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CHAPTER SIXTY EIGHT:

UMBILICAL NOOSE.

        IF OCTAVIA BLAKE WAS THE LIGHT OF BELLAMY'S CHILDHOOD, THEN AURORA BLAKE WAS ITS PINNACLE. The highest peak, the altar upon which he had placed every nascent hope and every ounce of devotion his young heart could hold. His love for his mom was not just a bond, but a compulsion—an all-consuming need to be the son she deserved—to measure up to a woman who seemed larger than life, yet so terrifyingly fragile. Aurora was his everything: the most beautiful, the strongest, the wisest . . . and yet, the hardest to please.

        Bellamy would have ripped the flesh from his bones if it meant keeping his mother warm.

        And that was only the beginning.

        For Aurora Blake . . . there was no ceiling to Bellamy's sacrifice. He would've made himself sick if it meant easing her pain, willingly inviting every Ark-borne illness to ravage his small body if it could spare her the discomfort. He would've plucked the stars from the void outside their cramped quarters, allowing their blistering heat to scar his hands as he rearranged them to spell her name. He would have fought soldiers. Broken the laws that bound them in chains. Defied gods and fascist regimes alike—anything, everything, just to keep her safe.

        And he did.

        Bellamy gave his mother every fragment of himself that he could, sacrificed until there was nothing left but the raw, aching remains of the boy who yearned to be her savior.

Her shield. Her anchor. Her son.

        In the end . . . it wasn't enough.

Before Octavia was born, it had always been Bellamy and Aurora—a son and his mother bound not just by blood, but by a shared resilience against a tyrannical government. Aurora had always expected more of him than most mothers did of their sons. She demanded bravery in the face of fear, strength in the absence of comfort, and an unwavering hypervigilance that left no room for weakness. Perhaps it was because the only thing Bellamy had ever known of his father was his absence—a gargantuan void that his small hands could never fill.

(He had tried. Still tried.)

Between the gentle hum of lullabies and the worn, dog-eared pages of mythology books she read to him, Aurora taught Bellamy that strength was not just in clenched fists—but in kindness offered when it hurt the most. She taught him that bravery wasn't about invincibility, but about sacrifice—the willingness to give everything for those you love . . . even when there was nothing left.

        It had prepared him well for Octavia's birth.

        At least, he told himself that.

YOUR SISTER—
YOUR RESPONSIBILITY.

The words weren't just a rule; they were law. A sacred commandment hammered into Bellamy's soul at the tender age of five. A sibling was an impossibility, a forbidden anomaly in the sterile, law-bound history of the Ark. And yet, here she was—Octavia, the tiny light Bellamy had been sworn to protect, even if it meant snuffing out his own.

        He sacrificed his childhood on that altar.

        Neglected friendships. Dreams gutted and left to rot. Barely passed educational classes. Abandoned any semblance of a life outside of the two women who defined his existence. If he kept Octavia safe, his mother would smile, and the reward of that was enough. If he worked tirelessly to join the Guard, exploiting the very system meant to destroy them, it was enough. If he became the best Cadet on the force, ensuring his mother would never have to trade her body in exchange for inspection intel again, it was enough. If he surrendered every shred of autonomy, every hope, every ambition for the sake of someone else's survival . . . it was enough.

        Bellamy had never yearned for more.

        He did not allow himself to need it.

        And then came the lapse.

        One mistake, one grief-stricken lapse of judgment, and the secret world Bellamy had held together with bloodied hands came crashing down. The price of his failure was paid in flesh and bone—in the life of the first woman he had ever sworn to protect.

       Bellamy had watched Aurora Blake get vacuumed into the cold, unfeeling expanse of space, as if her existence were nothing more than celestial debris.

        . . . But the words she branded into his soul remained.

YOUR SISTER—
YOUR RESPONSIBILITY.

Yet, as Earth demanded more from him—more blood, more sacrifice, more grief—the mantra began to twist and grow, reshaping itself with every innocent life lost. Every teenager who died became another ghost, another corpse strapped to Bellamy's shoulders, forcing him to his knees. Your sister—your responsibility became your friends—your responsibility, as though every life around him was his to protect, every death his to atone for.

It hung over him like an iron crown, its crushing weight pressing him earthward time and time again. But Bellamy Blake was not crafted for collapse. He bore it, lifting himself upright with trembling knees and shaking hands, carrying the weight of the world as if it were his birthright.

By the time the creed reached its final evolution, it was no longer a whisper in his mother's voice—but a deafening roar in his own.

YOUR FAMILY—
YOUR RESPONSIBILITY.

        And on Earth, family was no longer just blood. It was the people Bellamy had fought beside, bled beside, and buried beneath the same cursed sky. These kids were his to protect—no matter the cost—even if it killed him.

        Especially if it killed him.

And when the Mountain Men began stealing his family from Level Five's dormitory, vanishing them one by one into the suffocating silence, Bellamy knew—down to the marrow of his bones—that it was his responsibility to find them.

        Bellamy would do anything for his friends—anything, including forcing his too-large frame into the suffocating confines of Mount Weather's air vents. The space was hell—hot, cramped, and generally unfuckingbearable. He kept bumping his stupid hat on the stupid ceiling. Metal walls seemed to close in on him with every movement, yet he pushed forward, spurred by the knowledge of what was at stake. Clarke and Raven had tried to guide him . . . though their constant bickering over the comms did little more than fray Bellamy's patience. Directions came sporadically, between heated arguments and clipped commands, often leaving him to grunt his frustration into the stale, recycled air.

        Unexpectedly, Orion had been the one to emerge as his lifeline, guiding Bellamy with an efficiency that the others couldn't seem to shut up long enough to manage.

". . . Go through the left duct and take the third turn on the right, unless your ass is too fat to squeeze through . . . "

But even with Orion's help, as Bellamy had dragged his corpse deeper and deeper into the labyrinthine pathways, his thoughts were miles away.

They were with Haven.

He knew, without a doubt, that she would have hated the vents. The oppressive confinement, the stifling air, the metal pressing in from all sides—it was a nightmare tailor-made for someone like her. No wonder she had spiraled into HIBI episodes when navigating spaces like this. Beneath the dropship floorboards. In the stifling, cramped car stowed within that goddamn parking garage. The mere thought of Haven enduring something like this had made Bellamy's own breaths come harder. Sweat had slicked his curls, dampening the back of his neck, and he often had to gnash his teeth into his lip to stop himself from gasping for oxygen.

But what unsettled him more than the suffocating space—more than the agony lancing through his body with every pull forward—was the silence.

        Haven's voice was eerily absent from the radio.

According to the girls back at Camp Jaha, Haven had been assisting Naomi with dinner cleanup, taking over the nightly routine that was usually his. The thought of her in his place, doing something so . . . mundane, unnerved Bellamy in ways he could not fully name. Because while it offered him a fleeting sense of relief, it also felt peculiarly wrong.

        . . . Off.

        Clarke had promised to bring Haven back to the Engineering Bay once she was finished, but Bellamy had swiftly cut her off, urging her not to force it.

        Not for his sake.

        Because the truth was, the silence was safer.

        The more occupied Haven was—the better. If scrubbing plates and organizing the kitchen kept her grounded, then she could scrub until her hands bled for all Bellamy cared—so long as it kept her far, far away from the fence of Camp Jaha. So long as it stopped her from conjuring that inevitable, reckless spark—the one that would drive her to slip into the night and chase after them, into the purgatory she had no business running toward.

        He knew her too damn well.

        That being said . . .

        Bellamy could not wait to ask Haven about the playing cards he'd bribed out of that snot-nosed Alpha brat just before he'd left with Lincoln. The kid had driven an impossibly hard bargain, all glittering eyes and smug grins, but Bellamy had inevitably relented—because it was for her.

(He really, really hoped that she liked them.)

Jackson had insisted that small, achievable tasks were essential for maintaining Haven's neural pathways and promoting stability in her brain function. Consistency and simplicity—things she could accomplish without overwhelming herself. Bellamy had nodded, absorbing every word, but he'd refused to let himself linger on the weight of HIBI's diagnosis for more than a heartbeat. Ten seconds, maybe less, before his throat would constrict, his world tilted off-kilter, and his vision blurred with something he refused to let fall.

        Weeping would not help her. Action would.

        Hence, the card games.

        Bellamy had latched onto Jackson's advice with the desperation of a man drowning. He found solace in the fact that there were things he could do—small, deliberate gestures to help Haven, to steady her, to make the unimaginable nightmare she carried in her head just a fraction lighter.

. . . He would've robbed that eight-year-old blind if he had dared to say no.

        Adequately fucking shit up for Haven did not have to demand epic, gladiatorial displays of violence, though god knew she excelled there. She thrived in that space—starfire seething in her eyes—and Bellamy privately loved watching her unleash hell when the moment called for it.

But what he cherished—what mattered more than the poetry of her destruction—was seeing her healthy.

Clarke had even informed him that Haven was back in her shoulder brace, finally free from the oppressive limitations of her sling. And that—that small step, that inch toward strength—was the true, monumental definition of fucking shit up.

        (At least, in Bellamy's lovesick eyes.)

So, the Blake boy had choked back his own selfish need to hear Haven's voice crackle through the comms—some reassurance that she was alive, breathing, fighting—and pushed forward through the suffocating, infernal maze of air ducts.

Then came the sound.

A low, rhythmic whir that had raised the curls on the back of his neck and sent his stomach lurching.

A drill.

Bellamy had edged closer, forcing himself to crawl toward the source despite the dread pooling in his gut. When he finally reached it—peering through the narrow slats of a grated panel in the ceiling—his breath had hitched. Before him stood Dr. Tsing, Mount Weather's cold, calculated harbinger of death, calmly operating her horrific machinery.

And there, strapped to the operating table, was Julian Virek.

Bone marrow extraction—according to Clarke.

Tsing had drawn the blood from Julian's hollowed hip bone like a vulture feeding on carrion, her hands clinically detached as she injected it into the dialysis shunt embedded in a Mountain Man's chest. The horrifying transfusion unfolded effortlessly. Another life stolen. Another friend torn from Level Five's dormitories, snatched from their fragile sense of safety, only to be drained dry for the Mountain Men's twisted survival.

Julian was sixteen.

Sixteen—with a nasally, hopeful laugh that still rang in Bellamy's ears. He could almost hear it now. The sound echoed from their distant days at the dropship, when Julian cracked a joke so atrocious that even Monty had groaned.

Sixteen.

        But the mountain had slaughtered him.

        And Tsing . . . fucking Tsing . . .

It took every shred of restraint Bellamy possessed not to tear through the vent and crush the woman's windpipe. Right then. Right there. He ached for vengeance, not just for Julian—but for Haven. For her blood, the treasure they sought to drain, to desecrate, to exploit for their unholy ambitions. He had been so close to obliterating his mission, when another voice had shattered the moment. Cage—the President's son, Clarke had whispered later—stood beside Tsing, his words as sharp and cruel as the blade Bellamy longed to bury in their throats.

A missile.

The Mountain Men were planning to turn Tondc into a smoldering graveyard. To destroy it as the war council convened, reducing leaders, allies, and hope itself to nothing more than ash and dust. All to crush their external army while the internal one remained hidden in plain sight.

        Bellamy did not think that things could possibly get any worse than they were now.

Which . . . led him to his next task.

After Clarke had assured him that Octavia and Haven were still safe at camp, far from the missile's intended devastation, Bellamy turned his focus to the immediate threat. Cloaking himself in cunning and resolve, he had veiled himself among the Mountain Men, slipping into their ranks like a wolf in sheep's clothing. When the guards descended on the dormitory for another one of Tsing's raids, Bellamy had already positioned himself among the soldiers, waiting for the chaos. It had erupted fast, too fast, and Bellamy's first choice—Miller—was preoccupied, fending off a guard and embarrassingly getting his ass beat.

        . . . That left Jasper.

        Bellamy had seized him by the collar, slamming him against the wall with enough force to startle the kid, but not break him. He demanded the Jordan boy to rally stronger barricades—to fight harder—to hold the line more aggressively so that Tsing could not claim any more of their friends. The boy had nodded jerkily, then offered a slender thread of hope—or perhaps something close to it. Jasper had urged him to locate Dante, the President, the one person who might have the power to stop the madness.

        But the path to him wasn't simple.

        Bellamy would need Dahlia.

        Armed with . . . that knowledge, Bellamy had made his decision swiftly, covertly slipping his pistol into Jasper's trembling hands before turning away. He'd filed out with the rest of the Mountain Men, slipping back into the role of a shadow among his enemies, and ultimately leaving his friends behind.

        It could have killed him.

Leaving his friends behind was not a choice; it was a wound. But Bellamy believed in them—not because of hope or faith, but because he had to. Because acknowledging failure was akin to accepting death. There was no alternative, no margin for error. Bellamy could not—would not—allow their lives to be fodder for the Mountain Men, their innocent bodies piled like carcasses for the slaughter. He had watched tyrants rise before, watched them rip apart families and lives in the name of power. He'd lost too much already, had too much blood on his hands, and heard too many ghosts whispering his name in the jet-black dead of night.

He would not let another regime annihilate what little remained of his family.

        Not again. Never again.

        He refused.

        Now . . . Bellamy was heading for the library.

To find Haven's mother.

Believe it or not, Bellamy wasn't nervous. Or, more accurately, he was horrifyingly nervous, but the rage that writhed beneath his skin left little room for anxiety to fester. The mere thought of her—Haven's abusive, neglectful mother—was enough to contort his organs into knots of revulsion. He didn't just despise Dahlia's existence; he loathed the fact that she was vital to their survival.

        The task was deceptively simple: ensure that Haven's mother, the woman who had failed her in every conceivable way, was truly on their side. Confirm that Lexa's supposed "insider" would remain true to her word. Then, somehow, Bellamy had to convince Dahlia to help sway an entire legion of Grounders—who already believed she was a traitor—to turn against their captors.

        All while trying not to kill her on sight.

        And if that monumental endeavor wasn't daunting enough, there was still the small matter of locating the missing President—the linchpin to halting the bloodshed that threatened to consume them all.

        Easy. Simple.

        (Completely impossible.)

Swallowing his nerves, Bellamy forced himself to walk steadily behind Maya through the library's depths, his ring finger tapping the handle of his pistol in counts of five.

The library itself was suffused with a haunting elegance, the kind of beauty that might have rooted Bellamy to the spot if his world were kinder. He hated that he had to keep his head down, avoiding the watchful gaze of the cameras. Hated even more that he couldn't immerse himself in the ambience—the towering shelves of knowledge, the silent majesty of the place. He longed to trace his fingers along the leather spines of tomes that whispered of lives long past. To breathe in the scent of ink and paper and possibility. As a boy, he knew that he would've lived here if he could, allowing the silence to nurture his wildest, most tender dreams until the world finally forgot him.

        But that boy was long gone—perhaps he never tangibly existed—and the man left behind could not afford the childlike luxury of wonder.

Eventually, Maya guided him to a secluded corner of the library. A massive, gargantuan bookcase stood before them, strategically placed against the wall and beyond the reach of the cameras. Bellamy's gaze lingered for only a moment, the faintest flicker of curiosity stirring as he wondered what genres were tucked away here. But before he could act on the intrusive thought, Maya reached out, plucking a worn paperback from the organized rows. The moment the book left its place—the case groaned to life.

Bellamy arched an eyebrow.

. . . A secret entryway.

With a creak of old wood straining against hidden mechanisms, a smaller section of the massive bookcase swung open—unveiling a passage that burrowed beneath the array of literature against the wall. Maya gave a subtle nod, signaling for Bellamy to follow. He moved after her unhesitatingly, but not without tightening the grip on his gun.

As they stepped into the shadowy corridor, the light from the library dimmed, swallowed by the darkness ahead. The passage, though cramped and dust-laden, promised a vein of secrecy. Perhaps it could be used to strategize, or perhaps it led deeper into another labyrinth of unforeseen dangers. Either way, Bellamy knew that whatever lay at the end of the tunnel, it was pivotal to their mission.

The room at the end of the passage was small . . . but the presence of Dahlia Smith was gargantuan.

Bellamy felt his heart sputter.

        At the heart of the shadow-cloaked room, perched at an unnervingly pristine desk, was Haven's mother. The woman believed dead for the last five years was not only alive, but glaring at him with a precision that left no room for doubt. The book she had been absorbed in lay abandoned, its pages half-turned as her gaze snapped to Bellamy—sharp, unrelenting, dissecting him as though he were the ghost.

Holy. Fuck.

Long, icy locs cascaded from the crown of her head, their frosted hue falling to her waist in a way that struck him with an almost painful familiarity. Brown eyes gleamed beneath the harsh framing of tribal tattoos, their ink arcing from her eyelids and curling insidiously across high, regal cheekbones. Her lips, sculpted in cruel stillness, seemed to carry centuries of unspoken judgment. There was no warmth in Dahlia Smith—only the glacial severity of a woman who could anesthetize a room with her presence alone.

        Haven looked nothing like Dahlia.

        But Dahlia looked everything like Haven.

It was a cruel, haunting resemblance—one that made Bellamy's stomach churn. The Smith women were mirrors of one another at a glance, their shared features unmistakably carved from the same mold. But Bellamy knew better. Even if today had been his first encounter with both of them, he still would have known better. The likeness between the women was a shallow, deceptive thing—an echo born of blood and bone.

        Genealogy. Nothing else.

        Everything that Dahlia was, Haven was not. Any beauty in Dahlia had not been passed down to her daughter; it had been taken. A reversal of the natural order of inheritance. As though she had stolen Haven's most striking qualities for herself, absorbed them like a thief in the night, and woven them into the facade she now wore. Dahlia's face was a frigid mockery of Haven's—flawless in its symmetry but utterly devoid of the warmth, the heart, the life that made Haven who she was.

       It wasn't inheritance—it was theft.

        A counterfeit. A fraud.

Haven was. Dahlia took.

Still.

Bellamy knew without question that both women could unmake him with a single glance. A power neither of them had to hone—it was innate, a weapon carved from something elemental. And as Dahlia's gaze raked over him now, Bellamy could feel the weight of it—as if her very presence dared his greedy lungs to take another breath.

        And then . . .

        "There he is!"

Unexpectedly . . . Dahlia's voice wasn't the venom-laced accusation Bellamy had braced for. Instead, she rose from her chair, gliding across the room to greet him and Maya at the hidden entrance. Her tattooed hand reached out with an almost playful air to pat the pocket of Bellamy's—no, Lovejoy's—uniform. Although the contact was light, it seethed against his skin like a brand. Her fingers lingered, and for a split second, Bellamy froze.

        Should he flinch away from that hand . . . or crush it beneath his own?

        He did not know.

        But what he did know was what those hands had done to her daughter.

        "He lives!" Dahlia greeted . . . warmly, her voice carrying an edge of amusement that felt unnervingly out of place. "It's about damn time you showed up."

Uh . . .

        Bellamy cleared his throat and forced himself to stand taller. "You know who I am?"

(He hated that his voice sounded half an octave higher than normal.)

        "I'd recognize that freckled face anywhere," Dahlia hummed knowingly, lips curling into the faintest of smirks. "I used to watch you raid the Mythology section of the library when you were..." Her hand flicked downward, halting at the height of her hip bone. "...This high."

Bellamy froze. Again.

        . . . Holy. Fuck.

Haven had mentioned her mother working in Factory's library, but she'd never painted Dahlia as someone so . . . tangible. Bellamy had always thought of her as a distant, shadowy figure in Haven's past, not someone who might have watched him. He could vaguely remember the library staff from when he was a boy, back when the Ark's systems still relied on human interaction. Faces blurred by time. Voices swallowed by the rise of self-service scanners and automated order. As the technology evolved, the librarians had faded into the background like the soft hum of an old machine.

Faceless. Forgotten.

But not Dahlia.

Bellamy racked his brain, digging furiously into the buried ruins of his memory, searching for any trace of Dahlia—or Haven. Surely, he would have noticed her. Even then, as a boy, he would've felt the magnetic pull—the impossible certainty of the girl haunting the same aisles of myths and legends as he did. It was meant to matter; he certainly would have remembered the love of his goddamn life walking those same halls.

        . . . Right?

The question mattered little when Dahlia's knowledge of his escapades in the Mythology section was an answer in itself.

        Dahlia had always known of him.

        "Bellamy Blake," she drawled, tilting her head as she studied him. Despite her shorter stature—a mirror of Haven's—there was nothing diminutive about her presence. "The leader. The infiltrator. And, if memory serves, the same boy I had to peel off my daughter's bleeding body back at the ruins of your camp."

HOLY. FUCK.

The words slammed into Bellamy like a fist, forcing his lungs to empty of air he hadn't realized he'd been holding. Memories clawed their way to the surface, annihilating the crimson fog in his mind. He could feel it all over again—fire licking at the edges of his world, the deafening roar of the rocket explosion, and the sharp, jarring sensation of waking to the suffocating quiet that followed.

Undead.

That was what it had felt like.

Waking from the edge of death, every nerve screaming in protest as he reached for Haven's body beside him—only to grasp at nothing.

She was gone. Vanished.

And then there was the foxhole.

A crude shelter. Covert. Protective. Bellamy had woken up there, far from the epicenter of the blast, concealed like some hidden artifact. At the time, he hadn't questioned it any further. He had been too disoriented to wonder how he'd ended up there, alive and intact, when everything else had burned.

But now, clarity struck with all the subtlety of a lightning bolt.

. . . It was Dahlia.

Dahlia had been the one to separate them.

Bellamy's jaw tightened, the veins in his neck pulsing beneath his skin as he stared her down. "You put me into that foxhole?" he pressed. "It was you who took me away from her—?

        Dahlia shrugged. "Believe it or not, it was for the best."

        "For the best," Bellamy echoed bitterly. "Yeah. Right."

        "You don't seem like the type to die for just anybody."

        "You don't know a damn thing about me."

        "I know that your corpse was cocooned around my daughter's." Dahlia's admission was calm, unbothered, as though Bellamy's mounting fury was nothing more than a trivial nuisance—far beneath her notice. "That tells me more than enough."

       Bellamy wrestled with the sudden, almost overwhelming urge to clench his fists, but he refused to grant Dahlia the satisfaction. "Still waiting for your explanation."

        Dahlia's lips curled into a smirk, one that quickly unraveled into what seemed to be her natural state—a faint scowl. "You're incredibly... gruff," she mused. "Separating you two gave Haven the motivation to claw her way out of this purgatory. To believe there was something out there still worth fighting for." Her voice was calm, maddeningly rational—as though she were recounting a strategy rather than the choice that had obliterated his universe. "I was part of the scout team that brought your friends back here. When I saw the state of her shoulder injury—what was left of it beneath you—I knew she'd bleed out and die if I didn't act. I made the call to bring her here."

        Her gaze locked with his. Unflinchingly.

        "You were still breathing. Barely. But you were alive enough to be an incentive. Haven needed something to fight for... so I did the right thing and separated you. You should be thanking me."

        Once again, Dahlia's words slammed into Bellamy's ribcage, not as a blunt force this time—but as an incendiary slash of lightning. His hand twitched toward the holster at his waistband before he forced it away, dropping it to his side. Instead, he clenched his fist behind his back. The motion repeated in a silent, desperate rhythm—seeking to funnel the rage coursing through him into something less volatile, less wretched than the woman standing so calmly in front of him.

        It wasn't that he didn't understand the logic behind Dahlia's actions, not when she framed it so clinically. Bellamy had seen the extent of Haven's injury with his own eyes—the mangled state of her shoulder, hanging by a thread as they crawled toward each other amidst the carnage of their camp. He could still feel the weight of her blood soaking through his jacket. It made sense. Medically. Transporting her to Mount Weather to save her life, to repair the muscle and to keep her from bleeding out—it was rational.

        He couldn't argue with that.

        But it wasn't the act itself that set Bellamy's blood on fire. It was the rest of it. Everything beyond the necessity.

        Incentive.

        The word seethed in his mind, sharp and bitter, igniting something far darker than the fury he had tried so hard to suppress. He could no longer bite his tongue at the mere notion of it. That Haven's survival—her will to survive—had been treated like a calculated gamble, a lever to be pulled for effect.

        It wasn't strategy.

        It was . . .

"Has anybody ever told you that you're fucking insane?"

        Dahlia blinked, momentarily astonished, before her amusement contorted into an incredulous laugh. "Oh! He swears!" she exclaimed. "Big, bad Bellamy with his righteous little temper tantrum. Your words can't hurt me, boy. I've been called far worse for my entire adult life. Go on. Stomp your boots. Hit me with your hardest." She arched an infuriatingly smug eyebrow. "But we both know that you can't argue with results. My plan worked. Didn't it?"

        Bellamy's fist clenched like iron behind his back, his restraint warring with the impulse to tap against his gun once more. "You traumatized her."

        "Trauma works wonders, darling."

        "Haven's your daughter—"

        "And—?" Dahlia tilted her head as though Bellamy's statement wandered far beyond her realm of understanding. "Do you think being my daughter suddenly makes Haven exempt from reality? Would you prefer her to be soft and useless... or strong and capable?"

        "Useless?" An incredulous scoff seared Bellamy's lips and echoed viciously against the walls. "Useless—?"

        "I taught her how to survive," Dahlia interrupted, her tone maddeningly matter-of-fact, as if the sheer absurdity of her reasoning should be self-evident. "Certain requirements needed to be met in order to trust her with the mission here. She needed to be tested, pushed, and forged. I had to make sure she was capable enough—"

        "She was BORN capable!"

Dahlia did not flinch at the declaration.

Bellamy's stare burned into her, hellfire colliding with an immovable glacier. Dahlia Smith was no more than a hollow vessel in his eyes, a bloodless apparition that had somehow claimed the role of mother to the girl he loved. The dissonance rang in his skull like a broken bell—how could Haven, the Haven he knew, have sprung from soil so cold, so barren, so merciless? How had Haven grown beneath the shadow of Dahlia's stone-cold detachment without being frozen solid herself? Perhaps as a child, her tongue had been stilled by fear. Maybe she'd learned to shrink beneath the weight of Dahlia's icy authority, too afraid to speak up against the biological entity that called itself her mother.

        But Bellamy was no frightened child.

        He hadn't been there for Haven as a kid.

        But now . . .

"Why does she have to jump through hoops to prove that to you, huh?" Bellamy pressed, relinquishing the tension in his clenched fist only to cross his arms defiantly across his chest. "Why aren't you the one trying to prove yourself to her? Your daughter is the smartest person I've ever met. The bravest. The strongest. She's not strong because of you—she's strong in spite of you. What the hell has she done to make you think otherwise? To suggest that she isn't capable?" His head shook in a torrent of unfathomable outrage. "Why make her suffer on purpose?"

Dahlia shrugged icily. "That's the price of survival."

"No," Bellamy spat out through gritted teeth. "That's the price of you."

"And my prices kept both of you alive. You're welcome." Dahlia retorted, her voice a fortress unto itself, impervious to the scathing scorn hurled from Bellamy's lips. "Do you ever get tired of hearing yourself talk without a shred of comprehension? I mean, really. You can't possibly understand the burdens borne by a woman of the Smith lineage."

        "Burdens," Bellamy echoed flatly. "How about the burden of being raised by the narcissist who thinks her abuse is a gift?"

        "Spare me the lecture." Dahlia's jaw tightened, the sharp line of her clenched teeth betraying her irritation—though her hand waved dismissively. "You. Don't. Understand. You're just a kid playing hero, Bellamy. A boy pretending he's a man. And you're certainly not a parent."

"And you were?"

At that . . . Dahlia finally stiffened.

Bellamy would rather die than back down. "Abandoning your fifteen-year-old daughter to chase some delusional dream of a dead planet? Over the child who was right there in front of you? The... the gift you had beneath your own goddamn nose? Neglecting her? Beating her?" He nearly laughed, the bitter sound threatening to erupt, but he forced it down, allowing the venom to do its work. His lips curled into a snarl as he delivered the final blow. "Mother of the fucking year."

He couldn't quite decipher the whirl of complexities flitting across Dahlia's face in response to his damning judgment. The unsettling echoes of resemblance between mother and daughter nearly bent Bellamy's perceptions as he attempted to navigate them. On most days, Bellamy could read the undercurrents of Haven's emotions masterfully, long before they painted themselves across her heaven-touched features. But on others . . . she sealed herself away with a skill that even he could not penetrate.

If Haven was stone—solid, steady, but weathered with cracks that hinted at the life beneath—Dahlia was iron. Cold, rigid, and deliberately forged to repel anything that dared to touch it.

At last, the woman cleared her throat.

"Did Haven tell you that?"

        Bellamy clenched his jaw. "No," he muttered lowly. "But the way she flinched away from me for an entire year did. So did the scar on her lower back." His eyes narrowed into condemning slits as he menacingly cocked his head. "What was that from, anyway? A belt—?"

"Oh, how noble of you to notice." Dahlia cut in. "But tell me something, boy—how did you spot that scar on her body, hmm? Have you seen Haven naked?"

        Bellamy went rigid. "No."

       "Are you having sex with my daughter, Bellamy?"

FUCK.

        Bellamy's wide eyes nearly burst from their goddamn sockets. "I—"

"You're certainly not making a compelling case for my help here." Dahlia raised her voice not in volume but in clarity—the kind of sternness reserved for reprimanding an insolent child. "In fact, you're doing an exceptional job of convincing me to reconsider keeping your secrets. You know, I had a choice yesterday when I found Lovejoy's corpse rotting in the dumpster. Could've gone straight to the guards and let them handle it."

        Her lips curled into a taunting sneer as she leaned closer.

        "Consider yourself lucky that I told Tsing and Cage it was yours."

Bellamy blinked in bewilderment.

. . . She did what?

        "So, if you're determined to keep biting the only hand that's keeping you alive, by all means—continue," Dahlia concluded coldly, reaching upward to adjust the collar of Lovejoy's stolen uniform and adjusting the hat atop Bellamy's crown of curls. "But don't mistake my patience for weakness. It has limits... and you, Bellamy Blake, are walking a dangerously thin line."

Bellamy forced himself to straighten.

As much as he fucking loathed the woman standing before him—a pitiful, venomous shadow of humanity—he couldn't ignore the weight of Dahlia's confession. It grated against him like shards of glass. If he wanted any chance of pulling off their mission, of saving the people who mattered, he had to endure her presence. He had to be the better man—the smarter one. Adult enough to tether his rage from devouring reason, and man enough to resist putting a bullet through her as penance for what she'd done to her daughter.

        She'd helped him survive, somehow.

        He hated her for it.

        Every second in Dahlia's orbit felt like another step toward the gallows, her assistance less an offering and more a death sentence.

        And yet, Bellamy bore it.

        For now. For them. For Haven.

        Bellamy drew in a slow, deliberate inhale through his nose. "I'm here because we need a distraction. Something to stop the guards from taking more of my friends for the bone marrow extractions," he explained stiffly. He was fully aware of the minefield he was navigating now, the stakes higher than ever. "Once we take Level Five, I have to disable the acid fog to make way for our external army. There's an alliance in place now. The Grounders are coming with... reinforcements."

Dahlia arched an eyebrow. "Haven pulled it off?"

"Of course she did," Bellamy snarled reflexively, forcing himself to swallow his outrage and resuming the relentless rhythm of counting in his mind. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. He needed to hear Haven's voice on the radio soon. "Then, we have to recruit the Grounders in the Harvest Chamber for our internal army. Take the Mountain Men down from the inside. My friends told me that Dante's on our side."

The words felt foreign, acidic, as though they scorched his mouth the moment they escaped . . . but the question that followed was infinitely worse.

"Are you?"

        Bellamy felt flayed alive, stripped to his very marrow under the scalpel of Dahlia's stare. It wasn't just the weight of his people's survival pressing on her answer that unsettled him—it was the unsettling familiarity in her eyes. Those traitorous, undeserved eyes that cleaved through the armor he had built, seeing not the man shaped by blood and sacrifice, but the boy he had buried long ago.

A boy she had no right to see.

She had stolen that vision from Haven—leeched it like some parasitic thief, wielding it as a weapon to disarm him.

       (Were these the crazy eyes Haven had warned him about? Was this the part where he was supposed to stop, drop, and roll . . . now?)

One beat passed. Another.

And then . . .

"I'm with you."

Bellamy silently awaited an explanation.

"Didn't Haven tell you? We're burning this motherfucker to the ground, boy." Dahlia met his skepticism head-on, lifting her chin with the confidence of someone who had long since accepted the weight of her own sins. "I tried to hold off Tsing for as long as I could. Cage was always a lost cause. But I can't interfere any further—not directly—without compromising my role among their government. They still trust me." She released a weighted sigh. "I armed Nathan with as much as I could before I brought Haven back to the dorms."

Bellamy's mind throttled—spun—then snapped horrifically taut.

        "What?"

"Maps. Codes. Lamp poles. Inconspicuous weapons they can use to fortify their defenses," Dahlia continued. "It's not much, but it should be enough to—"

"Haven's here?"

        Bellamy stared at Dahlia with the desperation of a man who had already drowned a thousand deaths—dragged beneath the surface by unseen hands, lungs bursting, only to reemerge half-dead and be forced back under again. He sought a lifeline in her answer, but all he found was the cruel reflection of his own hope. It crushed instead of stabilizing, its weight dragging him deeper into an ocean as black and torturously salt-laden as despair itself.

        He had to have misheard her.

        Haven wasn't here. Haven wasn't here.

        She couldn't possibly be back here.

        But the pity in Dahlia's eyes told him everything Bellamy needed to know, inevitably sealing his coffin and forcing him to drown.

        "You... you didn't know she was coming?" Dahlia drawled out her words slowly, as if even she found the revelation difficult to believe. Her bewilderment lingered before sharpening into something far more cutting. "Oh, isn't that rich. I thought you two planned this little suicide mission together, but... I suppose I was mistaken. Haven snuck back in to help you and your friends, apparently."

        . . . No.

        No. No. No. No. No.

        Panic constricted Bellamy's organs until he was certain his chest was bound to implode and splatter against the walls. He did not need to glimpse his reflection in Dahlia's eyes to know the truth—his bronze skin had already faded to the ashen pallor of something long dead. Lifeless. Blue. Bloated. The hollow, decaying wreckage of a man who had already failed too many times to count.

Bellamy Blake was no savior—he was merely a walking corpse in denial, broken by his own shortcomings.

        Somewhere in the deepest recesses of his soul, in a particle of himself so small it was almost imperceptible, he knew. He knew he hadn't done enough to stop Haven from running after him. He had felt it in the silence on the radio, the gaping absence where her voice should have been. He knew something was off. But instead of facing the truth, he'd clung to the beautiful, poisonous lie that—for once—he hadn't been the anchor dragging her into the abyss.

        Failing. Failing. Failing. Failing. Failing.

        Eternally failing to protect the people—the person—who mattered most.

How could Bellamy have thought pathetic little love notes and playing cards—a half-hearted gesture of hope—would be enough to tether Haven to her promise? To keep her safe? To make her stay?

        He was so fucking stupid.

        Glass stretched over his wide eyes.

"Where is she?" he whispered.

"Relax," Dahlia huffed, brushing off the vulnerability clouding Bellamy's tear-brimmed eyes, the sight too . . . human, for her to stomach. She pointedly looked away. "I got her out of Tsing's lab, but she's still acting infuriatingly... ungrateful about it. The hell is wrong with her? Really. It's almost like she wants to die—"

"Where. Is. She."

Dahlia sighed. "She's in the dorms."

Bellamy wasted no time as he spun on his heels and forcibly blinked away his tears. His gaze barely flickered to Maya, who lingered timidly near the entryway to the library. Without a word, the Vie girl turned and took the lead, slipping into the hidden passageway as Bellamy fell into stride behind her.

. . . Only for Dahlia to grip his shoulder.

He almost reached for his gun and fired.

Almost.

"Slow down." Dahlia lowered her hand from Bellamy's uniform as soon as she sensed the anxiety oozing from him. He bled all over her fingers like an open wound. "Haven's safe—for now. Tsing plans her raids every four hours. If you want to save her and your friends, I can lead you to Dante first. He'll know how to buy them more time."

Bellamy's chest rose and fell with shallow, uneven breaths, his fingers still twitching near the gun, but Dahlia refused to falter. She let her words sink in, permeate the charged air between them, knowing all too well that, despite his instincts screaming otherwise—he had no choice but to trust her.

        At least, for now.

He moved again. Unflinchingly.

"That easy, huh?" Dahlia quipped, falling into step beside him. Her smaller frame was dwarfed by his shadow, but the confidence in her tone refused to be overshadowed. The two of them moved swiftly through the narrow passageway towards the library. "You don't think I'm leading you to your death—?"

"I don't care if you are," Bellamy shot back, ensuring he kept his eyes glued to the perimeter and far, far away from Dahlia. "I've got a gun for a reason."

"I'm the mother of the girl you love. You'd really shoot me?"

        "The same mother who put a gun to her head—after you drugged her and shoved her into a cage," Bellamy spat wretchedly. "Keep fucking talking and watch how fast I'll call it even."

        Dahlia laughed. Loudly.

Another trait that was stolen from her daughter—its sharp, familiar echo only exacerbating the agony in Bellamy's aching heart.

        "Y'know what? I think I might like you," Dahlia mused, studying the Blake boy as though she were peeling back the layers of his flesh for sport. "Perhaps tolerate is a better word. You're outrageously dense. Thick-skulled and heart-strong to the point of sheer idiocy. But, you're... brave."

Bellamy did not dignify her with a glance.

        "I learned that from your daughter."

• •

HIIIII!!!!

bellamy keeps the throne yall 👑 YES MAAM!

a chapter under 8k words..... WHAAAAAT! i dont think we've had a chapter this length since before the confessional chapters in act 1.
initially it was 12.8k words, but I decided to split hav's pov and include it in the next chapter instead. both povs have SUCH significant moments in them (especially the next one) and i wanted each of them to have their respective breathing room without one overshadowing the other

plus... i really feel like this interaction needed its own chapter. i die to write bells pov and sometimes i write them faster than i write haven's lol. bell's in #thoughtdaughtermode and the mommy issues felt more cohesive all rolled into this chapter so they can hit ✨harder✨
(... dont think about how bell's hypervigilance TRUTHFULLY at its core stems from the dedication to his mom/octavia.... and then its metamorphosis when it comes to haven !!! and how abby's actions exploited that!!! dont do it!! i cried!!)
like abby needs to be SHOT. we know that. but we can also bring torches for the entire ark government for forcing him into this perpetual state of anxiety at literally FIVE

we've got some big moments for hav in the next chapter. SHITS GETTING REAL AND EVERYONES FUCKING SHIT UP YALLL!
its gonna be SUPER LOONGG AND ACTION PACKED🤭

plus.... REUNION BABY!!!!! 🥹🤓
the TRUE reunion will be chapter 70 (you'll see what i mean) but they're def back next week

i love you!!! happy holidays and happy new year :))) im wishing all of you the warmest of wishes and sending the BIGGEST of hugs!!!

^(thank u lizzie)^