Chapter 46: THE COURTYARD SHATTERS

Georgia

I stepped outside to breathe and found the one person I was trying not to think about.

The ballroom had grown too warm, too loud, too heavy with everything I’d been carrying all night. Darcy’s low, calculated comments. The pin’s persistent cold biting against my skin. Mandi’s panicked eyes. I excused myself from Darcy with some quiet claim about needing air, and he let me go easily enough, already distracted by another conversation across the room by the time I actually slipped through the side doors.

The courtyard outside sat quiet and cold, snow falling in slow, drifting flakes that caught the light spilling out from the ballroom windows, settling soft and untouched across the stone benches and the low hedges lining the path. I wrapped my arms around myself, grateful for the cold after the crowded warmth inside, and let out a long breath that fogged in the air in front of me. My shoulders dropped an inch. Then another.

I wasn’t alone for long.

"Couldn’t take much more either?" Puck asked, his voice careful, testing the air like he wasn’t sure it would hold his weight.

I turned to find him standing a few feet away, hands tucked into his pockets, snow already dusting the shoulders of his jacket like he’d been out here longer than I’d realized. Something different sat in the set of his shoulders tonight, a weariness I hadn’t noticed before, like he’d been carrying something heavy for far too long and had finally set it down somewhere just out of my sight.

"Something like that," I said.

He stepped closer, slow and unhurried, and settled onto the stone bench a careful distance from where I stood, leaving room beside him without quite asking me to take it. After a moment, I did anyway, the cold of the stone seeping faintly through my dress as I sat. My heart beat a little too fast. I told myself it was only the chill.

Neither of us spoke for a while. The snow kept falling, quiet and steady, and something about the stillness of it, the muffled distance from the noise and light of the ballroom, made the tension that had sat between us for weeks start to loosen. Just slightly. Just enough that I could breathe around it. I studied his profile in the dim light: the sharp line of his jaw, the way his breath fogged the air just like mine. *How does someone this dangerous end up feeling like the safest place in the whole building,* I thought, and hated that I didn’t have an answer.

"I’m sorry," Puck said, his voice dropping low and rough. "For all the silence. For every warning I couldn’t explain."

"You don’t have to apologize," I said, quiet.

"I do," he said, firmer now, and looked at me properly, something open and unguarded in his expression that I hadn’t seen from him in weeks. Not since before the fight. Not since before the cold silences, before any of it got this complicated. "I know I haven’t given you anything close to a real explanation for any of this. I know that’s not fair to you."

"Then explain it," I said, flat, daring him.

He fell quiet for a long moment, snow settling in his dark hair. Something warred behind his eyes, the same battle I’d seen from him more than once now, wanting to say something and holding himself back with visible, physical effort. His jaw locked tight, muscle ticking at the corner, like the words themselves were fighting to get free while something stronger dragged them back down.

"I want to," he said slowly, strained. "More than you know. There’s just so much I’m not allowed to tell you. Rules that exist whether either of us likes them or not."

"You said that before," I said. "About keeping me alive."

Something flickered across his face at the memory, raw and unguarded, a flash of pain so quick I almost missed it. "I meant that," he said, hoarse. "Every word of it."

"Alive from what, Puck?" I pressed.

He didn’t answer right away, and for a second I thought he might retreat again, the same careful, controlled distance settling back over him the way it always did right when I thought we might actually get somewhere real. Instead he just looked at me, something soft and aching behind his eyes, like he was memorizing my face for reasons he couldn’t explain. The snow kept falling between us. I found myself leaning almost imperceptibly closer, drawn in despite every warning I’d been given, despite the cold weight of the pin still resting against my collarbone.

"You should know," he said, so quiet it was almost a confession to himself, "that everything I’ve done, every warning, every stupid, cold silence, all of it’s been because I’m trying to protect you. Even when it looks like the opposite. Even when it hurts you. I need you to know that, whatever happens."

He didn’t wait for me to answer. Instead, he leaned in, slow and careful, close enough now that I could feel the warmth radiating off him even through the cold night air, close enough that my breath caught somewhere high in my throat. The falling snow seemed to slow around us, or maybe I’d just stopped noticing anything else.

That was when I saw it.

His canines pressed visibly against his lower lip as he leaned closer, sharp and unmistakable, an involuntary detail he clearly failed to catch in time. Some small, physical tell slipped loose from whatever careful control he’d spent all night maintaining. My pulse stuttered, half in fear, half in something far more complicated that I didn’t have a name for yet. Instead of pulling back, I tilted my chin up, closing another inch of the distance between us before I’d even decided to move.

Before either of us could close the last remaining distance, a voice cut across the courtyard.

"Puck!" the voice barked, sharp with urgency.

He jerked back so fast it was like he’d been burned, putting several feet of distance between us in less than a second, his expression scrambling to reassemble itself into something composed and controlled before whoever was calling him actually reached us. I sat there, still catching my breath, the cold rushing back in to fill the space he’d left behind.