To ruin an Omega novel Chapter 485

Chapter 485: The Beast they deserve 1

LYSANDER

The silence pressed against my ears like water.

I stood over Hazel’s body and felt nothing. That should have alarmed me. It should have triggered something human buried beneath the wolf, but there was only the mechanical understanding that she’d stopped breathing. That her chest no longer rose and fell. That the pillow in my hands carried the weight of what I’d done.

I dropped it.

The fabric landed on her face with a soft sound that strangely echoed too loud in the stillness. My father’s corpse lay sprawled several feet away, one arm stretched toward where Hazel had been when I first grabbed her. The hole in his chest gaped like an accusation. Blood had stopped flowing from it sometime during her final moments, cooling into something that looked more like paint than life.

Two bodies... Two lives... I had done this.

I’d killed two people.

The thought arrived distant and just as factual. It was as if I was reading about someone else’s crimes in a report. Still... My hands were steady. My breathing remained even. Everything inside me had gone quiet in a way that felt wrong.

I turned away from them both and walked toward the door. My legs moved without conscious direction, carrying me through motions I couldn’t quite feel. The hallway beyond stretched empty and dark which I guessed weas good for me. I needed time before anyone found this. Time to think. Time to—

"Lysander..."

Her voice froze me mid-step.

I knew that voice. Knew it the way I knew my own heartbeat, even though I hadn’t heard it in years and the only moment it now resided in was in my dreams or delusions.

I turned in the direction of the sound.

My mother stood in the hallway behind me.

She strangely did not look like a ghost or some translucent specter from stories. She looked solid. Real. Exactly as I remembered her from the days before father’s mental games had made her sick and carved her down to bone and desperation. Her dark hair fell in waves past her shoulders. Her eyes held the same warmth that used to make everything feel safer when I was much younger.

She smiled at me.

The expression cracked something in my chest that I’d been holding together through sheer force of will. My knees buckled. I didn’t fall, but it was close. She moved forward and wrapped her arms around me before I could decide whether to run or stay.

Her embrace felt real.

Warm... Solid... Everything a hallucination shouldn’t be. I breathed in and caught the scent of lavender and woodsmoke that had clung to her always. My throat closed around words I couldn’t form.

"You did well," she whispered against my hair.

I shook my head. The movement felt sluggish. "I killed him. I killed her. I murdered—"

"You did what needed to be done."

"That doesn’t make it right." My voice came out hoarse. "There might have been... There were other ways. Better ways. I could have found something that didn’t require me to become this."

She pulled back enough to look at me. Her hands came up to cup my face with a gentleness I’d forgotten existed. "You saved your sisters. You saved your brothers. You saved her and you protected your pack from a man who would have destroyed everything even he himself built. You saved my Wenzel from himself."

"By destroying myself." The words tasted like ash. "I have two people’s blood on my hands now. That’s not leadership. Nothing I did was about justice. No matter how badly I want to frame it as that. This was just murder. It does help that it can be dressed up in noble intentions."

"Is it?" She tilted her head slightly. "Tell me something. If you hadn’t done this, what would have happened to her? Fia?"

I didn’t answer. I couldn’t. The images came anyway. My father dragging Fia before the pack in metaphorical chains. How he would have used her until she was dried up and had no light to give. She would have ended up like mother or worse. Because at least, he had loved mother.

"And Hazel?" My mother continued. "Would she have stopped after this failed? Would she have simply accepted defeat and moved on with her life?"

No. The answer settled into my bones with absolute certainty. Hazel would have schemed again. Plotted. Found new ways to climb over whoever stood between her and what she wanted. She’d proven that pattern again and again and I did not even know her for that long.

"You’re trying to make me feel better about murder." I said it flatly.

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