Chapter 104: The Hit

POV: Georgia

In the dining hall, our eyes hold for one long moment, the noise around us fading to nothing. Then the bell rings, shattering the silence, and Puck looks away first, his tray scraping against the table as he stands. By the time I blink, he’s already threading through the crowd toward the exit, shoulders hunched like he’s bracing against something only he can feel.

That night I lie awake, staring at the ceiling of my dorm room while the radiator ticks and hisses, and I decide something. I’ve spent weeks gathering pieces and watching him from a distance. If I want the truth, I have to ask for it, and I have to start with the thing I actually have proof of.

The article. Dominic Valentine.

I find him the next afternoon, after my last class lets out into the gray hallway light. On my way there, I pass Darcy near the trophy case, arms crossed, watching me with the flat, patient stillness of someone who already knows where I’m headed. He doesn’t say a word. He doesn’t need to. His warning is still lodged somewhere behind my ribs, and I feel it now like a held breath. I keep walking anyway.

I don’t have to look hard for Puck. Something in my chest pulls me toward the library like a compass needle swinging home, and when I turn the corner of the stacks, he’s there, alone at a back table with a book he isn’t reading. His fingers rest against the page like he forgot they were supposed to turn it.

My cane taps the floor, a soft rhythmic knock against old wood. His head lifts before I’m close enough for footsteps to explain it, and I think of Bianca saying she doesn’t smell like a skater, and I wonder how much he can hear and smell and feel from across a room. Probably everything. Probably more than I want to know.

"Hi," I say, breathless, my voice barely above the library hush.

"Hi." His voice comes out rough, scraped low, like he hasn’t used it much today.

I pull out the chair across from him and sit, the legs scraping faintly against the floor. I set my cane against the table, the metal clinking once against the wood. Then I take out my phone, open the screenshot I saved weeks ago, my thumb trembling slightly over the glass, and slide it across the wood toward him.

"I need to ask you about this," I say, firm despite the shake in my chest.

He looks down. I watch him read the headline, his eyes moving in slow, deliberate lines. I watch him read the sentence I’ve read a hundred times. *Unusual aggression inconsistent with his playing style.* Then he reaches the name.

His whole face changes.

It’s not anger, not the flare of heat I braced myself for. It’s more like a door closing somewhere behind his eyes, heavy and final, and then something darker settling into the space it leaves behind. The color drains out of his cheeks, leaving them the pale gray of old snow. His hand, flat on the table, curls slowly into a fist, knuckles whitening one by one.

"Where did you find this?" he asks, his voice quiet and careful, like each word costs him something.

"A search engine. It wasn’t hard." I keep my voice level, steady, though my pulse is doing something frantic beneath my skin. "Dominic Valentine is Darcy’s brother. Did you know that?"

"Yes," he says, flat, final, like a door shutting on the word.

"Of course you did." I breathe in, slow and deliberate. "I’m not here to accuse you of anything, Puck. I just want to know what happened."

He doesn’t answer right away. The library is almost silent, dust motes drifting gold in the slanted afternoon light. Somewhere behind us, a book cart squeaks and then stops. I wait, because I’ve learned that with Puck, pushing only makes the walls go up, brick by invisible brick.

"It happened two years ago," he says at last, low and grim. "In a game. I was sixteen."

I nod, and keep nodding, slow and steady, to show I’m listening, to show I’m not going anywhere.

"Dominic was a good player. Really good. He was going to go pro." He stares at the screenshot instead of at me, his jaw tight. "There was a play along the boards. A hit. It should have been a normal one. I’ve made a thousand of them."

"But it wasn’t normal," I say, soft and careful.

"No." His jaw flexes, a muscle ticking beneath his skin. "I lost control. I hit him with everything I had - more than I had. More than should have been possible."

I wait, my pulse loud in my ears. When he doesn’t continue, I ask gently, "What do you mean, more than possible?"

"I can’t explain all of it," he says, pained and raw. He finally looks up, and his eyes are dark and miserable, swimming with something I don’t have a name for yet. "I want to. You have no idea how much I want to. But I can’t, Georgia. Not yet. There are things I’m not allowed to say."

I think of Mandi choking on her own words at dinner. Liam’s face crumpling like paper. I nod again, slowly. "Then tell me what you can," I say, gentle and insistent.

He lets out a long breath, shaky at the edges, and some of the stiffness leaves his shoulders, like a rope going slack.

"I hit him harder than any person should hit another person," he says, hollow. "I heard it. I heard what happened to his spine, to his leg. I heard it before the crowd did. And I knew right then that I had done something that couldn’t be undone." His voice drops lower, nearly a whisper. "He never played again. He can barely walk some days."

The words sit between us like something physical, heavy enough to press the air out of the room.

"It’s in the article that it looked like temper," I say carefully, watching his face. "That you were just angry."

"That’s what everybody thought. That’s what I let them think." His mouth twists, bitter. "It wasn’t a fit of temper. I wasn’t angry at him. I barely knew him." He shakes his head once, sharp. "It wasn’t an accident of temper, Georgia. It was something in me that I didn’t have a handle on yet. Something I should have kept locked down, and didn’t."

I don’t ask what that something is. I think I already know, and the word is written in the middle of two circles in my notebook, underlined twice. But I let him have this part first. I let him say it the way he can, in pieces and fragments, the way I’ve been collecting mine.

"I’ve carried it every day since," he says, his voice cracking at the edges. "I see his face when I close my eyes. I tried to write to him once. I never sent it." He laughs, short and hollow, a sound with no humor in it at all. "What would I even say?"

I don’t flinch. All I feel is a deep, aching sadness, and under it a strange sense that this is the first time anyone at this school has handed me something real.

"Thank you for telling me," I say, quiet and steady.

His eyes snap up to mine, startled. "That’s it?" he asks, disbelieving, almost sharp.

"What did you expect?" I ask, soft, searching his face.

"I don’t know." He sounds almost bewildered, lost. "For you to leave. To look at me like I’m a monster."

"You’re not a monster," I say, firm.

"You don’t know that," he says, bitter and low.

"I know you carried that for two years and you still wrote him a letter you couldn’t send." I tilt my head, watching him. "Monsters don’t do that." 𝐟𝑟ⅇ

Something in his face cracks, just a little, like ice giving way beneath careful weight. He looks down at the table, and I see a muscle jump in his jaw. His fist is still curled against the wood, the knuckles pale, the tendons standing out beneath his skin.

I look at that hand. I think about all the times it’s almost touched mine - the library, the study session, the rain-slicked cobblestones. Every time, one of us pulled away.

So I do it on purpose. I don’t let it happen by accident, a brush of fingers over a shared book, an excuse I can take back later. I reach across the table, slowly enough that he could stop me, and I close my hand over his fist.

His skin is burning. It always is, hot like a stove left on too long, but this time I don’t let go.

Something warm rushes up my arm. It starts at my fingertips and climbs past my wrist, past my elbow, a slow, golden wave spreading beneath my skin. It reaches my chest and settles right behind my sternum, exactly where the dull ache has lived for weeks. For a second, it’s like a hand pressing against a bruise, firm and certain.

Then it vanishes, all at once, and the ache goes with it.

I pull back, startled, my breath catching hard in my throat. I stare at my hand, then at Puck. His fist uncurls beneath where mine had been, fingers trembling, and a sharp breath tears out of him like he’s surfaced from underwater.

"You felt that," he says, not a question, his voice hoarse with disbelief. He stares at his own palm as though it belongs to someone else. "I thought I was the only one who could. I didn’t know it worked both ways." Something shifts behind his eyes, wonder tangled with fear. "Georgia, that’s not supposed to happen. Not with someone outside the pack."

And I realize, with a strange, trembling clarity, that I feel better than I have in weeks. Lighter. Like I’ve been carrying something I didn’t know was there, and some careless, gentle hand just lifted it away.