Chapter 24 Silver in Her Eyes
Bella’s POV
The dream came in pieces.
Not a single vision. More like fragments of something larger that I kept almost catching and then losing. Silver light, very bright, cutting through dark in a way that felt less like illumination and more like movement. The sense of something massive nearby, not threatening, but enormous in a way that pressed against the edges of the space it occupied.
And underneath that, something else. Something quieter. Like a memory trying to surface from very deep water, coming up slowly, shape almost visible, and then dissolving before it fully formed.
I reached for it.
It slipped.
I reached again and lost it completely.
I woke with my heart going fast, hands pressed flat against the mattress like I had been trying to hold onto something that wasn’t there.
The room was dark. Still. The window showed deep pre-dawn grey, the kind that arrived a full hour before actual light.
I sat upright and let my breathing even out.
The feeling didn’t leave with waking. That was what bothered me. Dreams faded, that was what they did, the edges going soft, the details dropping away. But the silver light was still there behind my eyes when I closed them, and the sense of that presence was still sitting in my chest, heavy and faintly warm, like something that had been there much longer than one night.
I didn’t know what I had seen.
But it hadn’t felt like a dream.
I was sitting on the edge of the bed, both feet on the floor, trying to locate the boundary between real and imagined, when I heard footsteps in the corridor.
Not the usual sounds of the manor waking. These were quick, direct. Someone moving with purpose toward a specific room.
My door.
The knock came before I could decide what to do with that.
“Come in,” I said, because I was already awake and sitting upright and there was no reasonable alternative.
Rhys opened the door.
He was dressed, which meant he had either been awake already or had dressed quickly, and his expression when he stepped in was the controlled one I recognized. But there was a crack in it. A fraction of a second where something underneath came forward before it was pressed back into place.
I didn’t know what it was. I only knew it had been there.
He looked at me.
“I heard…” He stopped.
I waited.
“Something woke me,” he said. Like he didn’t entirely believe it was just that.
I looked at him for a moment. He looked back with that same fractured composure, controlled, but aware of something, working against a response I couldn’t fully see.
“I’m fine,” I said.
He didn’t leave.
He closed the door instead and came further into the room. Not toward me. He pulled the chair from near the desk to a position a few feet from the bed and sat down.
He didn’t explain this.
I watched him do it. I thought about asking, then decided not to, because whatever answer he had wasn’t going to be complete anyway, and the incomplete version would just sit in the room between us making everything more complicated.
So I lay back down and pulled the blanket up and looked at the ceiling.
He sat. He didn’t ask if I wanted him to stay.
And I didn’t ask him to leave.
The silence had weight to it, but not the uncomfortable kind. More like the forest. Me being aware of him without looking. Warmth in a cold room without explanation.
My breathing slowed.
The tight, disoriented feeling from the dream loosened its grip gradually, the way it does when something keeps you company in the dark without asking anything of you.
I don’t know when I stopped watching the ceiling.
I don’t know when I stopped being awake.
Only that at some point the darkness stopped being unsettled, and the light behind my eyes dimmed to something distant, and I slept without dreaming again.
\-----
Somewhere in the deep quiet before dawn, I half-surfaced from sleep.
Not fully. Just enough to be aware of the room. The low light. The chair still occupied.
I turned my head slightly against the pillow.
And heard it.
One moment, very clearly.
A second heartbeat. Low and steady, close enough to feel rather than just hear.
Not mine.
I lay very still.
It was there. I was certain enough of it that my own breath stopped for a second.
Then sleep pulled me back under before I could decide what to do with that certainty.
And when morning came, there was only mine.