Chapter 60: Liam’s Secret?
The car was quiet in a way it hadn’t been all day, even with their previous drive which made Liam raise a brow.
That was the thing Liam noticed first — not the silence itself, but the contrast. Sophia had filled every shared space since the gym with something. A comment, a laugh, a well-timed eye roll. Even quiet moments between them had carried a certain texture, like a room that’s empty but still warm. She had a natural frequency and she ran on it without effort.
Right now she was looking at the passenger window and saying nothing like her mind was elsewhere.
Her hands sat folded in her lap. The grey dress caught the passing streetlights in intervals. She was present and somewhere else simultaneously, in the way people get when something is happening inside them, or rather, overthinking.
Liam drove and let it sit for another block as he knew he couldn’t rush the conversation. He didn’t mind sitting in comfortable silence but this silence felt anything but comfortable.
"You okay?" Liam finally broke the silence between them.
"I’m good." She didn’t look at him. "Just thinking." Sophia added.
"About?" Liam questioned, genuinely curious as to what she could be thinking about so deeply.
"Just things..." Sophia didn’t give a definitive answer.
He nodded slowly. Gave it another half a block before speaking again.
"A dollar for your thoughts," he said.
That got her to look at him. "It’s a penny."
"I’m adjusting for inflation," Liam shrugged.
"That’s not how that works."
"How about we change it to a kiss?" he said casually. Eyes on the road.
Sophia opened her mouth but she realized soon after that she had nothing to say.
She faced forward again and said nothing, and Liam caught it in his peripheral vision — the slight shift, the stillness that replaced the usual quick return. Earlier that day she would have had something ready. A deflection dressed as a joke, delivered before he finished the sentence.
The Sophia at the salon, the Sophia on the treadmill, the Sophia who had rolled her eyes at him no fewer than six times since morning would have produced a response that was sharp and light and put the ball back in his court before he could enjoy having served it.
This Sophia said nothing.
Liam understood exactly what that meant.
He thought about his system — the way it had mapped Rachel’s emotional meter in percentages, the deterioration alerts, the improvement notifications. He had no such readout for Sophia. Not yet. The system, as far as he could tell, reserved that level of detail for targets where the deal had already been closed. Rachel was the only reference point he had, and Rachel’s first meter reading hadn’t appeared until after the first night.
He didn’t need the system to read this one.
He let the quiet stretch for another ten seconds, then said: "You know, I might not have mentioned this, but I used to be a serial killer."
Sophia didn’t respond. She kept her eyes forward.
"Pretty specific type. I’d take women on dates—" Liam’s voice was completely level, almost conversational— "nice ones, good food, the whole thing. Then afterward I’d just—" he made a vague gesture— "dump them in the bushes. Purely out of boredom."
Nothing from the passenger seat.
"Happened maybe twelve, thirteen times. Give or take." He paused thoughtfully. "Honestly I lost count after eight."
Sophia turned her head incrementally toward him, the way someone does when they’re trying not to give you the satisfaction of their full attention.
"But then I saw you in that dress tonight," Liam continued, the same flat indifferent tone, "and I thought — no. Not tonight. This one’s different."
He held the expression for exactly three more seconds.
Then he laughed — sudden and genuine, the kind that comes from the chest when you’ve been holding a straight face past its natural limit. He shook his head, one hand coming off the wheel briefly.
Sophia stared at him.
Then she exhaled hard through her nose, and something broke open.
"You are insane," she said. But the laugh was already underneath it, surfacing regardless.
Liam recovered himself. He glanced over at her once — properly, with the lightness gone — and when he spoke again his voice had moved somewhere quieter and more direct.
"I know you’re nervous," he said. "It’s okay. I felt my heart skip a beat when I saw you in that dress tonight. I mean that." He looked back at the road. "The woman in it is equally as stunning. Tonight we just get to enjoy each other’s company. That’s it. Nothing complicated."
Sophia looked at him. The nervous edge in her posture had softened into something less defended. She managed a small smile — not performed, not deflective. Just honest.
"Okay," she said quietly.
"Good." Liam nodded once. A beat. Then: "Relax. I’m not a serial killer."
He turned to look at her directly.
"... or am I?"
"Liam, I swear I will hit you—"
He was already laughing again and after one second of genuine resistance she went with it, and they were both laughing as he turned into the valet lane of Opus at the Sound— fourteen floors up in a glass-faced building overlooking the water, the kind of restaurant that didn’t put prices on the menu they displayed outside because anyone who needed to check wasn’t the intended audience.
The valet opened Liam’s door. Another appeared at Sophia’s side.
She stepped out and looked up at the building, at the warm amber light visible through the floor-to-ceiling windows, at the quiet procession of well-dressed people moving through the entrance with the ease of regulars.
She looked at Liam over the roof of the car.
"Opus," she said.
"You’ve heard of it?"
"I’ve walked past it." She looked at the entrance again. "I’ve never—" She stopped.
"Tonight you have," Liam said, and offered his arm.
Sophia looked at it for a moment.
Then she took it, and they walked in together on their first real date.