Chapter 49: STEADILY BURNING

Georgia

The decision took four seconds, start to finish: the moment I spotted Darcy across the room, easy and unbothered as always, to the moment "take me home" left my mouth. I’d spend a long time regretting it.

I walk away from Puck before the silence between us can stretch any longer, my whole body shaking, some raw, wounded fury propelling me back through the crowd faster than I can properly think through what I’m doing. My pulse hammers in my ears, drowning out the music, the chatter, everything except the echo of his silence and the ache it’s left behind. *He couldn’t even give me the truth. Not even a little of it.* After everything, after the courtyard and the almost-kiss and the way he’d looked at me like I mattered, he still chose the silence over me. That realization sits heavier than anything else, a stone lodged somewhere beneath my ribs. I don’t look for Mandi. I don’t look for Alexa. I don’t want comfort right now, or explanation, or anyone telling me to be patient or to trust something I have no reason left to trust. I want distance. I want noise loud enough to drown out the sight of his eyes going gold and staying that way, like something had finally broken loose inside him and he’d let it happen anyway, right in front of me, and still said nothing.

I find Darcy near the refreshment table, and something in me latches onto that ease like a lifeline. He looks so simple standing there, untroubled by secrets or silence or magic I can’t understand, and right now simple is exactly what I need.

"Take me home," I say, my voice thin and unsteady.

He turns, and whatever surprise crosses his face vanishes almost instantly, replaced by something careful and attentive. "What happened?" he asks, his tone gentle, coaxing, as though he already suspects the answer and only wants to hear me say it.

"I don’t want to talk about it," I say, sharp and final. "I just want to leave."

He studies me for a moment, and I catch something flicker behind his calm expression, something too satisfied to be simple concern. I see it clearly, the quickness of it, the way his eyes brighten a fraction too fast for someone who’s supposed to be worried about me. I know I should ask why. I know the old version of myself, the one who hadn’t just watched Puck’s mouth clamp shut around some unspeakable truth, would have stopped right there and demanded an explanation. But that version of me is gone tonight, burned out somewhere between the alcove and this table, and what’s left doesn’t have room to care about Darcy’s satisfaction. I choose, deliberately, to let it go. I need the ease he offers more than I need the truth of what’s underneath it. "Of course," he says, smooth and reassuring. "Let me grab our coats."

It takes him less than a minute, and I don’t miss the ease of it either, the complete absence of hesitation, like he’s been waiting all night for exactly this moment to arrive. I notice that too, and I set it aside just the same. He returns with both our coats already in hand, settling mine gently over my shoulders with a careful, practiced tenderness that should feel comforting and instead just feels distant, like I’m watching the gesture happen from somewhere outside my own body. I let him anyway. I’m too tired to unravel one more mystery tonight, too raw from the last one to survive asking questions I’m not ready to hear answered.

"Ready?" he asks, offering his arm, his voice light, almost teasing.

"Ready," I say, though nothing about me feels ready for anything at all.

We move together toward the ballroom’s main entrance, weaving through the last scattered clusters of the crowd, the music and the lights and the noise of the gala fading slightly behind us with every step. Darcy’s steady presence beside me should feel like relief. Instead it feels like moving through water, everything slow and strange and slightly unreal, as though my body has agreed to leave while the rest of me is still standing frozen in that alcove, staring at Puck’s shaking hands and silent mouth.

Just before we reach the doors, some instinct I can’t fully control makes me glance back one more time.

I shouldn’t. I know I shouldn’t, some small, exhausted part of me already bracing for whatever I’m about to see, but I can’t help it, my body turning almost against my own will, my eyes scanning the crowded ballroom until they find him.

Puck is standing exactly where I left him, perfectly still, the crowd moving around him like water around a stone. He’s watching me leave with Darcy’s arm looped through mine, and something in his expression has changed since the last time I looked at him.

His eyes have stopped flashing.

Every other time I’ve seen the gold in his eyes, it’s come and gone in flashes, quick and startling, gone almost as soon as I register it. This is different. The gold has settled now, steady and unbroken, holding across the entire distance of the ballroom with an intensity that makes my breath catch even from here. There’s no mistaking it for a trick of the light this time, no explaining it away as exhaustion or reflection. It burns quietly, terribly, like something in him has finally given up trying to hide, like whatever mask he’s worn every day since I met him has simply dissolved and left only this behind.

It doesn’t look like anger anymore. It doesn’t even look entirely like grief the way it did on the dance floor earlier tonight. It looks like something has simply stopped flickering and started, permanently, to burn, as though whatever restraint had kept him tethered has finally, irrevocably snapped, and he’s letting me see the wreckage of it without any attempt to hide.

*Don’t look away,* some reckless part of me whispers. *Go back. Ask him again. Make him answer.* But I don’t move, and neither does he, and the space between us fills with everyone who isn’t us, strangers in silk and sequins drifting obliviously through the one silence in the room that actually matters.

I hold his gaze for one long, unbearable second, something in my chest twisting painfully at the sheer stillness of him, the way he doesn’t move, doesn’t blink, doesn’t do anything except watch me walk away with someone else’s arm around mine. For that single second, I forget to breathe, caught between the urge to run back to him and the certainty that if I do, I’ll lose whatever fragile resolve is keeping me upright. I think, absurdly, that this might be the last time he ever looks at me like this, like I’m something worth burning for, and the thought nearly buckles my knees.

Then Darcy’s hand tightens gently at my back, guiding me forward, and the doors swing open in front of us, cold night air rushing in to meet the last of the warmth from the ballroom.

I don’t look back again. I can’t. If I do, I’m not sure I’ll be able to keep walking, and some part of me, small and stubborn and aching, isn’t ready to find out what I’d do if I stopped.