Where The Ice Gives Way Chapter 140

**Charlotte**

Voices drift around me, talking about something fast and distant. I don’t know where I am or why my body feels so heavy. Everything hurts. My chest aches. My throat feels scraped raw. My fingers are stiff under the blankets, and when I try to breathe deeper, something pulls tight through my ribs. The voices keep going. One of them laughs quietly. Charlie. Charlie is here. I try to open my eyes, but it takes more effort than it should.

My lashes feel glued together, and when I finally manage to lift them, white light floods in. I squeeze them shut again with a tiny sound, turning my face toward the pillow. The talking stops, and silence falls over the room.

“Charlie, did you see that?”

I hear a chair scrape and fast footsteps. I try to reach for Charlie, but my arm barely moves. My hand shifts against the sheet, and then two hands catch mine from either side. One of them sends a strange warmth up my arm. It tingles through my fingers and settles somewhere behind my ribs. I can hear Charlie calling for a doctor, and the voice beside me drops low, close to my face. “Charlotte, can you hear me, pretty girl? I’m right here.” I don’t know that voice, but I like it. It is both smooth and rough, worn thin at the edges, and it sends a shiver down my spine. He smells like cedar and smoke from a fire. I blink slowly, forcing my eyes open again.

The light still hurts, but I push through it. Shapes swim in front of me. White ceiling. Pale walls. A curtain. A machine with a green line moving across a screen. Then him. He leans over me, coming into focus piece by piece. Messy black hair, tanned skin, dark brown eyes, broad shoulders. His face is tired. There are shadows under his eyes and stubble along his jaw. He’s beautiful. The thought slips through the fog before anything else does. His hand tightens around mine.

“Hey,” he breathes.

My throat burns when I try to speak, and the words come out broken and small. “Who are you?”

All the warmth drains from his face so fast I feel it in the air between us. He doesn’t let go of my hand, but his fingers go still around mine.

“What?” he whispers.

The door opens, and then everything starts moving too fast. A doctor comes in with a nurse behind her. She says my name and shines a light in my eyes, which I flinch away from. A hand touches my wrist. Another adjusts something near my arm.

“What’s happening?” the beautiful stranger demands. His voice cracks hard through the room. “Why doesn’t she know who I am?”

“Blake,” the doctor says firmly. “Step back for a second.”

Blake. The name presses against my chest, but nothing comes.

“I’m not stepping back,” he says.

“Blake,” Charlie says, and his voice is right beside me now, close and shaking. “Let her breathe.”

I turn my head toward him, and it takes everything I have.

Charlie is sitting on my other side, his hand wrapped around mine, his curls messy, his eyes red. He looks different. Older somehow. His mouth trembles even though he is trying to smile.

“Charlie?” I whisper.

“I’m here, Lotty.” He leans closer, both hands around mine now. “Right here. You’re okay.”

I stare at him, trying to make the pieces make sense. He looks like Charlie. He sounds like Charlie. But something about him feels stretched forward, as if I’m missing time.

“What happened?” I ask.

Charlie’s eyes flick over me, then toward Blake, then back again.

The doctor steps closer. “Charlotte, I’m Dr Hale. You’re in the hospital. You had an accident, and you’ve been unconscious for a little while.”

My chest tightens, and my throat burns. “What accident?”

No one answers me, and everything is slowing to a stop around me.

Blake’s hand is still around mine. It’s warm and tingling. My body keeps wanting to lean toward him, even while my mind stares at him from a distance. I look down at our joined hands, and his thumb brushes mine over mine. I look back up at him. He looks ruined.

“Do I know you?” I ask, softer this time.

His mouth opens, but nothing comes out. The doctor steps in before the silence can swallow us. “Charlotte, I need to ask you a few questions, alright?”

I nod, because that seems easier than looking at Blake.

“What’s your full name?”

“Charlotte…” I stop, blinking. “Charlotte Pierce.”

Charlie’s fingers squeeze mine.

“Good. Do you know how old you are?”

“Seventeen.”

Charlie’s grip tightens on my hand, and I flick my eyes to him. “What?”

“Nothing.”

The doctor’s expression stays calm, but her eyes move briefly to the nurse.

“Do you know where you live?”

My mouth opens and closes as a house flashes through my head. A hallway. Cold floor. Charlie’s hand on my wrist. A voice downstairs. I don’t like it. I push the image away.

“With Charlie,” I say.

The doctor nods. “That’s okay. That’s good.”

It doesn’t feel good. It feels like everyone in the room knows something I don’t. I look at Blake again. He is standing very still now, his hand still in mine, his other hand curled into a fist against his thigh. His eyes don’t leave my face. “Blake,” I say, testing the name.

He breathes in sharply, and the air between us pulls.

My chest answers before my mind does, a quiet tug beneath the ache. I don’t understand it. I don’t know him. I don’t know why his name feels warm in my mouth. His eyes shine, but he blinks it back. “Yeah,” he says, voice rough. “That’s me.”

I stare at him.

“You smell familiar.”

Blake’s face crumples for half a second before he pulls it back together. “Yeah?” he asks.

I nod faintly, exhausted from speaking, from looking, from breathing.

“Cedar,” I whisper. “And smoke.”

His hand shakes around mine.

The doctor glances at him, then at Charlie. “She needs to rest. Memory gaps are common after trauma, especially with hypothermia and oxygen deprivation. We’ll assess properly, but for now, don’t push her.”

“Will it come back?” Blake asks.

“We don’t know yet.”

What happened to me? My eyes start to close without permission, and panic rises in me at the dark. My fingers tighten around both hands holding mine.

Charlie leans in close. “I’m here.”

Blake’s voice comes right after, his free hand running through my hair.

“I’m here too, pretty girl.”

I should ask him not to call me that, but I don’t. The dark pulls me under. The last thing I feel is Charlie’s hand holding one side of me, Blake’s holding the other, and that strange warmth still threading up my arm from the guy I don’t remember. The guy my body seems to know anyway.