To ruin an Omega novel Chapter 327

Chapter 327: As above, so below 2

MADELINE

It was just there, huge and ragged, carrying across the dark space and coming back to me from the stone walls in fragments.

I clenched my teeth as it faded and sat there shaking, the mana collapsed back into nothing, leaving me hollow and scorched.

"Cian!"

My voice broke on his name.

"Cian! Where are you?"

I had nothing. Only the echo of my own voice and then silence.

"This is not what we agreed to!" I heard the way my own voice sounded, high and cracking, and I hated it. "Cian!"

Still, there was no answer.

I tried again with the ropes. Not fire this time. Something simpler, just a pull of force to loosen the knots, the kind of basic working I had done a thousand times without thinking. The magic moved toward my hands and something inside me opened, sharp and deep, like a blade finding the inside of a wound that had no outside. There was no visible cut. There was no blood. There was just the feeling of being opened from the inside, and I bit down on my lower lip hard enough to taste metal and screamed through my nose until it passed.

I sat very still.

What was fucking happening—

Oh... was this the pact?

I had made it with my own hands and my own blood and my own words. I had made it carefully. I had made it to mean something, to prove something, and now every time I reached for my power the binding read it as aggression against Cain somehow. It was reading the ropes, reading my captivity, reading the intent to free myself, and somewhere in its logic it was finding that that put Cian in danger.

It had been a stupid thing to do.

I knew that now in a way I had not let myself know before. I had built that pact on the assumption, the deep animal assumption, that Cian would never do this. That there was a floor beneath us. That even at our worst, we would not arrive here.

I put that thought down before it could become something I could not carry.

Think, I find myself. Think clearly.

The ropes were the problem. The ropes were the trigger. If the pact believed my magic was moving against Cian and the ropes were the obstacle between me and that, then I needed to convince the pact the ropes were nothing more than ropes. A nuisance. Not a weapon somehow being removed from the field. It had to be sold to the divine that I just wanted the ropes off.

I organized that thought carefully. I placed it at the front of my mind like a sign over a door. The ropes are biting into my arms. I want them off because they hurt. Only that. Only the comfort of it.

I gathered myself. Kept my intent small, specific and deliberately dull. Then I opened my mouth and chose a rhyme spell, simple and rhythmic, the verbal kind we learned young because the repetition was grounding, because the words could carry the intention cleanly without the dangerous compression of pure thought-cast.

The first line came out steady.

"Rope that tightens, rope that binds,"

The second.

"Hear my will and change your mind."

I took a short breath. Nothing violent was happening. That was a good sign.

"Loosen fiber, slacken thread," I had barely made it halfway through the third when the cough came without warning.

It came fast.

Too fast.

The taste hit first, thick and metallic, flooding the back of my tongue before I understood what was happening. Then it forced its way up and out of me, hot and heavy. I folded forward in the chair, the ropes cutting deeper as my body jerked, and it spilled from my mouth in a wet rush.

It didn’t stop.

It kept coming, choking, dragging something deeper with it. I spat, but it clung, stringing from my lips to the floor in dark strands that looked too thick, too wrong, as if it didn’t belong inside me at all.

My hands shook.

No, not shook, they tremored, sharp and uneven, like something was knocking against my bones from the inside, trying to get out.

My eyes moved upward without quite meaning to. 𝗳𝚛𝚎𝚎𝘄𝕖𝕓𝕟𝕠𝚟𝚎𝕝.𝗰𝕠𝐦

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