Where The Ice Gives Way Chapter 136

**Charlie**

For a second, I don’t understand what I’m seeing. The ice breaks open beneath Shanti, and my mind refuses to follow it. White fur drops. Rogues vanish with her. The lake swallows them in a violent burst of black water, broken ice, and thrashing bodies. The sound that comes out of Blake is something I have never heard from a person or a wolf before. The whole world narrows to the hole in the lake. Charlotte is gone. Shanti is gone. My sister is gone. No. No, she isn’t. She can’t be.

Blake is already running, his body hitting human form while he keeps going, bare feet slamming into snow and ice, blood streaked across his chest, his face twisted with panic. “Charlotte!” he screams. The sound tears through the air as he runs for the broken ice. Theo hits him from the side before he can jump. They crash into the snow hard, Blake twisting under him, fighting instantly. Theo grabs his arm with both hands and digs his heels into the ground.

“You’ll die if you go in there!” Theo shouts.

“I don’t give a fuck!” Blake roars, wrenching hard enough that Theo almost loses him. “That’s my mate! That’s my girl! Charlotte!”

He tries to throw Theo off, but other pack members come to hold him down. Blake fights all of them, teeth bared, hands clawing at snow, trying to drag himself toward the lake.

“Get off me!” he snarls. “I have to save her!” His voice breaks on the last word.

Something inside me breaks with it. I shift before I think about it. Titan falls away from me, and then I’m standing in the snow. I’m naked and bleeding and shaking so hard I can barely breathe. Cold slams into my skin, but I don’t feel it. I don’t feel anything except the empty space where Charlotte was. My twin. My life. My best friend. Gone. Gone. Gone. The word pounds through my head until it becomes the only thing left.

No. She can’t be gone. She was just here. She was beside me. She told me she loved me, and I told her to tell me when this was over, because I thought there would be time. I thought we would get through it the way we always do. I thought we would run, fight, and survive, and she would tell me again after that she loves me. I didn’t say it back. I didn’t say it back. My chest caves in. “No,” I whisper.

Then I’m running. I don’t hear anyone call my name. I don’t hear Gareth. I don’t hear the pack or the rogues or the ice still cracking along the lake. I run for the place where she went down, because there is no version of the world where Charlotte is under that water, and I am standing here breathing. I get three steps onto the ice before something hits me from behind. Gareth tackles me so hard the air leaves my lungs, and we skid across the snow at the bank, his arms locking around my chest before I can crawl forward. “Get off me!” I scream. His grip tightens. “I can’t let you do that, son.”

I thrash against him, clawing at his arms, kicking, fighting with everything I have. “Let me go! That’s my sister!”

“I know.”

“You don’t know!” I scream, my voice tearing itself raw. “You don’t fucking know!”

Gareth pulls me back harder, dragging me away from the edge while more hands come in. Hands that are trying to keep me alive when I don’t want them to. The lake keeps breaking in front of me. Ice shifts and grinds around the open water. “Charlotte!” Blake screams again, fighting against Theo and the others with a strength that makes them strain to hold him. “Charlotte!” His voice cracks straight through me, and I answer with my own pain. “Charlotte!” My throat burns.

I twist in Gareth’s arms, trying to see past him, trying to find her, trying to make my eyes turn the water into something else. Anything else.

“Please,” I choke out. “Please, I have to get her. I have to get her. She can’t swim in that. She can’t—she’s under the ice. She’s under the ice.”

Gareth’s arms tighten around me, his chest pressed to my back, his voice low at my ear.

“Charlie, listen to me.”

“No.”

“Listen to me.”

“No!” I slam my elbow back, catching him somewhere in the ribs, but he doesn’t let go. He barely moves. “She’s my sister,” I sob. “She’s mine. She’s all I have.”

“You have us,” he says, voice rough now. “And I am not losing you, too.”

I don’t want us. I want her. I want Lotty standing beside me with snow in her hair and blood on her shoulder and that stubborn look in her eyes. I want her to be angry at me for scaring her. I want her alive enough to hate me for anything at all.

“Let me go,” I beg. “Please. Please, Gareth. Please.”

He makes a low and broken sound, but his arms stay locked.

“I can’t.”

Across the snow, Blake makes another violent push and gets one arm free. His fingers dig into the snow as he drags himself forward, his eyes fixed on the lake. “Charlotte!” he screams. 

Theo throws his weight over him, and two more wolves in human form grab Blake’s shoulders, forcing him down before he can reach the ice. Blake’s body bows under them, fighting every hand. “Get off me!” he roars. “She’s under there! She’s under there!”

The pack keeps dragging him back. The pack keeps dragging me back. Hands that care about us. Hands that love us. Hands that feel cruel because they keep us from following her.

The cold finally reaches me. It bites into my bare skin, but it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters. I stare at the broken place in the lake, at the jagged ice floating in black water, at the ripples spreading and fading until the surface begins to settle. Settling as if nothing had happened. As if my sister didn’t just disappear under it. My breath turns pained and useless. “Lotty,” I whisper, but there is no answer. I reach through the twin place inside me, the place that always knew her, always found her, even in the dark, but there is nothing. Panic opens under my ribs. “No,” I whisper again. “No, no, no.”

Blake is still screaming. I can hear him through everything. “Charlotte!”

I drag in one breath, and then I scream with him. “Charlotte!”

My voice tears out over the lake, over the snow, over the bodies and blood and broken ice. Blake screams her name again, and I scream it too, both of us pinned down by hands that won’t let us die, both of us staring at the place where she vanished. “Charlotte!”

The lake gives nothing back.