Chapter 94: Mandi Pressed Again

GEORGIA

I wait until morning, until Mandi is awake and dressed and sitting on her bed with a granola bar she hasn’t started eating. I don’t give her a chance to make coffee or joke her way into the day first. The pages from last night are still spread across my comforter, a mess of printouts and photos and notes scrawled in my own frantic handwriting, and I’ve barely slept. My eyes feel raw, sandpapered, and my mind keeps circling back to the same terrible shapes no matter how hard I try to look away. I don’t have it in me to ease into this gently anymore.

"I need to talk to you," I say, my tone flat and unyielding. "Really talk. Not small talk."

She looks up, and something in my face must tell her this is different from every other time I’ve asked. She sets the granola bar down slowly, her fingers lingering on the wrapper like she needs something to hold onto, some small, ordinary thing to anchor her before the ground shifts.

"Okay," she says, her voice careful and quiet. "Talk."

I don’t know where to start, so I start everywhere at once.

"Your family," I say, my words clipped and fast. "You told me on the first night we met that they’ve been at Rosethorne forever. You said it like the word meant something. Then weeks ago you got a call, and you came back white as a sheet, holding a letter from a law firm, and you told me it was nothing. An investigation. An asset freeze. That’s not nothing, Mandi."

She doesn’t answer. Her hands go still in her lap, knuckles pale against her dark leggings, and for a moment she looks so young, so much smaller than the girl who usually fills every room she walks into.

"And it’s not just you," I go on, my voice rising with urgency. "My skates were sabotaged before the Classic. Someone loosened the blade mount on purpose. There’s a report that proves it, and it got buried. Bella’s eyes turned amber right in front of me. Bianca’s hands curled into claws and her teeth looked wrong. Puck heals from things that should put him in a hospital, and his skin burns like it’s on fire, and I saw him, Mandi. I saw a wolf in the clearing behind the forest, and it looked at me like it knew exactly who I was."

I’m not being careful anymore. I’m not circling. I lay it all out, flat and fast, watching her face the entire time, cataloguing every flicker, every twitch, every small betrayal her body might offer even if her mouth refuses to.

She’s gone very pale. Her jaw tightens, and her eyes fix on a point somewhere past my shoulder, like she’s staring at something that isn’t in the room at all, something only she can see.

"What is going on at this school?" I ask, my voice cracking with pleading. "Please. I need you to just tell me."

For a long moment, she says nothing at all. The silence stretches out so long I think she’s going to do what she always does. Deflect. Change the subject. Say something about my thesis or the dining hall or anything that isn’t this. I brace myself for it, for the familiar sting of being gently, expertly redirected.

Then her composure cracks.

It happens all at once, like a dam giving way after holding too long. Her shoulders drop. Her chin trembles. Her eyes fill, fast, and she presses the heel of her hand against one of them like she can push the tears back in before they fall.

"You don’t understand," she says, her voice thin and shaking, nothing like her usual bright, easy tone. "You don’t understand what you’re asking me."

"Then help me understand," I say, softening only slightly, my hands open at my sides, an offering I don’t know how to make land.

"I can’t." She shakes her head, hard, like she’s trying to physically knock the words loose. "I can’t, Georgia. I want to. You have no idea how much I want to, but I..."

She stops herself and presses both hands flat against her face for a second, breathing hard, her shoulders shaking with the effort of holding something in, something that seems to be pressing outward from the inside.

"My family isn’t just rich," she says finally, her voice muffled behind her hands before she drops them into her lap, her eyes red-rimmed and raw, stripped of every trace of the polished girl I thought I knew. "We protect something. Something bigger than money."

The words land in the quiet room like something heavy set down on a table, and I feel the weight of them settle over both of us.

"Protect what?" I ask, my voice gentle now despite my pulse hammering in my ears, despite every piece of proof from last night’s spread bed sitting in my head, waiting to be confirmed or denied.

Mandi opens her mouth.

Nothing comes out.

I watch it happen. Her lips part. Her throat works. I can see the effort in her face, real physical effort, like she’s trying to lift something too heavy for her arms. Her whole body strains toward the sentence, every muscle taut with the attempt. And nothing comes.

"Mandi?" I say, my voice sharpening with alarm.

She makes a small, strangled sound, somewhere between a word and a sob, and her hand flies up to her own throat like she can feel whatever is happening there, some invisible grip tightening beneath her skin.

"I can’t," she gasps out, her tone desperate and raw, and this time it isn’t the same *I can’t* from before. This one sounds different. Physical. Like she isn’t choosing not to tell me. Like something is stopping her, something outside of her own will, closing over the words before they can reach her mouth.

Her eyes meet mine, wide and glassy and terrified, and it isn’t fear of me. I understand that much. It’s fear of whatever just happened inside her own throat, fear of the silence itself, like she’s just discovered a wall inside her own body that she didn’t know was there until she tried to push through it and couldn’t.

"Mandi, breathe," I say, my voice low and steady, though my own hands are trembling as I reach for her.

She flinches back from my touch, not out of rejection, but like the movement itself might shatter whatever fragile control she has left. Her breath comes in short, uneven pulls, and I watch her chest rise and fall too fast, too shallow.

She stares at me, breathing hard, both hands pressed against her collarbone now, and she doesn’t say anything else at all. The silence that follows feels different from every silence before it, thick with something neither of us can name, and I realize I have my answer even without the words.