To ruin an Omega novel Chapter 320

Chapter 320: Let it happen 1

HAZEL

The scream tore out of me and then there was nothing left. Just the walls. Just the ceiling. Just the particular quality of silence that came after a locked door and a key pulled from the outside.

I stood in the middle of the room and breathed. Or tried to. The air felt wrong, like it had been sitting in here too long before I arrived, like it was secondhand and used up and there was not quite enough of it. I breathed again and got less than I wanted. I did it again and got even less.

My knees hit the floor before I decided to let them.

I did not know when the panic started. It was not like a door opening. It was like a door that had already been open for hours and you only just noticed the cold. One moment I was kneeling. The next, my body had decided it was dying. My chest locked. My vision went strange at the edges. I pressed both palms flat to the floor and focused on the texture of the rug and that did nothing because the rug was scratchy and wrong and the room was too small and the ceiling was too low and there was no window, everything about this fuckass room seemed nowhere near enough.

I vomited.

It came without warning. One second my stomach was clenched and miserable and the next, it had simply given up trying to hold itself together. I retched hard, again and again, until there was nothing left but the effort itself. The horrible mechanical spasming of a body doing work with no material to show for it. When it finally stopped, I stayed on my hands and knees for a long moment. Then my arms gave out and I went sideways and just lay there on the floor.

I stared at the door.

"Help," I said. My voice was barely a sound. "I can’t breathe. Please. Someone." The words came out soft and embarrassing. Yet I kept saying them anyway because the alternative was silence and I could not be silent right now. "I cannot breathe."

The door did not move.

That was when I saw her.

She was on the floor with me. Same angle, same position, same ruined mess of a night written all over her face. But her eyes were different. Cleaner, somehow. Like she had not wasted any of herself on crying.

She was me.

She looked at me like I was the most pathetic thing she had ever seen, and she had clearly seen some things.

"You are so pathetic," she said.

"You are one to talk," I said. "You are me."

She smiled without warmth. "I am not this version of you." She shifted slightly, settling her cheek against the floor, like lying in a pool of your own vomit was a perfectly reasonable place to hold a conversation. "I am not the version of you that needs other people to survive."

I looked at the ceiling. "We have always latched on to people. The strong and the weak. We find the person with the most power in the room and we get close and we stay close. That is how we have always worked."

"No." Her voice was sharp. "That is not what we do. We use them. We kiss ass, suck dick, smile at the right moment, and claw our way to the top while they think they are the ones holding the ladder. There is a massive difference between needing someone and using them." She looked at me steadily. "Which one are you doing right now?"

I did not answer.

"Is this where you want to be?" she asked. "Bottom barrel. Locked in a room. Whimpering at a door. A bottom barrel Omega that a sentinel treats like a child on the first day?"

"No."

"It is like you and Fia switched lives." She said the name the way it was always said between us, flat and loaded at the same time. I trust an apparition of myself to use Fia against me in a way that would cut so well.

"She is out there somewhere, breathing clean air, making clean choices, probably winning. And you are here, in this room, on this floor, covered in yourself."

Something tightened in my chest that had nothing to do with the panic.

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