Chapter 120: BELLA CONFESSES

The sensor light clicks off, and the dark settles in completely.

I stand on the landing for three or four seconds with my fingers locked around the iron railing, waiting until the trembling in my legs recedes. Cold bites into my boots, rising toward my ankles, while the thick woods swallow the last sound of Puck’s retreat until nothing remains to track. My wrist throbs with a low, insistent heat that keeps pace with my ribs; I press my opposite hand flat against the skin without thinking. The burn is real, which means every second of what just happened actually took place.

I make myself pull away from the railing.

The metal latch is stiff from the frost, so I yank it twice before the latch gives, and then the indoor air hits me with the heavy weight of radiator heat. My ears ring. The overhead tube in the stairwell buzzes with a thin hum that catches in my teeth, and I register the sound because my head is cataloging every single detail, running an internal inventory between what belongs here and what does not. The buzzing light belongs. A wrist that still burns from a boy who shifted his entire skeleton in the dirt does not.

I climb.

My knees threaten to give out on the second landing, so I plant one palm against the drywall, holding myself upright while my breath catches up. One more flight remains. The upper hallway carpet is the same faded burgundy, lined with framed photographs of past classes; the air smells of scorched iron and forgotten detergent. I anchor myself to the details. I need the mundane hallway to stay intact until I reach the latch of my room.

Except Bella stands outside the wood frame.

I freeze before my foot touches the carpet. She wears yesterday’s clothes, pale under the hall bulb, and her knuckles show white where her fingers wrap around the edge of her phone. When she looks up, whatever phrase she prepared falls apart before she speaks; her focus drops straight to my sleeve, then down to the wet mud on my boots.

"Where were you?" she asks. Her voice drops to an uneven whisper. "Georgia, I can’t keep doing this..."

Her hands shake with the exact rhythm that moved through Puck’s shoulders before his skin pulled taut. The look in her eyes is cold and exhausted, carrying the strain of a person who has run out of room to hold anything else inside her ribs.

I stand motionless across the faded runner, my wrist throbbing in time with my pulse, and the realization lands like lead; Bella waited outside my room because she already knows where I went.I stand completely still, and she stays rooted across the threshold. Bella’s phone screen dims to black in her tight grip, and the hallway settles under the low, persistent hum of the overhead fixture. Her gaze tracks up from my mud-caked boots to my face, and whatever she finds there makes her posture cave, her shoulders dropping like a cable snapping under strain.

"Come inside," I say, leaving no space for an invitation.

She follows me past the entryway without waiting for another word, and the door latch clicks shut behind her back. I set my keys down on the desk and turn around, conscious of my wrist pulsing with that dull, rhythmic heat, so I cup my left fingers over the joint out of habit to hold the ache down. Bella notices the movement instantly, her breath catching in her throat.

"I know something happened to my skates," I say.

It carries no question, offering zero room for her to maneuver around the edge of it. Bella’s chin drops against her chest, her whole frame sagging inward before the phone slips from her limp fingers and hits the floorboards with a dull plastic clatter.

"The blade mount," she says, her voice barely louder than the hum in the walls. "I loosened it before the competition. Darcy told me to." She falters right on the name, explaining the demand from the Valentine alliance before her knuckles press hard against her mouth, admitting she understood the danger from the start.

A cold rush of vindication settles into my ribs. It had not been my balance failing on the ice, or a clumsy landing, or my head making up patterns in the dark. It had been deliberate. The chill cuts straight through the relief, sharp and sickening, as I picture the torque of the jump, the steel wrenching loose under full weight, and how easily bone would have snapped beneath my skin if my ankles had caught the wrong edge.

The radiator ticks steadily in the corner while I keep my face blank. I let the silence stretch across the room, and she rushes into the emptiness the way people do when guilt outgrows their capacity to carry it.

"I’m sorry, Georgia. I tried to find a way to tell you for weeks, and I just kept..."

She trails off, but the sudden break in her voice has nothing to do with shame.

Her hands tremble against her denim, though this tremor is violent and involuntary, rattling through her wrists while her fingers spread wide across her thighs. Right before my eyes, the nails thicken and extend outward like bone forced through a mold, the graying skin stretching dead tight over every single knuckle. When her chin lifts, the eyes staring back at me are solid, unblinking amber, missing the whites entirely beneath the dull lamplight.

I hold my ground. My body already ran its inventory tonight, cataloging fangs, torn muscle, and a spine warping the wrong way in the dark brush; somewhere between the tree line and this small room, my instinct to run simply burned out. Her breath hitches as the amber tightens with sudden clarity.

"You already knew," she says.

The radiator ticks once more in the corner. I look at those lengthened claws and that predator stare, and every piece of evidence from the woods locks into place.The amber drains from her irises until only flat brown remains, and the effort costs her a low, compressed groan caught behind locked teeth. Her fingers curl inward as the nails retract one by one, and a violent shudder runs straight down through her ribs. She grips the doorframe with both hands until the wood groans under the strain, then straightens up and stares at me with human eyes I have seen every single day without questioning.

I do not move.

She reads my stillness the exact way she read it outside, dread tightening her jaw while her gaze tracks across my features for horror or disgust. She finds neither, and the realization hits her immediately.

"You already saw," she says, her tone subdued. "Tonight. Before you came back."

I say nothing; my wrist pulses with familiar heat, and I press my fingers against the skin out of instinct.

Bella lets go of the frame, dropping her hands to her sides.

"Bianca knew," she says, her voice flat. "She watched you from the moment you arrived. Darcy’s orders. She knew about the skates, knew what I was supposed to do, and she didn’t stop me."

She stops, pressing her lips together.

Something shifts behind her face, and I recognize it because I felt the same cold shock an hour ago at the tree line while bones snapped and reset under skin. It is the hollow point where a person stops being surprised by how much misery they can absorb. I think about Bianca’s texts, remembering how she tracked my hallways, my ice time, and every single question I asked. I catalog that shift, filing it alongside the rest of the tally I have kept without wanting to admit it.

Bella watches my expression settle into cold calculation, the dread visible in her throat.

The baseboard heater clicks against the wall.

Neither of us speaks; the buzz of fluorescent light fills the space between us while cold air threads across the threshold from the open hall behind her. The weight in my chest feels heavy and inescapable, anchoring me to the floorboards.

Then she speaks, barely loud enough to carry across the doorway.

"You know," she whispers, pausing with absolute finality. "Don’t you... About us?"

I study her face, taking in the normal brown irises that burned gold thirty seconds ago, along with the lingering tremor in fingers forced back into human shape by sheer willpower.

Neither of us moves.