Where The Ice Gives Way (Charlotte and Blake) novel Chapter 240

Chapter 240 I Need Someone

Jessica

I don’t sleep.

I lie in bed for hours with my blanket pulled up in my chin, staring at the ceiling while my whole world crumbles and reforms arusend me

The shadows in my room look normal. My desk is still messy. My skates are still beside the wardrobe. My schoolbag is still dumped neat

the door.

Everything is exactly where I left it.

Except me.

I keep thinking about Charlie standing under the park light with all that fear written over his face. I keep thinking about the wolf crouched in the snow, huge and black and impossible, watching me with green eyes I knew. I keep thinking about Mum’s face when i cante home, the way all the colour drained out of her the second she saw me, the way she asked what I saw before she even knew there was something to see.

By morning, my eyes burn, my chest still feels strange, and I have decided I cannot walk into school without talking to someone about this.

I almost text Annabelle.

My thumb hovers over her name for a full minute, but I can already imagine how that conversation would go.

Hey, so Charlie is apparently a werewolf, and his family is also werewolves, and maybe half the town is werewolves, and I think my mum knows something about it. Want to get iced coffee before English?

Annabelle would either laugh because she thought I was joking, or she would scream because she realised I wasn’t.

I can’t talk to Charlotte either, because she’s Charlie’s sister, and right now, Charlie is part of why my head feels like someone shook it

and put all +1

11:17 Wed, Jul 29

Chapter 240 I Need Someone

fighting with myself to leave.

I sit in the car for a second too long, contemplating every possible excuse to reverse out of the driveway and pretend I was never here.

Then the front door opens, and Theo’s dad steps out with a mug in his hand and the expression of a man who has absolutely caught me

sitting in his driveway having a crisis.

He lifts one hand in a small wave.

Shit. Too late to flee.

I get out, shutting the door with more force than necessary.

“Morning, Jess,” he says, kind but careful, as if he can already tell that one wrong word might send me bolting into traffic. “Everything

alright?”

No.

Absolutely not.

“Is Emily here?” I ask, my voice a little higher than I’d like.

“She is.” His eyes move over my face, not nosy exactly, but noticing too much. “You want to come in?”

I hesitate, and John seems to understand something from my face, because he steps back from the doorway and angles his body away. “Or

I can call her down.”

That kindness nearly breaks me.

“No,” I say quickly, because if I stand outside any longer I might change my mind. “It’s okay. I can come in.”

He nods and opens the door wider.

The house smells like coffee, toast, and laundry powder-normal smells. Human smells. Safe smells, if safe is even still a thing I’m allowed to believe in. I step inside anyway, keeping my bag strap gripped tightly in one hand.

“Emily and Theo are upstairs,” John says. “Second door on the left. I’ll put the kettle on.”

“Thank you.”

11:17 Wed, Jul 29

Chapter 240 1 Need Someone

I lift my hand and knock, and when something low rumbles from inside the room. I go completely still

It is not loud or necessarily angry, but it is deep enough to move through the door and straight into my bones. Before I can der whe

whether to run back down the stairs or pretend I knocked on the wrong house altogether, something catches for in my throat. I press my

lips together, embarrassed and startled by myself, just as Emily’s voice cuts through the room.

“Oh, calm down.”

My eyes widen.

There is a thump, a muttered male curse, and then footsteps.

The door opens, and Emily appears in an oversized jumper, her dark hair messy around her face, eyes still soft with sleep until she sees

“Jess?”

I try to smile, but my lips wobble embarrassingly.

Behind her, Theo is sitting up in bed, hair wild, shirt half on, eyes sharper than they have any right to be before eight in the morning.

“Can I talk to you?” I ask Emily. “Just you?”

Emily steps out without any hesitation and closes the door most of the way behind her. “Come on.”

She leads me down the hall to a small spare room with a folded blanket at the end of the bed and a stack of books on the windowsill. She closes the door gently once we are inside, then sits on the edge of the mattress.

I stay standing.

For about three seconds.

Then my legs give up, and I sit beside her with my hands pressed between my shaky knees.

Emily studies me for a second, her face softening, like she can already see I’m holding myself together with string.

“What’s going on?” she asks gently. “Are you alright?”

holding hack comes pouring out of me.

11:17 Wed, Jul 29

Chapter 240 I Need Someone

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify