Chapter 132: STRATEGY SESSION

The knock came before she counted a full minute. Georgia remained seated on the edge of the mattress when the impact sounded; three measured raps echoed through the wood with total certainty. The pulse under her collarbone tightened, lifting her upright before conscious thought directed her limbs across the floor.

She pulled the door open.

Puck occupied the frame, heavy wool coat buttoned to the throat, chest working against the chill of a rapid sprint across campus. An amber trace still lingered across the irises of his eyes; his attention raked over her, calculating damage and structural integrity rather than surface appearance, until the locked tension across his shoulders dropped.

"You’re okay," he said.

"I told you I was."

"You did?" His boots held their position on the outer threshold, waiting for permission to cross into her territory.

She stepped aside.

He moved past her into the small room, cataloging corners and escape points with the same detached assessment he used on the rink ice; his glance registered the notebook sealed shut on the small desk, then swung toward the lit screen resting flat on the bedside table where her sent message still burned faintly. He tracked back toward her face.

"You closed it," he said, indicating the notebook.

"I closed it."

Silence settled between the floorboards. The pressure of the bond held a low, heavy hum in the quiet air, stripped of the jagged, racing spikes from the ice rink.

"No more curated versions where you decide my limits," Georgia said, keeping her tone flat. "Give me the truth."

The usual defensive wall did not fall into place across his features; instead, he studied her under the harsh ceiling fixture, letting the calculated half-truths and protective management simply drop away into the cold air between them.

"Mandi and Liam have been coordinating with me," he said, the admission landing without hesitation. "They helped track the sabotage and the Valentine threat while I..." He broke off.

"While you isolated me."

"Yes."

She offered no absolution, keeping her gaze pinned to him while the frost clung to the outside glass.

"You’re right," Puck admitted, the agreement landing clean, stripped of any soft excuse or protective shielding; "leaving you in the dark doesn’t offer protection; it merely forces you to navigate blind without a map."

Georgia rubbed her palms against her forearms, fighting the lingering draft that had seeped through the baseboards overnight. "Then we end that right now; four people in the room, working off the same board."

Puck reached into his coat and produced the phone, fingers tapping the glass with economical precision; a second later, the sharp chirp of an outgoing transmission marked the sent text.

"Mandi and Liam," he stated, tucking the device away. "I told them to assemble."

Georgia observed the phone disappear into his wool pocket, her pulse settling into a single, measured cadence while she stood her ground, braced for whatever followed.

"We’ll meet at my place," Puck said. "Off campus."

Puck’s apartment was three blocks away, which meant twenty minutes of cold pavement and deliberate silence before Georgia found herself standing inside it, cataloging the space the way she had once cataloged anomalies: exits, sightlines, and the quality of the lock clicking home behind Liam’s shoulder.

Mandi sat at the laminate table with her heavy coat still zipped to her chin. Without preamble, she flicked her wrist, sliding four glossy photographs across the surface. They spun across the faux-wood grain and fanned out in front of Georgia. Each one captured a different macro angle of the damaged blade runner, where the scored groove bit into the steel with clinical precision, far too straight to be accidental wear.

Georgia placed both hands flat against the table edge. Her thumbs locked over the lip of the laminate, knuckles whitening as her stomach dropped. Her knee twitched in involuntary phantom recoil, remembering the brutal sideways shear on the ice. The tampering had happened between warm-up and the final practice session, and Mandi laid out how the maintenance log was altered that same afternoon while the Council representative who signed off on the rink inspection took a seat on the panel reviewing Georgia’s injury claim.

The clinical distance Georgia had maintained for months, turning the bond into a sterile variable and lunar cycles into data points, snapped clean under her palms. These were not anomalies. This was deliberate sabotage.

Liam pushed up from his chair. The sudden scraping of wood against floor interrupted the room, and he began pacing the narrow corridor between the counter and the sink. His boots measured the floorboards in clipped strides as he broke down the timeline. The Valentine Pack had spent eighteen months probing the territorial boundary, using Bellamy to siphon information about Rosethorne’s internal hierarchy, its leverage, and its vulnerabilities. The sabotage was not random malice; it was an explicit message about what happened to anyone complicating their quiet arrangement. Rosethorne was supposed to remain strictly neutral, barring cross-pack bonds and keeping alliances locked behind old treaties. A mate bond between a Rosethorne wolf and an immune human threatened every single faction profiting from that stalemate.

Beside Georgia, Puck shifted his weight. He did not touch her, but his shoulder hovered barely an inch from hers, radiating a wall of heavy body heat that pressed through the wool of her sleeve.

"What arrangement?" Georgia said.

She pulled one of the photographs closer, remembering the seventeen irregularities her notebook had logged over four months. She had blamed stress, the rink acoustics, and her own perception errors, but every cluster aligned with the pressure events Liam mapped out. She had documented a territorial war without the key.

Puck spoke then, quiet and direct, explaining that the bond violated pack lines by definition, leaving the Council no way to sanction it without admitting thirty years of enforced borders were completely arbitrary, while her refusal to respond to pack healing meant they had no way to neutralize her cleanly.

"So I’m a liability."

"You’re a variable they can’t control," he said, leaving the blunt reality intact. "That’s worse, to them."

Georgia set the photograph down. The physical pressure behind her ribs settled into a dull, flat beat as the bond registered the threat without hesitation, matching her own cold certainty.

Mandi gathered the photographs into a single stack, tapping the edges level against the tabletop. She let the heavy silence hold in the room for several seconds before she glanced sideways toward Liam.

"There’s one more thing," Mandi said. "About timing. We didn’t get the log from the rink office. We-"

Liam’s boot struck the base of the kitchen cabinet as he pivoted on his heel, the dull thud cutting through her sentence. Mandi didn’t flinch, but her palms flattened hard on the stack of photos.

"Bella talked to us," Mandi said, her voice dropping. "One of Darcy’s people. Before she disappeared. She told us what Darcy was planning."

Georgia jerked upright, her breath catching in her throat as the chill in the room seemed to spike. Her fingers curled inward, nails digging sharp crescents into the flesh of her palms. The name did not belong to a board or a treaty; it was a person who had made a choice and vanished for it.

Liam stopped his pacing, leaning against the counter to assess the room with cold detachment. Darcy knew she broke ranks, he warned them, treating it as an operational fact rather than a guess.

The bond pulsed hard under Georgia’s collarbone, a single sharp beat, and she felt Puck’s stillness beside her the way she had learned to feel a sudden drop in barometric pressure before weather turned.

"Which means he knows we have his timeline," Puck said, flat and certain.

"He knows we have something," Mandi countered, pointing out that while Darcy did not know the exact details, the man already possessed enough to act.

Georgia pulled her hands into her lap. She had spent four months cataloging irregularities in a notebook she had since closed, building a careful architecture of evidence and inference and clinical distance, but none of that architecture remained available to her now. What she had instead was the photograph stack, Liam’s mapped pressure points, the clean scoring on a blade runner that someone had decided to ruin, and the fact that a person named Bella had delivered intelligence before dropping completely off the grid.

"Where is she now?" Georgia asked.

Mandi let the silence hang; the delay cataloged the outcome far more clearly than a direct answer would have.

"We don’t know," Liam said.

Georgia pressed her palms flat against her thighs, cataloging how the bond registered Puck’s tension as a low, continuous pressure beneath her skin. It was not the spiked jolt from moments ago, but something steadier and far heavier; it was the specific mechanical strain that never dissipated because the tactical threat causing it remained locked in place. Darcy had an active timeline, and they had extracted intelligence because someone inside his operation broke ranks and suffered the consequence. Now Darcy knew the perimeter was breached, which meant the schedule they had memorized was already obsolete; it was accelerating simply to compensate for the exposure.

They had not gained an advantage; they had triggered a countdown.

Puck’s shoulder remained three inches from hers. She registered the heat radiating off him without direct contact, identical to how she used to track the microscopic shift in ice under steel blades before she ever learned what the surface truly was.

Mandi squared the glossy prints against the tabletop, aligning the edges with deliberate mechanical precision before abandoning them in the center. Liam, Puck, and Georgia each received that hard appraisal in turn.

"This isn’t over," she said. "He moves faster now."

Nobody answered. The air in the room remained dense and unyielding, and Georgia sat motionless inside the quiet, aware that the distance she once maintained had evaporated.