Chapter 136: DARCY SUSPECTS

The hallway outside the meeting room was narrower than Georgia remembered it being on the way in, the walls closing in like a trap. She kept her pace measured and her shoulders locked back, moving with the deliberate control she had learned across years of falling on cold ice, pretending the landing had left no tremor in her bones. Puck walked beside her in absolute silence. Behind them, the bare wire fixture hummed against the plaster until the sound faded out, swallowed entirely by the dense, suffocating quiet of the pack house interior. Under her collarbone, the tether sat heavy, inert and cold; it pressed into her ribs like a jagged stone lodged in her throat.

She pushed open the heavy side door, and the night hit them with a sudden rush of freezing air and damp pine needles. They crossed the dark grounds together, keeping an even rhythm over the gravel while the timberline loomed ahead like an unbroken black wall.

"He hasn’t ruled yet," Georgia said, checking the tactical window left to them. "We still have thirty-six hours before the Council observers arrive, less whatever time we’ve burned. If we can reach someone who has Miguel’s ear before Darcy files anything additional, we can still counter."

Puck maintained his forward stride without an immediate answer, his jaw set hard, both arms held rigid against his sides as if actively fighting the instinct to strike.

"Puck."

"I heard you."

"Then talk to me instead of shutting down."

He stopped walking, and she caught herself a half-step later, wheeling around to face him where the dark lawn stretched toward empty woods.

"There is no counter-move," he said, the words stripped entirely bare. "Miguel decides. That’s the chain."

She pushed back against his posture immediately. "That’s how it works for the rank and file, but we’re the targets with thirty-six hours on our necks."

"We’re part of the pack, Georgia," he said, speaking with a terrifying, flat calm that offered no purchase. "He didn’t leave us a door to push on... There isn’t one."

She studied his rigid frame, noting the complete absence of fight, seeing how instantly he had reorganized his defenses around Miguel’s two-word dismissal. It reminded her of skaters who simply abandoned challenging the judging panel, resetting their expectations downward to endure a crooked ruling rather than break themselves against a fixed score. It was just surrender disguised as tactical sense.

"We go home," Puck said, turning slightly toward the road. "We wait."

The tether between them remained dead and unyielding, registering the change like an immutable score deduction, precise and cold. A physical shock dropped into her chest, sharp as winter water hitting bare bone, because she knew he had already conceded ground she refused to yield. She had treated the bond as shared weight, but standing in the bitter dark outside Miguel’s gate, she realized it functioned purely as a leash, and Puck had simply passed the lead straight into Miguel’s hands.

She could argue. She could push. She could fracture what little solidarity they had left by refusing to accept his surrender. "Okay," she said.

The word was a lie she gave him to buy silence. Underneath her ribs, the reality settled in cold and absolute: she was operating entirely alone now, bonded to a partner who had handed his throat over to pack law, navigating whatever came next without him.

Pressure cracks on fresh ice never gave advance warning, and she had spent years reading frozen rinks under that exact kind of silent strain.

The cold drag beneath her collarbone had not lifted since she stepped out of the pack house. It stayed lodged there, dull and solid, and she handled it the same way she handled blown routines on the circuit, pressing forward with a locked jaw, neutral eyes, and a rigid spine so nothing bled through the set of her posture. Puck’s sudden surrender from the previous evening had hardened into a raw, jagged edge, an internal rupture she kept testing like fresh nerve damage.

She only noticed Darcy when he was already level with her shoulder.

That broke his usual pattern entirely. Darcy Valentine typically traveled through Rosethorne’s halls as if he held the title deed to every square foot of linoleum, maintaining an easy stride that forced the corridor traffic to split around him. He never simply brushed past anyone.

Yet he cleared her side without breaking stride.

She caught the change an instant before he slipped past her peripheral vision, noticing the hard set of his jaw and the complete absence of that smooth, theatrical smirk he generally wore like standard uniform. The warmth was gone; it had cut out cleanly, the way power drops in a storm, leaving behind a cold calculation that measured physical distance and mass rather than greeting a classmate.

A sharp spike of adrenaline hit the pit of her stomach.

He offered no greeting and made no move to block her path. Instead, his pupils locked onto hers for three uninterrupted seconds while his boots hit the floor, and in that brief exchange she grasped the tactical reality without needing any spoken confirmation.

Bella broke.

She could not guess the hour it happened, or what specific leverage Darcy had brought down, or how much pain it had taken to tear a confession out of the girl. Even so, the outcome was evident in the stark, unvarnished nature of his focus, looking at her without the polished charm he spent every school day maintaining. That deliberate drop in posture exposed everything. Darcy Valentine remained obsessive about his public performance, yet here he dropped the mask entirely because maintaining the cover was no longer necessary.

She kept moving toward the main stairwell without altering her pace, refusing to let any tremor show across her ribcage. Puck’s rule had been explicit: go home, lock down, wait for Miguel’s ruling. Sticking to the safe corridor and heading for the exits was what he demanded. Instead, she pivoted sharply off the central hall and cut toward the side exit leading to the southern trail, deliberately walking into the open to find Bella before Darcy closed the loop.

The instant she took the unsanctioned turn, the cold drag beneath her collarbone spiked, pulling taut with an icy, physical twinge that caught in her throat. The bond registered her defiance even if Puck was miles away, dragging like a frozen wire against her pulse. She ignored it and pushed through the door.

The safety of remaining unseen was finished. Whatever she had dug into during those quiet hours, every question she had whispered, he already possessed the full ledger. The look he left behind carried no warning at all.

It was an inventory.Georgia found Bella near the southern trail, half-hidden behind the maintenance shed where the tree line started to thicken and lean over the path. The girl had both arms crossed tight over her chest, guarding fractured ribs rather than keeping out the bitter wind.

Georgia stopped in her tracks.

She cataloged the scene the way she once cataloged brutal impact sites after a bad fall across the rink; the dark purplish discoloration along Bella’s left cheekbone, the locked set of her swollen jaw, and the crust of blood split at the corner of her mouth that had not been there two days ago told the entire story. All of it was completely fresh. Georgia had learned early on the competitive ice that distinct varieties of trauma came with unmistakable biological timestamps, and she parsed these fractures without wanting to look.

"He came to me last night," Bella said, keeping her gaze pinned to the frozen mud. "I tried. You have to believe I tried."

Georgia kept her tone dead and level. "What did you tell him?"

"Everything." The word dropped flat between them. "About the blade, where he spent that week, and who met him in the woods."

Georgia stood anchored in place. The cold radiated off the dense evergreens while the shed’s rusted wall cast a sharp, grey shadow over the dead grass. The morning hallway had already exposed the betrayal, but hearing the mechanics spoken aloud pressed a far heavier weight against her lungs.

"It’s fine," Georgia said.

A sudden barometric pressure dropped hard across the back of her neck.

The shift hit her pulse before her mind caught up, triggering the exact survival reflex that had warned her about Puck during those brutal first weeks at Rosethorne. Her spine locked rigid on instinct; her center of gravity settled back onto her heels while every single cord of muscle across her shoulders pulled wire-taut.

She turned.

Darcy stepped out along the fringe of the tree line with the measured, hurried pace of someone working against a clock. He held a ring of heavy utility keys flat against his palm to kill the jangle, eyes fixed straight ahead on the padlock chain looped through the maintenance shed door.

He did not look at Bella. He did not look at Georgia.

He cut across the frost four feet from Georgia’s shoulder without a sideways glance, without a hitch in his stride, treating her presence with the absolute, chilling disregard reserved for a post in the ground or dead brush along the path. She was not a threat requiring intimidation, nor an opponent worth pausing over. He had cataloged her that morning in the hall, closed the file, and moved directly to execution.

Georgia stood completely still.

A warning would have left room to fight, but being entirely ignored was worse. The machinery had already moved past her, grinding forward without needing her acknowledgment.