To ruin an Omega novel Chapter 380

Chapter 380: No one mourns the cruel 1

CIAN

Fia moved before I could fully process what was happening, before my mind could even catch up to what my eyes were seeing.

One moment, she was beside me, close enough that I could feel her presence without looking. The next, she had stepped in front of me, placing herself directly between me and Pryce’s gun.

Her body became a barrier, rigid and unyielding, as though she believed she could stop a bullet with nothing but her own flesh.

My hand reacted before I could think. I reached out, caught her arm, and yanked her back with enough force that she stumbled, her balance breaking as she was forced to catch herself against the chair to keep from falling.

"What are you doing?" The words came out sharper than I intended, edged with something I didn’t bother to soften.

I didn’t wait for an answer. I pushed her behind me and stepped forward, reclaiming the space she had taken, placing myself back in the line of fire where I belonged.

I didn’t look at Pryce.

I looked at her.

At Fia.

The color had drained from her face so completely it made something twist low in my chest, and her eyes, wide and fixed on me, carried a kind of intensity that went beyond panic. Whatever she was feeling poured off her in waves, heavy and suffocating, strong enough that it unsettled me in a way I couldn’t ignore.

Fear.

But not the simple kind, not the instinctive reaction to a weapon being pointed in your direction, not the kind that makes a person flinch or duck or freeze in place.

This was something else entirely.

This was fear rooted in certainty, the kind that comes from knowing rather than guessing, from seeing something that hasn’t happened yet but feels inevitable. It carried the weight of something already decided, something she believed she could not change, no matter how desperately she tried.

My chest tightened as the realization settled in.

She thought I was going to die.

She thought this was the moment it happened.

I opened my mouth, ready to say something, anything, to pull her out of that space, to tell her I was fine, that nothing was going to happen, that she didn’t need to look at me like that.

Pryce’s voice cut through the room before I could speak.

"What the fuck?"

I turned toward him.

He was looking around the hall now, his gaze darting from face to face as if searching for something, or someone. His gun was still raised, but his arm had started to shake, the tremor growing more obvious by the second, and the color had drained from his face until he looked almost sick.

He was waiting.

Waiting for someone to stand with him, to back him up, to make this something other than a mistake he had made alone.

No one moved.

The realization hit him all at once, and I saw it unfold in real time, in the way his expression faltered, in the way his shoulders dropped as whatever resolve he had clung to slipped out from under him, in the way his grip on the gun weakened even as his hand trembled harder.

"Fuck," he said under his breath, the word breaking apart as it left him. "Fuck. I fucked up. Please, spare my family, Alpha Cian. They did not know. They had no idea."

He turned the gun toward himself.

I stepped forward immediately, instinct overriding everything else.

"Pry—"

The shot rang out before I could reach him.

The sound was deafening, sharp enough to cut through everything else, and it echoed through the hall in a way that made it feel like it had lodged somewhere inside my chest.

Pryce’s body dropped where he stood.

Blood spread beneath him almost instantly, dark and thick as it seeped across the stone floor, moving faster than my mind could keep up with.

The hall erupted.

People shouted, voices rising over one another in panic, chairs scraping as bodies moved, as everyone tried to put distance between themselves and what had just happened.

For a moment, I didn’t move.

It wasn’t long, barely a second, but it was enough.

Then something else caught my attention.

Aldric.

He was shifting.

Not fully, not completely, but enough to make the change visible. I heard the cracks before I fully saw them, the sound of bone shifting under skin, of his body forcing itself into something stronger, something harder. His muscles thickened, stretching against his clothes, and the chains around his wrists strained under the sudden pressure, metal groaning as it fought to hold.

Then they snapped.

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