To ruin an Omega novel Chapter 306

Chapter 306: I want to break free 3

FIA

I found myself staring up at the high window again, at the thick dark pressed against the glass like it had weight, like it could leak inside if it wanted to. It showed nothing back. No sky, no stars, no sense of time. Just absence.

When I lowered my gaze, it landed on the woman across from me, and the way she held herself made something inside me hollow out. She looked present and gone at the same time, like a shell that had learned how to breathe.

That was when I noticed her hands.

The marks were faint but impossible to miss once I saw them. Lines and shadows that did not belong to ordinary work or age. They sat against her skin like memories that refused to fade, and the thought that followed made my stomach twist before I could stop it.

I turned toward the younger version of my mother. I never spoke the question out loud, yet the words hung between us anyway, heavy and obvious. She watched me for a moment, and I felt the answer coming before she opened her mouth.

"It’s a choice she told me she regrets," she said quietly. "No matter how much she didn’t want to live anymore." 𝐟𝕣𝕖𝐞𝐰𝕖𝚋𝐧𝗼𝚟𝐞𝕝.𝗰𝐨𝐦

The room felt smaller after that. The air did not move.

"She stayed," I said, the words leaving me before I had time to soften them. "Even when she could have gone. She stayed because of you."

Silence stretched out, long enough that it started to feel like part of the room itself.

"She was afraid of what they would do to me," my mother finally said. "If she ran and they needed to punish someone for it."

My chest ached.

"Every time she got close to that point again," my mother continued, "I was what stopped her. She would get to the edge of it and then think of me and come back. But I think even that is getting hard for her. I have never known the outside world. Aside from words she has told me, I don’t know what I am missing. But she has. She knows what she lost."

The woman sat so still it almost felt wrong to call it sitting. More like she had been placed there and forgotten. I moved toward her without thinking it through, the urge sudden and sharp, like if I did not reach her now she might drift somewhere I could not follow.

I lifted my hand.

For a second I thought I would touch her shoulder. That I would feel skin, warmth, something real and solid. Instead my palm met resistance that was not resistance at all. It felt like pressing against the surface of water before it breaks, that strange trembling barrier that holds for half a breath before giving way. My hand stopped there, hovering, shaking, the air thick and wrong between us.

Pain flared in my chest so fast it stole the rest of my breath.

"You cannot despair now," I said, the words cracking as they came out. "It gets better. She escapes. Your daughter escapes. Muna escapes."

Saying it hurt. It hurt like forcing light into a place that had learned to live without it.

Athena did not move. Neither did she sense me.

"I’ve been coming here," I said slowly, the realization forming as I spoke it aloud. "Since when?"

"I wouldn’t know. But yes."

I turned toward her. "And you knew. You recognized me."

"Every time." Her voice softened even more. "You never stayed long. But you always came when it was worst. When she... or even me became close to the edge. You would arrive and something would shift and we would..." She hesitated, searching. "Hold on."

Something in my chest tightened until it felt too big for my ribs. Too heavy to sit quietly inside me the way it had before.

Had I been saving them? Was that what this was? Even if I never chose it, even if I never understood it, some part of me had been finding its way back through years that should have been unreachable. Back to a woman I had never known and another I knew too well, as if there had always been a thread pulling me toward them because leaving them at the bottom of whatever this place was had never been an option.

Before I was born, I had been finding my way back here.

The idea pressed in from every side, too wide and too deep to take in all at once, so I didn’t try. I let myself hold only the smallest piece of it and hoped that would be enough for now.

"What do you mean when you say break the cycle?" I asked. "You asked me that when I arrived."