Bella's POV:
I lay on my bed, staring at the textured ceiling as if it held the answers. The quiet of my room was a stark contrast to the storm in my head.
Maybe I was too harsh on him.
The thought was a whisper, soft but persistent, cutting through the lingering fog of my own fear. He'd been intense, overwhelming, dominant in a way that short-circuited every sensible thought. But had he truly been cruel? The memory of his touch wasn't violent; it was… sure. The look in his violet eyes at the end wasn't anger. It was something like devastation.
When all he showed was kindness… maybe dominance, but anyways.
I groaned, rolling over and burying my face in my pillow. I was arguing semantics with myself. He was a panther. Dominance was his language. And in his own, possessive, infuriating way, hadn't he been trying to show me I was seen? Desired? Chosen in a way that felt terrifyingly absolute?
I shouldn't have said that. You could eat me.
The words echoed back, cringe-worthy and cruel. I'd reduced the complex, terrifying pull between us to a crude cartoon of predator and prey. I'd insulted his control, the very thing he'd been trying to prove to me.
A cold knot of regret tightened in my stomach. Oh, god. What do I do?
My phone sat silent and guilty on my nightstand. I hadn't answered a single text or call in three days. He must be furious. The thought of his anger, cold and sharp, sent a shiver through me. But the thought of his hurt… that sent a different, deeper pang straight to my chest.
I needed space. I'd needed it to breathe, to separate the scent of him from my own scrambled instincts. But the space was starting to feel less like safety and more like a void I'd created myself. And in the quiet of my room, I was no closer to an answer than I was in the passenger seat of his car.The silence in my room became a cage. Every tick of the clock on my wall was an accusation. Coward. Liar. Rabbit.
I pushed myself up, my ears twitching at the distant, comfortable sounds of my father rumbling in his study and my mother humming downstairs. Their normalcy was a world away from the electric chaos Knox had introduced into my life.
My fingers itched. I stared at the dark screen of my phone, a tiny black monolith containing all the words I was too scared to hear… and the ones I was too scared to say.
Hesitantly, I reached for it. The screen lit up under my touch, blinding in the dim room. There they were. The missed calls. The unread messages. A digital monument to my retreat. I took a shaky breath and opened the thread.
I scrolled past his earlier, terser messages, bracing for the fury, the cold demands I was sure would be there. But then I saw it. The latest ones, sent just tonight.
Knox: Bella.
Knox: I'm sorry.
Knox: Not for wanting you. I will never be sorry for that. But for the way I showed it. For frightening you.
Knox: You asked me if I was sorry. This is my answer.
Knox: I am here. When or if you ever want to talk. No fitting rooms. No demands. Just… talk.
The air left my lungs in a soft, astonished rush. All the coiled tension I'd been holding, the expectation of his rage, unraveled, leaving me feeling unmourned. This wasn't fury. This was… a surrender. A laying down of arms. From him.
Tears, hot and sudden, pricked at my eyes. This was worse. His anger I could have met with my own. This quiet, raw honesty disarmed me completely. He'd heard my cruelest fear, and instead of raging against the accusation, he'd apologized for causing the feeling behind it.
My thumbs hovered over the screen. The need for space was still there, a real, physical pressure in my chest. But it was now tangled with a sharp, pulling need to bridge this terrible silence I'd created.
I didn't type a reply. Not yet. But for the first time in three days, I didn't feel like I was just hiding. I was holding the fragile, offered end of a thread. And I hadn't let it go.
The decision felt less like a choice and more like a gravitational pull. Before my courage could evaporate, I snatched the phone, found his name, and pressed the call button.
It rang once. Twice.
My heart hammered against my ribs, a frantic drum solo drowning out all other sound. He's going to be angry. He's going to be cold. He's—
"Bella."
He picked up on the third ring. His voice wasn't what I expected. It wasn't the low, commanding rumble from the car, or the sharp, dangerous tone I'd braced for. It was… quiet. Careful. As if he were holding something fragile, and the slightest wrong word would shatter it.
The sound of my name in that tone unspooled me. All the rehearsed apologies, the defensive explanations, tangled in my throat and died.
A choked, silent sob hitched in my chest. I couldn't speak. I just pressed the phone tighter to my ear, listening to the faint, steady sound of his breathing on the other end of the line, waiting for me in the silence I had broken.
My voice was a thin, shaky thread, barely more than a whisper. It was the only question that mattered, stripped of everything else.
"Are you… really sorry?"
The line was so silent for a moment I thought he might have hung up. Then I heard it, a slow, deliberate exhale, as if he were letting go of a weight he'd been carrying.
"For frightening you? For making you see a monster where there's just a man who's terrible at this?" His voice was soft, graveled with a raw honesty that vibrated through the speaker. "Yes, Bella. I am. I am so sorry for that."
He paused, and I could almost see him running a hand through his hair, those sleek panther ears lowered in regret. "But I need you to understand something. I am not sorry for knowing you're it for me. I'm not sorry for seeing my future in your eyes. I'm only sorry that my way of showing it made you want to run from yours."
Another beat of silence, filled only with the shared hum of the connection.
"Does that make sense?"
he asked, his voice quieter now, almost hesitant. It was the sound of a predator consciously sheathing every claw, asking permission just to exist in the same space.
His words didn't just hang in the air; they settled over me, a heavy, warm cloak of a truth I couldn't deny. He wasn't apologizing for the core of it, for the devastating, terrifying certainty. He was apologizing for the shock of the delivery. And somehow, that made it more real, not less. I swallowed around the tightness in my throat.
"It… it makes sense," I whispered, the admission feeling both terrifying and like a first, solid step on unsteady ground. I could hear the subtle shift in his breathing, a slight release of tension.
"Thank you," he murmured, the words thick.
Silence stretched again, but it was different now. The electric, hostile charge was gone, replaced by something quieter, more delicate. It was the silence of two people standing on either side of a chasm, one having just thrown a rope across.
"What do we do now, Knox?"
The question left me in a rush, all my confusion laid bare. I was a rabbit asking a panther for a road map through a dark forest. It was absurd. It was necessary. I heard the soft rustle of fabric, as if he were leaning forward, bringing the phone closer.
"We go slow," he said, the words a vow. "You set the pace. You tell me when to stop. No more fitting rooms. No more… overwhelming you." A faint, self-deprecating humor tinged his voice. "I can do slow. For you, I can learn to do anything." He let that promise hang for a moment before adding, his voice gentle but firm,
"But Bella? You have to talk to me. You can't just… disappear into silence. That, I can't handle. If you need space, you tell me. If I go too far, you tell me to stop. But you have to tell me."
It was a condition. A boundary from the one who seemed to have none. And it was perfectly, devastatingly fair.
"Okay," I breathed, the word a surrender to the process, to the terrifying, hopeful possibility. "Okay. I can do that."
The quiet that followed was no longer empty. It was full of a new, fragile understanding, and the first, tentative thread of trust, spun across the void.
A small, shaky laugh escaped me, born more from nerves than humor. It felt strange to use the muscles after so much tension. I bit my lip again, testing the new, fragile ground between us.
"You know," I said, my voice still soft but gaining a faint, teasing thread, "those three days… you can consider that your punishment."
I held my breath, waiting. It was a risk, a tiny step back toward the fire to see if it would still burn.
The silence on the other end lasted just a heartbeat too long. Then, I heard it—a low, warm, and utterly genuine chuckle. It was a rich, rolling sound that seemed to vibrate through the phone and straight into my bones, loosening a knot of anxiety I hadn't even fully acknowledged.
"Consider it noted," he said, his voice now laced with that same warm amusement. "And duly served. The sentence was… exceptionally effective. I promise to be on my best behavior to avoid a repeat."
There was a smile in his words. A real one. And in that moment, the remaining ice around my heart didn't just crack, it melted completely. We weren't okay yet. But we were talking. And he was laughing. And for now, that was everything.