To ruin an Omega - Chapter 431: Meet your maker 1

Chapter 431: Meet your maker 1

FIA

My eyes opened.

The ceiling above me was stone. Rough and gray, the same kind I’d seen in the cell where Athena and I had spoken. Except this was real. This was solid and cold, and it pressed down on me with the weight of centuries.

I tried to move and couldn’t.

My wrists were bound to something metal. The surface beneath me was hard and freezing, and when I turned my head slightly, I saw restraints wrapped around my arms, my torso, my legs. All of it anchored to what looked like an examination table.

The kind you’d see in a morgue.

Pain radiated through my skull in waves. My nose throbbed with every heartbeat, sending fresh agony across my face. Blood had dried there, cracked and tight against my skin. My ribs ached when I breathed. My hip screamed in protest at even the smallest shift of weight.

Everything hurt.

But I was awake.

“Can you give me some drugs first?”

The voice came from somewhere to my left. Young. Female. Strained in a way that suggested she was barely holding herself together.

I knew that voice.

The girl who had beaten me unconscious. The one who’d covered my face with that rug and brought her fists down again and again until there was nothing left of me except darkness.

“I overused myself.”

I turned my head as much as the restraints would allow.

She stood near a counter covered in medical equipment. Vials and syringes, monitoring devices with screens that glowed a sickly green. Her hand rested against the edge of the counter as if she needed it to stay upright. Even from here, I could see her trembling.

Then I saw her other hand.

Bark-like lesions crawled up from her wrist, spreading across her palm and fingers in patterns that looked wrong. Organic but alien. The skin there had gone dark and rough, cracked in places like dried wood splitting under pressure.

She was ’rotting’. It looked similar to the ones mother suffered from.

“Give me a moment.”

That second voice stopped my heart.

Valentine Blossom stepped into view. He moved with the kind of casual confidence that belonged to someone who’d never once doubted their place in the world. Tall and lean, with his salt and pepper hair pulled back from a face that would have been regarded as objectively handsome if not for the emptiness behind his eyes.

He wore a lab coat over dark clothes. The coat was pristine. White and pressed, like he’d just put it on for this occasion.

“I just need to take some blood work, and we will get back to you, Number Four.”

Number Four.

The name landed like a punch to the stomach. Number Four. Not a person. Not someone with a real name or a life or dreams that extended beyond whatever purpose Valentine had assigned her.

Just a number.

The girl who’d beaten me into unconsciousness, who’d used strange alien powers like they were second nature, who’d looked at me with that empty expression while I begged her to stop. She was an experiment. Another victim of whatever sick process Valentine had perfected over the decades.

She looked at me then.

Her eyes went wide, and she stumbled back a step from the counter. The bark lesions on her hand seemed to pulse, spreading further up her wrist.

“She’s awake.”

Panic colored her voice. Real fear. She certainly did not expect or want me to be awake.

Valentine glanced at me. His expression didn’t change. If anything, he looked pleased.

“Do not worry about it.” He picked up a syringe from the counter and checked it against the light. “She is restrained and still badly injured. Not to mention that she is not healing.”

He said it like it was an observation. Clinical and scarily detached. Like I was a specimen in a jar rather than a person strapped to his table.

I tested the restraints.

They held firm. Metal bit into my wrists and ankles, unforgiving. Whatever material they’d used, it was designed to withstand far more force than a broken, bleeding Omega werewolf could generate.

“What is the end goal here, Valentine?”

The question came out rougher than I’d intended. My throat was raw, probably from screaming or maybe just from the beating. Everything felt damaged, like my body had been taken apart and put back together wrong.

He turned to face me fully.

Then he smiled.

The expression made my skin crawl. It held warmth, genuine pleasure, like he was looking at something precious that he’d finally managed to acquire after years of searching.

“What do you know about your history?”

I stared at him.

The audacity of that question. The sheer fucking arrogance of it, coming from the man who’d tortured my grandmother to death in cells just like this one. Who’d experimented on my mother before she’d even been born. Who’d spent decades destroying lives in pursuit of whatever twisted vision lived in his head.

“I will not dignify your madness with a response.”

My voice came out flat. Final. I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of pretending this was some kind of intellectual exchange between equals.

“I know my history, and I know your end.”

Valentine’s smile widened.

“Cocky.” He set the syringe down and moved closer to the table. To me. “But I like you. You deserve to be cocky. Given what you are. What I made you.”

The words hit me like a slap.

Heat flooded through my chest. Pure rage, the kind Athena had told me to hold onto like a lifeline. The kind that would keep me alive when everything else failed.

“You did not make me.”

I let the laughter come then. Wild and bitter and edged with something that might have been hysteria if I’d let it go any further.

“You cannot truly believe that? The nerve to believe you made me? You think yourself a god?”

Valentine reached the edge of the table. He looked down at me with that same pleasant expression, like we were having a conversation over tea rather than him preparing to take my blood while I lay restrained and broken.

“I think of myself as a creator, actually.”

His hand moved to adjust one of the restraints. Not tightening it. Just checking. Making sure everything was in place exactly as it should be.

“The healers did not need to die out because of a few werewolves’ madness. Your goddess, of course, will not see reason. But we do not need to convince her of reason.”

He spoke with the certainty of someone who’d repeated these words to himself so many times they’d become truth.

“The supernatural are allowed to be ingenious.”

I felt the restraint give slightly under his touch, then settle back into place. Locked, secure, and keeping me exactly where he wanted me.

“I made your grandmother and made your mother.”

Valentine’s gaze met mine. There was something almost gentle in his expression. Almost fatherly.

“You might not know the story. But in doing so, I made you too.”

The rage inside me crystallized into something sharp and focused.

I laughed again.

This time, the sound came out clear. Fierce. With all the contempt I could pour into it.

“I beg to fucking differ.”

I pulled against the restraints hard enough to make the metal creak. Pain shot through my wrists where the edges bit in, but I didn’t care. I wanted him to see that I wasn’t afraid. That whatever he thought he’d created, it wasn’t submission.

“I know the story, and it is nothing like you are peddling. You fucked up the life of my grandmother and my mother, too.”

Movement caught my attention.

Number Four had staggered away from the counter. She clutched her hand to her chest, and when I looked closer, I saw the bark lesions had spread. They covered her entire hand now, creeping up past her wrist toward her forearm. The skin there looked dead. Petrified.

She winced as another section of flesh hardened into something that resembled tree bark more than human tissue.

“Look at that.”

I turned my attention back to Valentine, gesturing toward the girl with my eyes since my hands were useless.

“Even another of your experiments is facing withdrawals.”

The girl made a small sound. Something between a whimper and a gasp.

Valentine glanced at her, then back at me.

“All specimens cannot be perfect.”

He said it without emotion. Like he was discussing a batch of failed prototypes rather than a living person who was rotting from the inside out right in front of him.

“But look at you, Fia.”

His attention was fixed on me completely now. There was intent there. Focused in a way that made my stomach turn.

“You use your gifts and do not face backlash. Sure, your powers are limited. But I guess you got that from your mother. It was similar to your grandmother.”

He picked up the syringe again and moved toward the table with measured steps.

“So you should still suffer from rot. But you do not.”

The pieces started connecting in my head. The reason he’d sent Number Four after me. The reason I was here on this table instead of dead in that dining room.

“You will be the key to understanding why.”