Chapter 117 Just Because You Tried to Kill Me Once, Doesn't Mean We Can't Be Friends
Bella
Even the guards, the ones still trying to remember their loyalty, hold very still, because that is not a speech, that is a confession, and it drags a hush across everyone listening. I don’t soften, but I do breathe, slow and steady, because this is the moment where someone like her expects pity to turn into weakness.
“I’m sorry that happened to you,” I say, and I mean it, because I am not heartless, I’m just not willing to die for her trauma. “I’m sorry someone made you feel like love was a trap. But you don’t get to decide the only way to keep people safe is to make sure they never risk being hurt.”
Her eyes flash, and snow lifts higher, swirling faster, the air thickening with cold until the edges of my lashes start to frost.
“You will destroy them,” she says, voice ringing now, because she needs everyone to hear the part where she is right. “You will fill their heads with fantasies, and then you will leave, and when they reach for warmth and find only pain, their magic will break loose, and the world will pay for their foolishness.”
I exhale slowly, and my breath fogs in a steady stream.
“Maybe heartbreak hurts,” I say, and my voice stays calm, because calm is its own kind of defiance. “Maybe it hurts so much you think you’ll never breathe again. But pain isn’t the same as destruction, and love isn’t the enemy just because it has teeth.”
Her eyes narrow further, and I realise too late that I’ve given her the one thing she can’t tolerate. Hope. Not the quiet kind, the careful kind, but the kind that spreads, the kind that makes people stand a little straighter and look a little longer and question the stories they’ve been fed. The Frostborn’s hand lifts, and the air snaps.
Ice gathers around her palm in a tight spiral, dense and bright, and then it stretches, sharpening into a long, jagged spear that forms faster than breath, and her body shifts, not stepping, not advancing politely, but lunging with the clean, lethal certainty of someone who has killed before and expects to kill again. The courtyard erupts into movement. Someone shouts my name. A child screams. The ice spear cuts through the air straight for my chest, and I don’t flinch, because flinching is what she wants, and because somewhere deep in my mind a dragon is already roaring, already moving, already ready to tear this mountain apart if I need him, and I lift my hands, power rising with perfect control, cold meeting cold in the space between us as the first strike of her wrath comes for me. Cold slams into me like a wall. The spear shatters against the space I carve open in front of me, ice meeting ice with a sound like breaking glass magnified a hundred times. Fragments explode outward in a storm of shards that scream as they tear through the air and embed themselves into pillars, railings, and stone. I move because standing still is how people die. I twist, boots skidding across frost-slick stone as I redirect the next wave she hurls at me, a sweeping arc of ice that tries to cut me in half at the waist. It grazes my side, the fabric of my coat stiffening instantly, frost biting into my skin hard enough to burn. I stay upright, teeth clenched, hands already shaping the cold instead of fighting it.
“Stop!” I shout. “This doesn’t have to be a war!”
She laughs again, sharp and joyless, and the sound splinters something in the air.
“You mistake defiance for mercy,” she snaps, spinning gracefully as she sends another strike at me. “There is no other way.”
Ice blooms beneath my feet, trying to lock my boots in place, trying to drag me down and pin me where I stand. I drop low, slamming one palm into the stone and forcing my power outward in a tight, controlled pulse, cracking the ice just enough to free myself without sending shards flying into the crowd.
“Look at them!” I shout, throwing an arm wide even as I dodge another strike. “They’re already changing!”
She doesn’t look. She won’t.
Snow whips around us now, thick enough to obscure faces, to blur the edges of the courtyard into a pale, chaotic haze. I catch flashes of movement through it—guards scrambling and civilians pulling children back behind pillars. People are pressed against walls with hands over mouths, eyes wide.
“Love made you weak,” she snarls, and the temperature drops another degree, then another, ice crawling across the floor in jagged, aggressive lines. “It will make them weak too.”
“No,” I gasp, redirecting a strike so close I feel the pressure of it tear past my shoulder. “It made me controlled.”
I draw in hard, grounding myself. I don’t push harder. I don’t escalate. I narrow. I refine. The cold I shape isn’t explosive; it’s precise, a lattice of ice forming midair that catches her next spear and locks it in place, freezing it solid before it can reach me. She stares at it for half a second, disbelief flickering across her face. I take that second and step forward, boots crunching, power coiled but leashed, my voice ringing through the storm.
“You don’t have to carry this alone anymore,” I shout. “You don’t have to decide the fate of an entire people because you were hurt!”
Her expression shatters.
“You think I don’t know that?” she screams, and this time the sound rips through the courtyard, raw and furious and uncontained. “You think I didn’t try? You think I didn’t love until it ruined everything I touched?”
Ice explodes outward from her, a shockwave that throws me back hard enough that my spine slams into a stone pillar, the breath punched clean out of my lungs. I hit the ground and slide, palms scraping against frost, pain blooming sharp along my ribs.
“This ends now,” she says, advancing on me through the snow, every step deliberate, every movement radiating certainty. “You don’t get to undo centuries of order because you found someone who didn’t leave.”
I stagger to my feet, shaking, blood warm against my side where the ice cut deeper than I realised, and I lift my hands again, not to strike but to hold.
“Yes,” I say hoarsely. “I do.”
She lunges. The ice she throws is a brutal surge meant to overwhelm, to crush, to bury me beneath sheer force. I dig in, teeth bared, power screaming under my skin as I meet it head-on, cold colliding with cold in a blinding explosion that sends shockwaves rippling through the Sanctum. I drop to one knee, barely holding the line, arms shaking, lungs burning as I pour everything I have into containment instead of destruction.
“You don’t have to do this!” I scream again, tears freezing at the corners of my eyes. “We can find another way!”
Her face twists, fury and grief tangled so tightly they’re indistinguishable.
“There is no other way!” she roars—
—and then the world shakes. Not from ice but from heat.