Chapter 122: MANDI’S RELIEF

I close the door.

A clean, deliberate pull until the latch clicks, and Bella Bellamy disappears behind it, still standing in the corridor with her chin up, her hands trembling, and nowhere left to go.

I don’t move for a moment while the room settles around me, the amber light long dead, the air carrying the particular stillness of a building where everyone else is asleep and the silent hallway presses against the frame. My wrist pulses. The burn sits deep, well past the skin where you could press it and call it a bruise, like something rewired itself in the clearing and hasn’t finished deciding what it wants to be.

I cross to the desk and sit.

The names Bella gave me are already arranged in my mind by the time I reach for a pen. Pack hierarchy, three generations of Bellamy obligation, and the order that came down through Darcy Valentine’s chain before landing on a blade that ended my career at the boards. I don’t write anything. I just hold the pen and let the architecture of it settle: every name, every rank, and every silence purchased with the threat of exile. Bella didn’t hand me a confession. She handed me a map.

"The pack doesn’t need locks," she had said, her voice dropping until it barely cleared the threshold. "They just take everything."

The burn pulses again.

I set the pen down and press my thumb against the inside of my wrist, testing the heat the way you press a bruise to confirm its edges. It doesn’t fade, staying as hot as it was in the woods. I track what Bella said about the silence rules, how the pack needs no threats you could point to in a courtroom because the enforcement is built into the bond itself: exile, erasure, the kind of removal that leaves the family standing while stripping everything that made standing worthwhile.

Bella came to my door knowing what it would cost her.

And then I track Mandi.

The pieces snap together under cold assessment. Mandi has been strange since the first week of term in ways I cataloged, filed, and kept returning to without ever finding the right frame: the morning of the skate sabotage when she choked on her warning, the sudden cough, the way her eyes darted toward the quad before steering into empty chatter about locker assignments. Darcy Valentine had been watching from across the asphalt, and Mandi had clamped down so hard her knuckles turned bloodless. It was never shyness, and it was never the ordinary social calibration of someone still deciding how much to trust me.

I was wrong.

The exact rules that turned Bella into a weapon pointed at my skates have been sitting in Mandi’s chest this entire time, an absolute lock with no key she was allowed to offer. It was never conspiracy, and it was never choice. It was imprisonment with a friendly face on it.

I’m on my feet before the realization even finishes.

My jacket is on the chair, so I pull it over my shoulders, the burn flaring once as my wrist moves through the sleeve, sharp enough to make me pause, but only for a second.

I open the door and step into the corridor. Mandi’s light is still on. I stop in front of it for a second, hand not quite raised to knock. If I’m right, if the same rules bind her, she’s been drowning behind that door since September. If I’m wrong, I’m handing my unraveling to someone who has no reason to keep it quiet. The burn in my wrist has settled into a steady pressure, low and insistent, like a second pulse that refuses to match my own; I knock twice.

The pieces snap together under cold assessment. Mandi has been strange since the first week of term in ways I cataloged, filed, and kept returning to without ever finding the right frame. The deflections; the moments where she would start a sentence and then locate something else to say instead, something smaller and safer and miles away from whatever she almost let slip. It was never shyness, and it was never the ordinary social calibration of someone still deciding how much to trust me.

I was wrong.

The exact rules that turned Bella into a weapon pointed at my skates have been sitting in Mandi’s chest this entire time, an absolute lock with no key she was allowed to offer. It was never conspiracy, and it was never choice. It was imprisonment with a friendly face on it.

I’m on my feet before the realization even finishes.

My jacket is on the chair, so I pull it over my shoulders, the burn flaring once as my wrist moves through the sleeve - sharp enough to make me pause, but only for a second.

I open the door and step into the corridor. Mandi’s light is still on. I stop in front of it for a second, hand not quite raised to knock. The burn in my wrist has settled into a steady pressure, low and insistent, like a second pulse that refuses to match my own; I knock twice.

Footsteps shuffle across the floor, the lock clicks, and the door swings open to reveal Mandi in an oversized sleep shirt with her hair pulled back unevenly. The moment she takes in my face, a sudden panic cuts straight through her features, tightening her jaw before she manages to drag the guard back up.

"Georgia..."

"I know," I say.

She blinks. "What?"

"The pack. The Veil. The rules about what you can say to me." I hold her gaze, refusing to let her look away; "I know all of it."

The silence between us is sharp and volatile. Her hand on the doorframe does not slacken, it clamps down white-knuckled as color rushes into her neck. She does not yield; she corners like an animal caught in daylight.

"Don’t say that word in the hall," she snaps, voice dropping to a harsh, trembling rasp. "You don’t know anything, Georgia. You think you can walk up to my room in the middle of the night and toss words around? Who sent you? What did Bella say to you?"

"Bella gave me the names," I say quietly, stepping forward until she is forced to either slam the door or back into her room. "Darcy Valentine. The order from the chain. The sabotage on the ice, and the penalty if any of you breathed a word about the bond. Exile. Erasure. I know the whole perimeter, Mandi."

Mandi backs away two steps, her chest heaving, trapped between fury and sheer panic. "Bella is an idiot who just threw her life away. You don’t have proof. You can’t just come in here and trap me with this."

"The burn on my wrist didn’t come from an ordinary hit," I say, holding up my arm. "And neither did your silence."

The defiance fractures. The anger drains out of her posture all at once, leaving only hollow exhaustion as her knees buckle slightly against the edge of the bed. She pulls the door shut behind me with a trembling shove, her fingers slipping off the wood.

She makes a low, choked sound, and then the tears come, hard and unspooling, months of buried terror collapsing into raw relief. She presses the heel of her hand to her eye, trying and failing to stop the shake in her jaw.

"Every day," she whispers, her throat scraped raw. "I wanted to tell you every single day."

I wait.

"They said..." Her throat bobs as she swallows the rest of the sentence. "The bond said exile was the only answer if I spoke, that I would lose my family, my place here, everything; so I just kept finding other things to say."

All the redirected conversations and hollow excuses fall into place; I had logged every single evasion without the proper framework to read them. Now the ledger makes sense.

She scrubs her knuckles across her skin again, the relief turning brittle and sharp around the edges. When she glares up through reddened lashes, her expression hardens into the realization that the barricade stood open all along, yet no one ever offered her the key.Her knuckles scrape over her cheekbone a second time, slower, and the tremor underneath turns brittle. The shaking continues, yet the texture of it hardens into something colder than grief as she straightens against the unyielding wall.

"They called it protection," Mandi says, her tone hollow and stripped of every scrap of meaning pack law was supposed to carry. She exhales sharply through her nose, naming covenant rules for what they really are, a padlock sold under better branding.

I don’t move.

The raw redness around her eyelids lingers, but the rigid line of her jaw shows a stubborn resistance beyond tears. I watch her catalog every evasive sentence she traded away since September, remembering all the conversations she deflected toward harmless topics while I registered the friction without ever grasping the real danger.

She admits she kept hunting for some slight give in the perimeter, waiting for an opening where the codes might flex so she could slip truth through unnoticed. There was none, and she shakes her head once, tight and dismissive.

Beyond the frame of the bedroom door, the dark hallway stays dead silent, holding the frozen stillness of four in the morning when the floorboards rest cold and nobody stirs.

Mandi swallows against the tightness in her mouth, struggling through the inventory of every crisis she tracked in silence. She confesses how sick it felt watching me step blind into traps while she scrambled to invent empty distractions, bitter that pack loyalty simply made her complicit in the whole deceit.

I stay where I am.

She looks straight at me with reddened lashes, dragging the flat of her wrist across her chin with deliberate finality.

"I’ve hated it since the day you walked onto this campus."

The accusation settles into the room with the crushing weight of every phrase she buried before breakfast, every deliberate change of topic in the corridor, every smaller lie offered up while I stood nearby trying to make sense of the distance between us.

Beneath the flesh of my wrist, the feverish ache throbs against the bone, an alien rhythm stubbornly out of sync with my heart.

I don’t offer absolution. I don’t hand out easy comfort, and I offer no neat promises about tomorrow, but I stay clear of the doorway too, and she recognizes what that stillness means.

Mandi whispers, wiping her face, "It’s not just a rule. It’s a cage. And I’ve hated it since the day you walked onto this campus."