To ruin an Omega Nov Chapter 305: I want to break free 2

Chapter 305: I want to break free 2

FIA

It was only then it sort of dawned to

that I was irrevocably connected to Athena and there was a clear cut reason that Isobel’s mother had said I looked so much like Athena.

Muna was my mother and Athena was her mother.

Athena was my grandmother.

My heart skipped multiple beats.

The woman looked up.

I did not know if she could see us. My mother had not said. But her eyes moved across the doorway in a slow, searching sweep, like soone who had learned to pay attention to the edges of rooms, the places where things could co from. Her gaze passed through

and ca back and lingered for a mont.

It did not look like recognition. This was sothing lighter than that. The way you felt the sun on your skin on the first warm day after a long winter, nothing you can na yet, just warmth where there was cold.

"Does she know we’re here?" I asked.

"Sotis." My mother’s voice was careful. "When we connect, the walls between monts get thin. She’s felt

most of her life too without knowing what I was. I think she decided it was the Goddess."

I watched the woman rest her head back against the stone. Her eyes closed. Her chest rose and fell in the deliberate, disciplined rhythm of soone practicing at being calm.

"She has our hands," I said.

"Yes."

"And your jaw. And—" I stopped. There was too much to list. "She looks like... Except older."

"She is older."

I pressed my own palm against the doorfra and the thin mbrane resisted and gave slightly. A flash ca through it, brief and sharp as a knife: a corridor very much like this one, a woman being half-carried by two n who did not care if she could keep her feet, a door shutting, the sound of a lock. Then it was gone and all that remained was just stone under my hand.

"How long has she been here?"

My mother’s expression did not change but sothing behind it did.

"A long ti," she said. "Most of her youth... and then mine too."

The cold of the room felt sharper than it had a mont ago.

"You were here," I said slowly as I shuddered. "You grew up here."

"Parts of

did." Her voice was even. The evenness of soone who has had a very long ti to decide how they felt about sothing. "The other parts I will grow sowhere else. After."

After. The word carried the whole weight of everything she had never told

about where she ca from. Every question I had asked as a child that she had answered with silence or deflection or a gentleness so careful it was its own kind of wall. After she escaped being ’trafficked’. After she was found. After she beca just a woman with no pack and no history and a daughter she was raising in a place far away from all of it.

I thought of Pauline. Her sharp eyes. The way she had looked at my face like she was finding sothing she had lost intentionally and hoped to never find.

"Athena!"

The na ca back to

the way it always did. Like sothing I should know. Like sothing written in a language I had almost learned.

"Athena," I said.

My mother went very still.

"That’s her na." It was not a question. "The woman against the wall... Her na is Athena... Is it not?"

There was a long silence.

"Yes," my mother finally said.

The na settled in my chest with a weight that felt old. Older than . Older than the dream where a man with a chainsaw had brought it down like a blade. It felt like sothing that had been waiting a very long ti to be spoken in the right place by the right person.

"She’s my grandmother," I said. "Isn’t she?"

My mother looked at

then. Really looked. The way she used to when I was small and said sothing that surprised her, when she was trying to decide how much of what she felt to let

see.

"Yes," she said again. Soft. Like the word had cost her sothing.

I moved into the room.

The mbrane resisted and gave and I was inside, properly, as inside as I was capable of being in a place that was not my own ti. The air tasted different here. Heavier. Like breathing in sothing that had been breathed out too many tis already.

I crouched down a few feet from the woman against the wall.

She did not open her eyes. But her chin tilted slightly toward , the way an animal did when it sensed a presence it could not yet see. Her hands loosened around her knees, just fractionally. Like sothing had told her body to ease.

I looked at her face up close.

My hands. My mother’s jaw. The brow that I had, the one that made

look serious when I was only tired. The particular shape of the mouth that ant nothing felt done by half, that ant when this woman loved sothing she loved it completely and when she decided sothing she had already finished deciding it by the ti she said it out loud.

All of it mine. All of it hers first.

"This place looks different than my dream."

My mother’s voice carried across the room, soft and young in a way that still made my skin prickle. Every ti she spoke like this, sounding both like a child and soone who had seen too much, it left

off balance. I never quite got used to it.

"He changes things sotis to make us feel normal," she continued, her eyes drifting over the walls like she was searching for pieces that used to be there. "To give us hope. This tiny prison is better than a small cage."

The words settled in my stomach like sothing spoiled. I did not want to picture what counted as a cage to her, or what counted as rcy to whoever kept them here. If this was the version ant to feel normal, I did not want to imagine the alternative.

I swallowed and forced my attention away from her, away from the heaviness creeping into my chest, and focused on Athena instead.

"She’s been through sothing recent," I said quietly. I could feel it. Not the specifics but the shape of it. The freshness of a wound underneath the practiced composure. Sothing had happened and she was sitting here choosing not to break.

"They tried sothing new today." My mother’s voice ca from the doorway behind . She did not co further in. "A new serum. To try to accelerate the process."

"The process of what?"

"His ga... Fleshcraft."

"Fleshcraft?"

"Yes."