Chapter 42: THE ROOM TURNED

Georgia

The whole room turned when Darcy walked in with me on his arm.

The ballroom glittered for the occasion, string lights strung high across the vaulted ceiling, tables draped in deep green and silver, the whole space glowing warm and golden against the early winter dark pressing at the tall windows. Somewhere beneath the chatter, a quartet played something slow and sweeping, the notes curling through the air like smoke. Darcy looked effortlessly polished beside me, his hand resting lightly at my back as we stepped through the entrance together. For one brief second, walking in on his arm in my green dress with the strange, cold pin still fastened near my collarbone, I let myself feel something close to normal. I let myself imagine, just for that heartbeat, that I was an ordinary girl at an ordinary party, worried about nothing more dangerous than a misstep in my heels.

That feeling didn’t last.

The room shifted the moment we cleared the doorway, a ripple of attention moving through the crowd that had nothing to do with ordinary party curiosity. I caught it in fragments: a cluster of students near the punch table going quiet mid-sentence, several heads turning our way with expressions I couldn’t quite name, something tighter and more charged than simple interest. Near the band, a girl grabbed her friend’s arm, her mouth moving fast and urgent, both of them glancing toward us before snapping their eyes away. My pulse ticked up without my permission, some animal part of me registering danger before my mind caught up to name it.

I told myself it was gossip catching up, the same rumor mill that had spread word of Darcy asking me within the hour weeks ago. Maybe people were surprised. Maybe some of them were jealous. I clung to that explanation the way I might have clung to a railing on unsteady ice, needing something solid beneath me even if it wasn’t quite true.

"Why is everyone staring?" I asked Darcy, keeping my voice light as we moved deeper inside.

"They’re always staring," he said, easy and almost bored, guiding me toward a quieter corner near the edge of the dance floor. "You get used to it. New girl on the arm of the guy everyone already talks about - give it an hour and they’ll find something else to whisper about."

It should have settled me. The explanation was reasonable, even flattering in its way, and his tone carried no hesitation at all. But something about the smoothness of it snagged in my mind, a beat too rehearsed, an answer that fit a little too neatly over a question he hadn’t seemed surprised to hear. I searched his face for some crack in the ease, some flicker that matched the tension humming under my skin, and found nothing but that same warm, certain smile. I let it go. Whatever instinct had sparked in me, I told myself, I could examine it later, once the noise of the room stopped pressing so hard against my thoughts.

I didn’t get used to it. If anything, the feeling sharpened the deeper into the room we went. More heads turned. More conversations dropped into hushed, careful murmurs the moment we passed within earshot. It didn’t feel like envy, not entirely, though I kept trying to convince myself that was exactly what it was. Something underneath it felt closer to alarm, a held breath rippling through certain clusters of the crowd that had nothing to do with how I looked or who I stood beside and everything to do with something I didn’t have the framework to understand. The chill from the pin at my collarbone seemed to deepen with every step, as though it, too, sensed something gathering in the air.

I caught sight of Bella near the refreshment table, her eyes wide and fixed on us, her expression closer to dread than curiosity. Beside her, Bianca’s face had gone carefully blank, the same calculating stillness I remembered from the exhibition weeks ago, that same look she’d worn while watching me from the sidelines, cool and assessing, like she was already three moves ahead of whatever game the rest of us didn’t know we were playing. It hadn’t meant anything to me then, just one more strange glance among strangers. Now it felt like a thread picked back up, a piece of some larger design I still couldn’t see the shape of. Neither twin looked away when I met her gaze, and for one unsettling moment, I felt like the last person in the room to understand a joke everyone else had already heard.

*It’s nothing,* I told myself. *People talk. That’s all this is.*

I was wrong. I didn’t know that yet, not in any way I could name. But some old, quiet instinct at the base of my spine already sensed it, some truth sitting just beneath the surface of the room that I didn’t have the tools to translate. It sat there, patient and cold, waiting for me to catch up.

Darcy led me toward the dance floor, easy and confident as ever, seemingly unbothered by the current running beneath the party, or simply skilled enough at hiding his awareness of it that nothing showed. He smiled at me the way he always did, warm and certain, the kind of smile that made it easy to forget the strange weight pressing against my chest. We talked. We laughed. For a while I lost myself in the music and the lights and the simple, uncomplicated pleasure of being somewhere warm and beautiful with someone who made conversation easy. I let his voice fill the spaces where my doubts had started to gather, grateful, for once, not to have to think too hard about anything at all.

Then I glanced across the room, and I found him.

Puck stood near the far wall, a drink untouched in his hand, watching us. Not glancing, not offering the brief, curious looks scattered through the rest of the room. Watching, steady and unbroken, his whole body angled toward us like nothing else in the ballroom existed. Even from a distance, I could see the tension coiled through his shoulders, the careful stillness of someone holding something back by sheer force of will.

He didn’t move. He didn’t blink, not that I could tell from this distance, his gaze fixed and unwavering in a way that made something in my chest pull tight. It wasn’t jealousy I saw in his face, or not only jealousy. It looked closer to fear, the kind that roots a person to the floor.

Every time I glanced back - when Darcy spun me across the floor, when I laughed at something he murmured against my ear, when the band eased into a slower song and Darcy drew me a little closer - Puck stood exactly where I’d left him, exactly as still, exactly as focused. Something in me ached at the sight of him standing so alone in a room full of people, untouched by the warmth around him.

*Say something,* I thought at him, useless and silent. *Do something. Stop just standing there like a statue and give me a reason.*

He didn’t. And with every passing minute, the silence between us grew heavier than anything he could have said.