Where The Ice Gives Way Chapter 137

**Blake**

My face is turned sideways into the snow. It fills my mouth when I scream. Theo is across my back, one arm locked around my shoulder. His weight pins me down while two others hold my legs. Someone has my wrist twisted behind me. Someone else is shouting in my ear, but I can’t hear the words anymore. All I hear is the lake—the cracking ice. The water is closing. Charlotte is under there.

I throw my body against them, chest heaving, hands clawing for purchase in the snow. My fingers dig down to frozen dirt, nails splitting under the pressure, skin tearing as I try to drag myself forward one inch at a time. I don’t feel it. I don’t feel anything except the space where she was. “Charlotte!” I scream again. My voice rips apart on her name.

Theo’s grip tightens. “Blake, stop.”

I buck under him so hard he grunts. “Get off me!”

“You’ll die!”

“I don’t care!”

Because I don’t. I don’t want a life without her in it.

I reach for her through the bond, shoving my mind down that thread, searching for her voice, her breath, anything at all— And all I find is cold. I claw harder at the snow. “Charlotte!” Then something moves on the far side of the lake. A human shape crashes out of the trees, slipping down the bank, blood streaked across his face and shirt, one arm hanging wrong at his side. Charlotte’s father runs straight onto the cracking lake. His boots skid across the ice. A crack shoots beneath him, and his foot sinks through with a burst of black water. He pitches forward, catches himself on one hand, then rips his leg free and keeps going. The fight drains out of me as my chest fills with hope. I go still beneath Theo.

Her father reaches the broken edge where Charlotte went under. He doesn’t stop. He dives straight in, and the lake swallows him too. Everyone goes quiet around me, as the water ripples, then settles. Seconds stretch until they feel endless. My lungs burn. My body shakes under the weight of the people still holding me down, but I don’t fight now. I stare at the hole in the ice and beg with everything left in me. Please. Please. Please.

The water breaks. Her father comes up first, choking, one arm hooked under Charlotte’s body. Charlotte. There she is. Human. Limp. Her hair is plastered to her face. Her lips are blue. Her eyes are closed. A broken sound leaves me, and Lex surges through me, using every last bit of strength we have. “GET OFF!”

The command explodes out of me. Everybody holding me freezes. Theo’s arms lock for one split second, and that’s all I need. I tear free and scramble forward, hands and knees in the snow, then push onto my feet and run for the lake. “Blake!” someone shouts, but they can get fucked. I don’t stop.

I hit the ice carefully, dropping low, spreading my weight, my palms flat against the surface as I move forward inch by inch—the ice trembles beneath me. Cracks branch out in thin lines, spreading under my hands. I keep moving. Slow. Careful. Every instinct in me is screaming to run, to get to her faster. I force my body to stay low, to crawl, to slide forward while Charlotte’s father fights to push her up onto the broken edge.

He gets her chest onto it, and the ice gives. They both drop again. “No!”

I shove forward, and the ice cracks under my knee. Her father surfaces again, gasping, his teeth chattering, his hands shaking so badly I don’t know how he’s still holding her. He pushes her higher this time. “Take her!” he chokes.

I stretch as far as I can, my body flat on the ice, my arm reaching out until my shoulder burns with the strain. Charlotte’s hand slips. Her skin is freezing as I grab her wrist. Her father shoves from beneath her, forcing her arms onto the ice, and I lock both hands around her forearms. “I’ve got her,” I grit out. “I’ve got her.”

The ice groans under us as I lock eyes with him. His face is grey from the cold, blood washed pale across his temple, but his eyes are steady. “Save her,” he says, as he pushes her again.

I drag Charlotte toward me with everything I have, sliding backward across the ice, my elbows digging in as the surface cracks beneath her legs. Water surges up, and the ice breaks again. Her father keeps pushing from below, lifting her just enough that I can pull her free of the hole. Her body slides toward me. I wrap an arm around her and roll onto my back, dragging her across my chest as I scramble away from the break. Hands grab me from behind, and I hear Charlie, “Don’t let her go. Hold onto her.” He drags us across the ice and into the snow. The second we hit the bank, I curl around her. “Charlotte.”

She doesn’t answer. Her lips are blue. Her skin is too cold. I press my ear to her mouth, trying to feel breath, but my own breathing is too loud, too broken. “Charlotte, baby, breathe. I need you to breathe for me, pretty girl.” My voice cracks and shakes, and I run my hands all over her body and her face. 

Dad drops beside us. “Doctors are coming. I’ve already linked them.”

Mum’s voice cuts through somewhere behind him, sharp and breaking as she orders people back, telling someone to get blankets, telling someone else to clear space. Hands move around us, and coats drop into the snow. Dad presses fingers to her throat, then her wrist, then back again. Another hand reaches for her. For her. For her. “Don’t take her from me!” I snarl, the sound raw in my throat.

Dad’s hand closes firmly around the back of my neck. “Blake. You’ve got to let us help her.”

I look down at her. At the water dripping from her hair into the snow, and the stillness in her chest. My arms loosen by the smallest fraction as I rock her into me. “I’m here,” I whisper against her forehead. “I’m right here, Lotty.”

I look back toward the lake. The water shifts once, and a hand breaks the surface for half a second—Then disappears… Charlotte’s father is gone. The lake closes over him. I stare at the dark water with Charlotte, cold and silent in my arms. The truth settles into my chest with a weight I will never be able to put down. He came back for her… and he let the lake take him instead.