To ruin an Omega novel Chapter 313

Chapter 313: Conjoined

CIAN

She said nothing.

The silence stretched between us until it felt like something physical, like a rope pulled tight enough to hum. I waited. She kept her mouth closed. Her eyes stayed wet. She stood there like if she didn’t move, if she didn’t speak, the whole thing might pass over her.

Something shifted in my chest. It started as grief. It hardened fast. Turned into something with edges.

"Answer me."

She didn’t.

Her lips pressed together. Her shoulders stayed squared in that careful way she did when she thought stillness made her smaller, less visible, less guilty.

"Madeline." My voice came out low at first, then it ripped free of my control and echoed off the walls. "Answer me."

She flinched. Actually flinched. The tears were still clinging to her lashes but her spine went straight, like she’d remembered who she was supposed to be. I watched something reorganize itself behind her eyes. Fear shifting into calculation.

"Aldric put a sentinel to watch me," she said, barely above a whisper. "If you keep yelling, you could alert them."

I stared at her. It took effort not to laugh.

"I wasn’t followed," I said. "I made sure of it. That ends that."

She held my gaze like she wanted to argue, then let it drop.

"Can I cast a spell?" she asked.

The request did something ugly to me. I didn’t think. My hands reacted before my mind caught up. The claws pushed through my skin slow, which was worse than if they’d torn out clean. I felt the pressure build, the split, the sting. I looked down and saw the blood well against my palm, bright and immediate.

Then I looked back at her.

"Do not," I said, and my voice was steady in a way that surprised me, "even consider it."

"It’s just to seal the room," she whispered. "So no one can hear us."

The fact that she thought lowering her voice would soften me almost made me furious all over again.

"The problem," I said, pressing my bleeding hand against my thigh, "is that I don’t trust you anymore. Not even a little. So no spells. Just talk."

She wiped at her face with the back of her hand. The gesture made her look young. Too young. She had always looked younger when she cried, and that had always been my weakness. It used to undo me.

It didn’t tonight.

"I didn’t mean to hurt you," she said. "Cian, I swear."

"Yet you did." I kept my tone even because if I let it slip I didn’t know where it would go. "More than once. You killed a witch. You stirred hate against me from your own people. You shaped it carefully. Made me the problem. Made yourself the solution. Why? So you could circle back and look clean?"

I had to breathe. Just breathe. Because saying it out loud made it real in a way that thinking it hadn’t.

"How long?" I asked. "How long have you been working for Aldric?"

"Cian..." She said my name the way she always had when she wanted to slow me down. In that soft, weighted and intimate manner.

It dragged against me.

My hand moved before I chose to move it. The claws caught the light and her eyes dropped to them instantly. She stumbled back and hit the wall, but that was pointless. I was already too close. Close enough to see the red threading through the whites of her eyes. Close enough to see where her tears had cut clean tracks down her face.

Something in me pulled back at the last second. I forced my hand down.

"Please," I said. It came out rougher than I wanted. "Just talk. Don’t say my name."

She started crying again, and this time it wasn’t careful. It wasn’t pretty. It was messy and loud and humiliating. I watched her fall apart and felt two things at once. The years of knowing her. The refusal to let those years soften me.

"When your father died," she said.

My stomach dropped so fast it made me dizzy.

"What."

She covered her mouth like she could shove the words back inside herself. Her shoulders shook. She kept crying.

"I didn’t want to do it," she whispered.

The drop in my stomach flattened into something cold. Clean, as it was exact.

I stood there and made myself understand what she had just said.

"So when you asked me to choose," I said slowly, because if I rushed I might lose control, "between you and the seat of Skollrend. That was because..."

She nodded.

I laughed. It sounded wrong in my own ears. Scraped raw.

"Wow," I said, shaking my head. "How could you? That was my father. You knew how much I loved him. You knew. How could you even think—"

"I had no choice."

The words snapped something.

"What does that mean?" The cold cracked open and heat poured through. "You keep saying that. I had no choice. What does that functionally mean, Madeline? Because from where I’m standing you made plenty. You planned. You maneuvered. You lied."

"He threatened me." Her voice fractured around the words. "Aldric threatened me."

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify