Chapter 23 Don’t Go
Bella’s POV
The door opened without a knock.
I felt him before I saw him, just the change in the air that comes when someone stops in a doorway. I was at the wardrobe, deciding whether a second pair of shoes was worth the space in the bag, when I turned.
Rhys was standing at the threshold.
He was looking at the bag on the bed.
Something moved through his expression, quick, unnamed, gone before it fully formed. Then it was just his face again, arranged into stillness. But the stillness was working harder than usual. I could see that much.
He didn’t say anything immediately. He looked at the bag for a moment longer than felt neutral, long enough that the silence had started to carry its own weight.
“Going somewhere,” he said. Not quite a question.
“Removing the complication,” I said. “For you. For the elders.” I kept my voice steady. “If the decision is already made, there’s not much point in pretending otherwise.”
“What decision are you making for me?”
“The one the entire pack watched the elders make this afternoon.” I turned back to the wardrobe. “Ten days, Rhys. That’s not a deadline with flexibility in it.”
He came into the room.
Not fast. Measured. He crossed to where the bag sat on the edge of the bed and picked it up before I had fully registered he was reaching for it.
I let him take it.
He set it on the floor without looking at it again and didn’t step back.
We were standing closer than we usually did. Closer than we had stood since the night he tended the cut on my lip, since his fingers had grazed my jaw and neither of us had named what had moved through the room. Close enough now that I could see the tension along his jaw clearly, the particular quality of stillness he carried when he was holding something in rather than simply having nothing to say.
I looked at him.
“Then give me one reason to stay,” I said. “Not the alliance. Not what the elders need. Not what makes sense for the pack or the treaty.” I held his gaze. “Not duty.”
A pause.
“Just you.”
Something shifted in his face.
The controlled quality of it didn’t disappear, he wasn’t a man who lost composure all at once, but it bent. Just slightly.
I watched him work for a response. Actually work for it, the way someone does when the honest version won’t come out clean. He wasn’t performing the difficulty. It was real, visible in the way he paused, adjusted, tried again.
“I don’t…” He stopped. The line of his jaw tightened.
He started again, slower.
“I don’t know what this is,” he said. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with it.” A short exhale, sharper than he intended.
He looked at me directly. And this time he didn’t look away.
“But letting you walk away…” A pause. “Feels wrong. In a way I don’t trust and can’t ignore.”
The room was very quiet.
This wasn’t a confession of anything. It didn’t name anything or promise anything or arrive neatly at a point.
But it was real in a way that everything carefully controlled and perfectly arranged could not be. His voice had a rougher edge than usual. His hands were still at his sides.
I held his gaze.
I thought about the assembly. The full moon. The ten days between now and a decision the entire pack had already made for him. I thought about the bag on the floor and the folded shirts inside it and the tired, practical logic that had put them there.
I didn’t reach for the bag.
Neither of us moved.
The evening light came through the window at a low angle and lay across the floor between us, and the room stayed quiet.
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Kattie stood in the corridor outside the open door.
Her expression, from where she stood, was impossible to read clearly. The distance was too great, the light too poor.
But her hand, braced against the wall, curled slowly. Knuckles whitening against the stone.
She stayed there for another moment.
Then she turned, and the corridor took her, and the sound of her footsteps faded in the direction of the west hall.