increasing fear of losing her that shook his very core so much that he felt like a little boy again, shaking at the sight of a thunderstorm.

The next thing he knew, he ran off to London like an absolute coward.

He took a case at their London headquarter that he really didn't need to.

He drowned himself in work to the point he didn't have to.

He deprived himself of listening to her voice on the phone and satisfied himself inquiring about her well-being from Bean. The security guard came in handy at that dire moment and had proved himself useful enough, letting Max know upon further inquiry that Sofia was still keeping her bloody window wide open dutifully.

Now Max regretted not putting grills on the windows of his home, no matter how unfashionable and antiquated it seemed.

Her safety was in question here, and out of pure desperation over that, Max had sent her a text message—reminding her to close the bloody window of her room. It was not a surprise that she refused. Max had sat there on his cold bed then, his lips twitching up to a smile and eyes moistening with familiar affection. He immediately commanded Bean to put another guard towards the wall where her blasted window was.

It was expected that he passed nights sleep deprived and missing her like crazy. But he also knew at the same time that this distance was needed. Not just for controlling his emotions, his raging hormones, and his desires for her but also because he needed to learn to forgive himself before going back to earn her heart.

Hatred, be it directed at someone else or to one's own self, is equally destructive.

Max had learned it the hard way and did not wish to repeat it.

Coming back home, as he hauled Sofia into his arms at last, embracing her as if his life depended on it, his passion over the brink, he promised he would make it alright. He would love her so much that she would grow to love him back, too, someday.

He was never going to give up on her, on them. Six months be damned, he would convince her of forever.

--

Max hoped his little wife would find the hints in his notes and see him for the husband he was rather than an on-and-off friend who had kidnapped her out of the blue and bullied her into a vengeful marriage. He cringed, recalling his mistakes.

He still did cringe and felt mortified whenever the memories crossed his mind.

That night at the balcony, after her surprise birthday bash, he had apologized, and she had forgiven him, but it seemed the bitter memories would still remain for a long time. Maybe, it would not taste so bitter anymore after he brought the promised light, the sweetness, into their world.

With multiple shopping bags in both hands that bumped against his thighs, he walked down the bustling corridor of Wilders' law firm. As he was about just to enter his office, Neil, on his way out with a pile of files, ran into him hard.

"Ooomp..."

"Brrrhhh..."

Both the cousins immediately found themselves on their bums on the floor, files and shopping bags all over and around them.

Neil groaned at the same time as a similarly irritated Max grunted.

"What the hell, Neil! At least look where you are going," Max chastised, beginning to straighten himself up.

"Say that to yourself, bro..." Neil trailed off mid-sentence, his eyes now staring at the contents spilling out of the bags Max was carrying. Lingerie and dresses, most of which Max had bought from the nearest mall—rushing out during lunch hours, they were all now out for Neil to gawp at and whoever would pass by.

Feeling a little embarrassed for what had seemed so intimate to Max lying out in the open now, he quickly began stuffing them back inside the bags, a deep scowl forming on his face.

But Neil was on his face the next second, grabbing his collars in rage. "You're cheating on my Sof!" Neil roared.

"She's not your Sof!" Max was aggravated to no end. "And no way in hell I'm cheating on her."

Neil's face relaxed down a tone. His fingers loosened on Max's collars. "Then who're they for?" Neil asked, a bit calmer now.

Max slapped away Neil's hands roughly and was now shoving the dresses and other things inside the bags at lightening speed. "Of course, for my Sof."

It seemed Max was more focused on the fact that Neil dared say Sofia was his. How bloody dare he!

"Then why are you taking them inside your office? We all know how many voluptuous female species work in this institution and throw themselves at your ugly feet, that too on a regular basis." Neil had his eyebrows raised in a suspicious manner.

Max groaned, frustrated at the fact that Neil behaved more like Sofia's personal, self-proclaimed benefactor than a normal younger cousin. It was getting increasingly bothersome day by day, really.

A hell lot of energy and patience had to be wasted to have Neil convinced that, indeed, Max was no more in a mindset to hurt his Sof.

In a way, Max knew he couldn't blame Neil, though. It was his own doing that people lately felt so wary of his purposes regarding his wife. Those people were many in number and were protective of his wife, and while Max felt thrilled at the fact, it also appeared way too boisterous at times.

--

All of Max's efforts seemed to have succeeded.

He delighted at the sight of her flabbergasted face, the red lace he had picked for particular purposes now dangling from her index finger. His sentiments curtailed down to a few words in notes, were now in her hands, being discerned by her gawking eyes.

And that was how he sneaked up on her. He took her in his arms, wanting to cover her entire form with his body alone.

"Now, do