To ruin an Omega - Chapter 367: Hell is your exes 2

Chapter 367: Hell is your exes 2

ALDRIC

“Mother, stop,” Ronan said sharply.

“Let me go!” she snapped, thrashing in his hold.

Her hands clawed at the air toward me. She twisted violently, trying to break free, her elbow driving back into Ronan’s side. He grunted but held on.

“You lied to him!” she shouted at me. “You made him believe that?”

Across the room, I barely reacted.

“I simply told him what he needed to hear,” he said calmly. “The truth.”

“The truth?” Teagan let out a furious sound and shoved backward with all her strength. Ronan stumbled a step, and that was enough. She twisted out of his grip, slipping from his arms before he could catch her again.

“Teagan—”

Too late.

She closed the distance in seconds.

I could have stopped her. But I did not care too. Whatever was wrong with my guts, it made me apathetic mostly.

Her fist caught me square in the cheek and I went down.

The floor came up faster than I expected. My hands shot out but the trembling in my arms made the landing ugly. I braced and caught myself but the impact rattled through my chest and the heat inside me surged so violently that my vision blurred at the edges for a moment.

Ronan was already there.

He grabbed Teagan by the shoulders and hauled her back.

“Enough,” he said sharply. He pulled me up with one hand, his grip solid and certain. He set me back onto the bench and put himself between us again. “I said enough. Stand down.”

Teagan breathed hard. Her chest rose and fell in uneven bursts. She stared at me past Ronan’s shoulder with her hands clenched at her sides.

Then her expression shifted.

She stopped looking at my face.

Her eyes dropped.

She looked at my hands.

And then she laughed. It was not warm. It was not bitter either. It was something worse. A sound that held recognition in it. The kind of laugh that came from knowing someone for a very long time.

“You sweet summer child,” she said.

Ronan frowned. “What?”

She pointed at me. At my hands.

“Look at his nails.”

I looked down.

My nails had gone pale. Not gray exactly. Pale. The kind of pale that crept in slowly from the edges and worked its way inward when the body started to lose the battle against something it could not fight on its own.

I had not noticed that yet. What the fuck was that?

“He has taken something,” Teagan said. “Poison, I would bet. He intends to take the coward’s way out and leave you standing here alone to face everything. To carry his sins along with your own.” She let out a short, sharp breath. “This is who he is, Ronan. This has always been who he is.”

Ronan turned to me.

He looked at my hands.

I watched his face shift. The certainty that had been holding him together since we were first brought down here developed a crack in it. Small. But I saw it.

My mind moved backward without my permission.

The wine.

The courtyard. Morrigan beside me. Her smile. Her easy manner. The bottle pressed gently into my hand like an offering.

I had taken it without thinking. Of course I had.

Oh, I was such a fool.

I stood. My legs shook but I forced them to hold. I looked at my hands properly for the first time. The pale had crept further than I realized. The trembling made more sense now. The heat. The uneven pulse. The way my thoughts kept slipping loose from their moorings.

“I did not do this.”

My voice came out steadier than I had any right to expect.

“I did not poison myself. I was poisoned.”

Teagan’s expression did not change.

“I know you,” she said simply. “Better than you think I do. And if this was something done to you against your will, you would be terrified right now. You would be falling apart from your seams. You would be screaming for a healer. That is the kind of man that you are. A maniuoulative and pretentious fool who belives he is bigger than the system and throws tantrums whne it does not work in his favor.”

She looked at me.

“But you are not. And that tells me enough.”

She turned away from me deliberately. Like I had already ceased to be worth addressing.

“This man lies,” she said to Ronan. “He has always been a liar. He is extraordinary at it. I know. I fell for it once.” Her voice did not rise. She kept it level, which made it worse somehow. “I was stupid enough to believe that the things he said meant something. That he was different underneath. But there is no underneath. There is only what he wants from you in any given moment.”

She stepped closer to her son.

“Look at that man and tell me you believe him now.”

Ronan’s jaw worked. He looked at me.

And for the first time since we were thrown in here together, I saw the doubt sitting fully in his eyes. Not flickering. Not brief. It had settled.

“Father,” he said quietly. “You wouldn’t.”

I held his gaze.

The rational part of me that had been building walls and laying traps for years knew exactly what was needed here. A clean denial. A firm voice. Absolute certainty. Something to hand him that felt more solid than what Teagan was offering.

But my hands would not stop shaking.

And my nails were still pale.

And the heat was still moving through me like something searching for a way out.

I breathed in slowly.

“Don’t disappoint me,” I said. “Don’t come at me with doubt and foolish questions after everything I have given you.”

He watched me.

“This changes nothing,” I said. “I am not leaving you. As long as you hold my hand, none of this ends the way they want it to.”

Teagan made a soft sound. “Be smart, Ronan.”

He looked between us.

Something was moving across his face that I could not read cleanly anymore. The poison was doing that. Making the edges of things soft and unreliable. I pressed my palm against my leg to hide the worst of the shaking.

Ronan opened his mouth.

Whatever he was about to say was swallowed by the sound of boots in the corridor.

The cell door opened in quick succession.

A sentinel stepped inside, and his eyes swept the cell without settling on anyone in particular.

“It is time,” he said. “The elder’s circle has arrived. Judgment begins now.”