To ruin an Omega

Chapter 387: The Healing Factor 2

FIA

The words hit me like a blow.

Gabriel’s body jerked again. Harder than before.

Then his eyes snapped open.

They were unfocused. Wild. Filled with something that looked like terror.

Blood started pouring from his nose.

Then from his mouth.

It ran down his chin and onto the pillow beneath his head.

“No,” I said. “No, this cannot be happening.”

Maren grabbed a cloth and tried to wipe away the blood, but more just kept coming.

Gabriel’s breathing turned ragged. Wet. Like he was drowning.

I stood frozen. Watching him die… Watching him slip away after everything we had done to save him.

Then I heard it.

The hum.

It started low. So faint I almost thought I imagined it because of how badly I hoped it would find me again. It was a distant vibration at first. Like something stirring just beneath the surface of the world.

Then it grew.

Not louder in sound alone, but in presence. It pressed into the room, into my chest, into my bones, until it was impossible to ignore.

I looked down at my hands.

Light bled from my palms.

Soft at first. A celestial blue glow that flickered like it wasn’t sure it belonged to me. Then it steadied, deepened, and spread across my skin in slow pulses that matched the rhythm of the hum.

It felt… alive.

The goddess.

She wasn’t just near.

She was here.

The realization settled into me with a quiet certainty that made my breath catch.

Maren stilled across the room. Her mouth opened slightly before she caught herself. Her eyes locked onto me, wide and sharp.

“Are you going to heal him?”

I didn’t answer her. I couldn’t look away from my hands.

The light was stronger now. Brighter. It curled between my fingers, gathering, as if waiting for something. For me.

Or for her will.

The hum deepened, and with it came a pull. Not forceful, not demanding, but steady. Patient. It had already decided what would happen and was simply waiting for me to catch up.

My fingers twitched.

Not entirely my own.

I swallowed, my voice quieter than I expected, but steadier too.

“I don’t think this is my choice.”

I lifted my gaze, the glow reflecting faintly in Maren’s eyes.

“She’s already decided.”

The hum grew louder. More insistent.

My hands moved before I could second-guess myself.

I placed them on Gabriel’s throat. Right over the wound Maren had stitched closed, and the light in response exploded outward.

It filled the room in a bright and blinding manner. I could not see anything except the glow.

Heat flooded through me. It started in my chest and spread outward through my arms. Down into my hands.

I felt it pouring into Gabriel.

The goddess’s power. Her blessing.

It moved through him like water. Filling every broken part. Every damaged cell. Every weakened organ.

I could feel his body responding.

The convulsions slowed, then stopped.

His breathing evened out. That wet rattle that was supposed to be a breath disappeared.

The blood stopped flowing.

I kept my hands pressed against his throat and let the light work.

It drained me.

I felt it pulling energy from somewhere deep inside. Taking more and more with each passing second.

My legs started to shake.

My vision blurred at the edges.

But I did not stop.

I could not stop.

Not until he was whole again.

The light pulsed brighter. So bright I had to close my eyes against it.

I felt Gabriel’s pulse beneath my hands. Felt it growing stronger. Steadier.

His body was healing.

The malnutrition reversing itself. The damage from years of imprisonment undoing itself.

The goddess was remaking him.

And she was using me to do it.

I felt my strength draining faster now.

My hands trembled against his throat. My knees buckled.

Someone caught me before I could fall.

Thorne.

He held me upright, and I forced myself to keep going.

Just a little longer.

Just until it was done.

The hum reached a crescendo. The light flared so bright it felt like it was burning through my closed eyelids.

Then it stopped.

All at once.

The light disappeared. The hum cut off. The heat vanished.

I opened my eyes to a world that refused to stay still, the room tilting at an unnatural angle as though the ground beneath me had quietly shifted without warning. For a moment, I could not tell if it was the space around me that moved or if it was something inside my own body that had come undone.

My gaze dropped to Gabriel.

His eyes were closed, not in pain but in rest, and his breathing came slow and steady, rising and falling with a calm rhythm that did not belong to someone who had been dying moments ago. The color had returned to his face, replacing the pallor that had drained him before, and the wound at his throat had vanished so completely that I found myself staring, searching for any sign that it had ever been there.

There was nothing.

No scar or mark was present. There was no proof that anything had happened at all.

He looked as though he had simply fallen asleep.

Whole, untouched, and alive in a way that felt almost unreal.

“Fia,” Thorne called, but his voice did not reach me the way it should have. It stretched, distorted, as if it had to travel across a great distance before finding me, and even then, it felt thin, barely there.

I tried to answer him, but my throat tightened before I could form the words, and whatever response I meant to give dissolved somewhere between thought and breath.

A heaviness began to settle over me, creeping in slowly at first, then all at once, like a tide I had not noticed rising until it was already too late. The edges of my vision darkened, shadows bleeding inward until the world narrowed into something small and unsteady.

I could hear them still.

Thorne and Maren.

Their voices overlapped, urgent and sharp in a way that suggested panic, yet none of it made sense to me anymore. The sounds reached me without meaning, as though language itself had slipped just beyond my grasp.

My body felt distant, as if it no longer fully belonged to me, and when I tried to move, to ground myself in something solid, I found nothing to hold onto.

The room continued to blur, its shape breaking apart at the edges, the light bending and folding into darkness until I could no longer tell where one ended and the other began.

I knew I should fight it.

I knew I should hold on.

But the effort required more than I had left to give, and the exhaustion pressing down on me felt deeper than anything I had ever known, sinking into my bones, into the very core of me, until resistance seemed pointless.

The last thing I felt was the quiet pull of it, gentle and absolute, as everything slipped away at once.

Then, there was nothing at all.