Chapter 47: BENEATH ME

Georgia

I wasn’t supposed to hear it. More than almost anything else tonight, I wish I hadn’t.

I sit alone on the courtyard bench for a few more minutes after Puck disappears back inside, the cold seeping up through the stone and into my bones. My pulse won’t settle. My mind keeps snagging on the sharp, unmistakable press of his canines against his lip, the way he stepped back like I’d burned him instead of the other way around. Before that, his voice cracked open, and he looked at me like I was something worth apologizing to, something worth the risk. For one reckless second out there, I let myself believe we were finally getting somewhere, that whatever wall stood between us had a door in it after all. I let myself imagine, just for a breath, what it might feel like to be let in.

*Stupid,* I think. *So stupid.*

Eventually the cold bites through the thin fabric of my dress, goosebumps rising along my arms. I wrap them around myself, but it does little good against the deeper chill settling in, the one that has nothing to do with the temperature. I make my way back toward the ballroom, following the same path Puck took only minutes before, telling myself I only want the warmth. I tell myself a lot of things tonight that aren’t quite true.

I don’t mean to overhear anything. I cut through a quieter side hallway to avoid the thick of the crowd, my mind still tangled in everything that just happened outside, when I catch the low, urgent sound of Puck’s voice around the corner. There’s an edge to it I don’t recognize, something raw and unguarded that makes me hesitate before I even understand why my feet have stopped moving.

I freeze without deciding to. Some instinct locks my legs in place before I’ve fully registered the reason, before some slower, wiser part of me can urge me to keep walking, to give him this privacy the way he’s never quite given me any peace. Curiosity wars with dread, and curiosity, as always, wins.

"She can’t know what I am," Puck says, his voice tight with something close to panic. "She’s beneath, beneath all of this. The pack, the bond, the danger. She deserves better than this world."

I don’t hear Liam’s response, if he gives one at all. My whole body goes rigid. My breath catches high in my chest, and my fingers curl against the cool stone of the wall beside me, like I need something solid to hold onto before the floor tilts out from under me entirely. The words hang suspended in the narrow hallway, and one fragment lodges itself directly into my chest, something with actual weight and edges, something that finds every soft, unguarded place in me and presses down hard.

*She’s beneath me.*

That’s what I catch. That’s the only piece that fully registers through the roaring in my ears. The rest, the pack, the bond, the danger, slides past too fast and too unfamiliar to hold onto properly, foreign words I don’t have the context to understand. I only hear the ones that gut me completely. Underneath it all, some quieter register of his voice snags at me too, the way it broke on the word *deserves*, less like a man drawing a line and more like one who hates where the line falls. I don’t have room to examine that now, not with everything else crashing down at once. Some distant, rational corner of my mind tries to whisper that I’m missing something, that the sentence means more than the wound it leaves, but the hurt is louder than reason tonight.

*She’s beneath me.*

Every warning, every cold silence, every half-explained rule I’ve spent weeks trying to understand reorganizes itself around this one, brutal interpretation, snapping into place like it was always going to end here. All of it, the distance, the control, the refusal to explain anything, makes a terrible, humiliating kind of sense now. He’s been managing me, warning me away from himself and from Darcy both, not because he cares about my safety, but because some part of him decided I’m not worth the trouble of an actual explanation. Not worth whatever world he actually belongs to, whatever pack or bond or danger runs beneath his skin like a second pulse. I think of every moment I mistook his silence for restraint, every glance I read as longing, and I want to laugh at how easily I built a whole story out of nothing.

*He looked at me like I mattered,* I think, bitter and raw. *It was probably just another performance.*

I back away before either of them can see me, my hand pressing hard against my mouth to keep any sound from escaping into that narrow hallway. My eyes sting with a sharp, sudden heat I don’t have room to process standing here at a school gala, surrounded by candlelight and distant laughter that belongs to some other, easier version of tonight. My throat tightens around a sound I refuse to let out, some ugly mixture of a sob and a laugh at my own stupidity for thinking, even for a moment, that any of this made sense, that I had found something real inside all this gilded rot. I press my nails into my palm, grounding myself in the small sting of it, anything to keep from unraveling completely in this hallway.

I don’t wait to hear anything else. I turn and walk quickly back the way I came, weaving through the edge of the crowd toward the ballroom doors, my pulse hammering an unsteady rhythm against my ribs. The noise and light and music that felt overwhelming just minutes ago now feel like something I desperately need to disappear into, anything to keep from standing still long enough to feel the full weight of what I just heard. My heels catch against the polished floor, and I steady myself against a passing waiter’s tray, silverware rattling precariously.

"Sorry," I mutter, breathless, barely aware I’ve said it at all, the word swallowed almost instantly by the din around me.

The whole gala suddenly feels unbearable. The string lights burn too bright. The music blares too loud. Every warm, glowing detail of the evening curdles into something I can’t stand to be inside of for one more second, the beauty of it all suddenly grotesque, a mask over something rotten. I search the room for an exit, for Mandi, for anything that might anchor me, but every face blurs into the next, strangers wrapped in silk and candlelight, none of them aware that something inside me just cracked clean in half.

*I want to disappear,* I think. *I want to be anyone else. Someone who never let herself believe that a boy with fire in his hands might see her as something more than beneath.*