Chapter 95: Darcy Pushes Too Far

POV: Georgia

Mandi and I haven’t really talked since yesterday morning. She left for class early, and I let her, because I don’t know what to say to someone who tried to answer me and couldn’t. I keep seeing her hand pressed against her own throat.

The wind cuts sharp across the quad, carrying the smell of frost and old leaves, and I pull my scarf tighter as I make my way toward the library. I find him at the same spot, the same low stone wall he always claims like it belongs to him, jacket collar turned up against the cold. His dark hair catches the gray afternoon light. He’s been texting me more the last few days, small check-ins that used to feel thoughtful and now feel like something else entirely, something I can’t name yet but can feel pressing against the back of my neck every time my phone buzzes against my palm.

"So," he says, the word clipped and eager, before I’ve even sat down all the way. "Any progress? On the investigation?"

I settle my cane against the wall and lower myself carefully beside him, my bad knee protesting the movement with a dull throb that’s become as familiar as breathing. "Not really. I’ve hit a wall."

That isn’t remotely true. I have Bella’s amber eyes and Bianca’s claws curling out of human fingers and a wolf standing in a moonlit clearing and a friend who physically couldn’t get words out of her own mouth this morning, her throat working uselessly around whatever was trying to escape. But none of that is going anywhere near Darcy. Not after Dominic. Not after the hunger I saw behind his smile in the dining hall, patient and cold and utterly inhuman.

"That’s frustrating," he says, his voice pitched soft and sympathetic, easy in the way it always is. "I figured you’d have more by now. You’re usually pretty relentless about this stuff."

"I’m tired," I say, which is at least true.

He nods slowly, watching me with that particular patience of his, careful, like he’s reading something written in very small print. "Have you gotten anywhere with the technician? Or is that lead completely dead?"

"Dead. His number’s disconnected." I shrug, the motion stiffer than I mean it to be. "I don’t really know where else to go with it."

"What a shame," he says, his tone drifting toward something almost bored as he looks out toward the quad. "It’s strange, honestly. A wear pattern that specific doesn’t happen by accident. The kind of stress fracture that spreads from the mounting screws outward instead of from the blade edge in, that’s not normal wear. That’s something someone did on purpose."

I go very still. My fingers curl tight around the head of my cane.

I never told him that.

I told him weeks ago in the dining hall, coffee going cold between us, that the report said irregular wear on the blade mount. I told him it wasn’t normal. But I never described how the fracture spread - screws outward instead of blade edge in. I don’t think I even fully understood that detail myself until I read the report for the eleventh time, alone, in my room, at one in the morning, my desk lamp the only light in the whole building. It was one small, dense paragraph buried in language I barely parsed, technical and dry and easy to miss. I never repeated it to anyone. Not to Mandi. Not to Liam. Not to Darcy.

My blood goes cold, slow and complete, spreading out from my chest the way ice spreads across a pond, glassy and silent and final.

He’s still talking, still looking out at the quad, completely relaxed, one arm draped along the top of the wall like he hasn’t just handed me something enormous without meaning to. "I mean, if someone really wanted to sabotage a skate without it being obvious, that’s exactly how they’d do it. Subtle. Deniable. Almost impossible to trace back to a single moment."

"Yeah," I say, forcing my voice into something flat and unbothered. "That’s basically what the report said."

"Makes sense," he says, glancing at me with a smile that doesn’t waver, easy as ever. "You should keep pushing on it. I still think there’s a trail somewhere."

I smile back. My jaw aches with the effort of it.

It’s not hard, which surprises me. Some part of me, some cold, careful part I didn’t know I had until this exact moment, just takes over. I nod along. I ask him a question about his own week, something meaningless about hockey practice, and I let him talk, watching his mouth move without really hearing the words, and I laugh at the right places, and the whole time a single sentence runs on a loop behind my eyes like a warning light strobing in an empty hallway.

*He knows too much. He knows too much. He knows too much.*

I don’t let it show. I’ve spent a whole semester learning how to hold my face steady while everything underneath it falls apart, and I use every bit of that now, sitting on a cold stone wall next to a boy who just proved, without meaning to, that he has known something about my fall from the very beginning.

We talk for another few minutes, nothing important, his voice a warm current I let wash past me while my mind works underneath it, and then I tell him my leg is bothering me and I need to get back before my next session.

"I could walk you," he offers, tone casual, though something flickers behind his eyes too fast to name.

"I’m fine," I say, already reaching for my cane.

He doesn’t push, which is its own kind of unsettling, because Darcy always pushes just a little, always finds a reason to stay five more minutes, leaning into my space with that easy charm that used to make my pulse quicken for entirely different reasons. Today he just nods and lets me go, watching me the whole way across the quad. I can feel his eyes on my back like a hand pressed flat between my shoulder blades.

I walk back to my dorm slower than I need to, my cane tapping an uneven rhythm against the frozen path, turning the conversation over and over the whole way. There’s a version of this where I misheard him, or misunderstood, or he’s just smart enough to guess at mechanical failure without needing to be told.

It doesn’t fit. It never did. I know exactly what I told him and what I didn’t, because I’ve replayed that conversation in my head a dozen times since, checking it against everything else, holding each word up to the light like I’m searching for a flaw in glass. He described a detail from the original report, word for word in substance, that never once left that document and never once left my own head until this afternoon.

Back in my room, Mandi is out, and I’m grateful for the quiet pressing in around me, thick and undisturbed. I pull my notebook out and open to a fresh page, my hand steadier now than it was an hour ago, steadier in a way that feels less like calm and more like resolve hardening into something sharp.

I write it slowly, pressing the pen hard enough into the paper that I can feel the letters on the other side, each stroke deliberate. Then I underline it. Once. Twice. A third time, the pen tearing slightly at the paper on the last pass, the sound loud in the empty room.

*Darcy knows too much. Darcy has always known too much.*