19. We’ve Been Here Before Ronan
19
We’ve Been Here Before: Ronan
“ I t’s the little things that I remembered first, really,” Silene starts, her piercing stare roaming the faces of everyone in the room. “Phrases, really. Someone’s voice speaking to me.” She flicks her beautiful green eyes to mine and lets them linger a beat longer than she had anyone else’s when she reaches the end of her statement. This little action tells me that, while she had warned me in my dream, I was her guide on her way out.
When she turns away from me, she clears her throat, the lights above us flickering, briefly casting our attention elsewhere before she continues.
“My fear of heights came first. Fighting felt like second nature. Next was one in the form of a dream. I had discovered something about someone Ronan and I worked for. Something big and terrible. He didn’t believe me. Not at first, at least. When I woke, I didn’t know what I knew, or even how I knew it, just that there was something .” Every single person is listening in their own way. Nate is a picture of inquisitive hesitance while Adonis appears to be more scrutinizing over the words that she’s saying. Like he’s tearing apart every word that she says and is building it to fit a narrative that makes more sense. Then there’s Carmen, who hasn’t stopped looking at the ground, but has shifted closer to Silene, taking hold of her hand in a comforting sign of support.
Though every now and again, her body stiffens slightly, or her eyebrows pull together with worry. Small but noticeable signs that I see clear as day.
Carmen’s hiding something.
“The next dream I had gave me more information. Who I was before we all met, how we know each other, and lastly…how we got here.” My attention pulls back to her when she says this, and I notice the way her confidence slightly falters. Her shoulders fall inward as a shuddering breath escapes her, seemingly in preparation to explain what she means.
“We all worked for someone. He…” Her gaze flickers to Carmen for the briefest of moments. I’m not sure anyone else would have even noticed, but I do. I notice everything she does. “He was very wealthy, cruel, and dangerous. We ended up on the wrong side of his business.”
And suddenly, I’m thrust back into the memories she’s speaking of, except now they’re my own.
“Can you just give up, already? We’ve been at this for hours and I’m starving,” I grit out between kicks and punches, but Nate continues to deflect each and every one of them. Offense seems to have always been his strength. He has some muscle, but he’s still much lankier than me and the other guys. But he’s also faster.
So much faster it borders on frustrating.
His eyebrows crease, but he smirks as he keeps dodging everything I throw his way. The sun beats down on us, and sweat covers every inch of our bodies. I had enough sense to rid myself of my shirt pretty early when I realized how unseasonably warm it was today, but he didn’t think to do the same, so I know his exhaustion must be quickly approaching. I just have to keep going long enough for it to catch up to him.
He’s almost there…just… one moment more, and…there.
I feign left as he sloppily dodges my last punch, and when he moves in response, I quickly switch direction, slipping past his defense. I kick in the back of his knee and smile in victory as he falls to the ground. My chest rising and falling just as hard as his, I take a second to look around, my gaze falling on the estate behind us. I know she’s in there, probably tucked away in one of the many lounges with a book.
“I have something that I need to tell you,” I say as he still struggles to catch his breath. Long white lashes brush against his cheek, and he doesn’t bother to open his eyes as he speaks. He doesn’t spare me a single glance, but grunts to tell me he’s heard me regardless. I don’t take much offense knowing his day-to-day work isn’t physically demanding like ours. Our infrequent sparring sessions take a lot out of him.
“Go ahead, asshole, we don’t have all day.”
I reach a hand out to Nate and help him up. He groans and grimaces as he stands, and I can’t stop myself from laughing at the sight of him so obviously uncomfortable with his sweaty shirt, now covered in dirt, clinging to his body like a second skin.
“You know Silene, right?” I ask as we begin walking toward the house. I work with Silene often, while Nate doesn’t often get the chance to. At least not directly since he works more on the cyber side of Mr. Delgado’s business. Honorable work, but a waste of his talent for sure.
He sideeyes me, that smirk back on his face. A gentle breeze pushes some of his wild orange hair from his forehead and makes it easier to see his dark brown eyes. “Yes. I know of her at least. Her success rate on missions is phenomenal. She’s only failed once and that was uh…one you assisted with, yes? Correct me if I’m wrong.”
I push at his shoulder, and we both bark out a loud laugh.
“What happened with that one anyway?”
“Irrelevant.” I cut in while smiling to myself at the memory.
“Okay then, why bring her up? And be careful what you say. That research you asked for a few weeks back is…dangerous,” he trails off, and suddenly I’m not so sure about what I want to say. He’s right. Voicing my thoughts could potentially end me, but carrying out these plans —involving him— without telling him the complexity of the situation doesn’t feel right. He and I haven’t always been close, but h—
I’m forced back to the present by the sound of Silene loudly clapping her hands before resting them in her lap. She’s rolling her lips together and anxiously looking around the room at the other men.
“So, did I pass this little test of yours? I told you everything that I remembered,” she calmly, if not a little awkwardly, states. Carmen grabs her hand, a movement tracked by all three of us, and Nate releases a deep sigh.
“Yeah, you’re good.”
I study the way he looks at her, always calculating, always questioning. She may have passed whatever test she needed in order to gain access to the folders, but the coolness in his gaze makes me wonder if she truly gained his trust. My gut tells me it’s unlikely as he shifts his gaze away and to the stairs beyond us.
“I guess it’s my turn, then?” Nate says. “Though, you’ll find that I don’t remember anything useful.” It’s a calm and casual statement, with no hint of a lie as he slowly rubs his hands together and brings them to his mouth. The sound of him blowing warm air into his hands fills the brief silence, and when he drops his hands, he shoves them into the pockets of the fresh pair of sweatpants he’d found in a drawer upstairs, reminding me that I should have grabbed a pair for Silene before we had made our way downstairs.
“I mainly remember my childhood. Not all of it, of course, but some. The basics, really. I remember having an older brother that I was really close with until he graduated from high school and moved out of our parents house. Though, I don’t remember what he set out to do, but I suppose it doesn’t matter because I graduated a year later and went to MIT. Studied computer science, got my bachelor’s and then…I don’t really know what happened after that.”
He ends on a shrug and then looks to Adonis, surely as a way to move the direction of conversation to the big guy in the room, but Silene doesn’t let him off so easily.
“You expect me to believe you know that little of yourself? You don’t remember what you’ve been doing for the past, what, two or three years? Not even a little bit?”
The question is fair, if not expected. It would make sense for more recent memories to resurface first. His dark gaze meets hers in a daring gesture, one I wouldn’t ever expect from him. Not when I’m slowly remembering more and more and know it’s not in his character to engage in any type of altercation if he can help it at all. He’s more the type to de-escalate, to stand back and only insert himself when necessary, and yet he looks to be picking a fight with the one person here who wouldn’t second guess sinking a blade into his throat and watching him bleed out.
“Yes. I have no reason to lie. The truth will come out eventually.” They face off for another moment, her unrelenting gaze freezing even me in place before I finally cut in between the two of them, making sure she doesn’t do anything else that could jeopardize her position further when she’s barely made it into their good graces.
“I’ll go next,” I offer, hoping it’s enough to distract them, but it only pulls Nate’s attention back to me. He gives a curt nod and small smile, while Silene continues to glare at him with so much mistrust that I wish I could look into her mind and find out what she’s thinking. Though, Carmen did warn us about what we’d find if we just listened long enough.
Destruction. A vile and wicked thing.
Taking a step forward, I go ahead and tell them what I remember, however useless it is. I tell them about the house and how I know that I’ve been here before. Tell them that the clothes upstairs are remnants of laundry from using the space as a safehouse after high stakes missions.
All of their attention bounces back and forth between Silene and me when I get to our relationship, something we had kept hidden due to Mr. Delgado’s fraternization policies. A “conflict of interest,” is what it was labeled as, but neither of us cared. I spoke of her more than myself, and when I finish, all eyes are on me. All except one pair, that stared at the cushion to her right, shoulders pulled back and spine straight, putting on a show of being uncaring, but I see right through it. I see the cracks in her carefully constructed mask she wears, I notice her rapid blinking and the occasional anxious bounce of her leg.
I almost turn away to give her a moment, before I notice her go completely still before slowly turning her face toward me.
“We’ve been here before,” she states in a way that feels more like a question than a fact, but I slowly nod, knowing she’s not really asking me anything, but turning something over in her own head. Her thoughts, racing one after the other, each one pushing the last out of its way to reach the forefront of her mind. “How did we get in and out?”
The question leaves me breathless as I try to figure out the answer, something that might make her believe me, but there’s nothing there. No memory resurfaces that could make me feel useful in this moment where I desperately hope that I could be to her, and I can tell she knows that by the way her brows scrunch tightly together. She aggressively rubs the area from her left wrist to thumb—an anxious tell that rarely makes an appearance.
“Strange,” she mumbles, barely audible, but loud enough to know none of us will be privy to her thoughts roaming aimlessly.
Everyone else seems to feel the same, but no one voices their own questions, but instead moves on in a way I know Silene never will. Instead, the deep rumble that is Adonis’s voice cuts through the lingering curiosity in the air as he begins to tell us what he has remembered. Like Nate, it wasn’t much that was useful, but it was recent. His memories were of training days with Silene and me as well as the nights of him and William hitting the bars after longer missions away from home. His cadence was steady and sure with each word spoken in a way that feels rehearsed to me. His head doesn’t so much as tilt, as if he is reading directly from a script etched on my face. Not once does he look away from me. But his eyebrows do pull together and his fists clench and unclench several times over as if there’s more to the story that he’s telling.
A daring gesture, one that begs me to second guess or question him. I refuse to do as such, though. I know better than to pick a fight I can’t win. No matter how suspicious it may be, I’m smarter than that. Thankfully, so is Silene. Or maybe she just didn’t listen to a word he said, not bothered with anything other than something that may prove useful, and in her eyes, he might not be worthy of that title in this moment.
However, I don’t feel as if I have any room to speak, seeing as my memories are nothing more than a mirage of what led me to her.
“Carmen,” her hesitant voice tears me away from my thoughts as I refocus on the scene around me. Everyone’s attention is locked onto the quiet woman who seems to be entirely made of her fears and discomfort. I’m not sure when she had shifted her body and unlaced her pinky from Silene, but now she looks at nothing and no one. Anxiety is etched into her every breath and movement. I can see it in the way she picks at her nails and the irritated skin around them. She has pulled her feet up and onto the cushion of the couch so she could wrap her arms around her long legs.
“I’m here,” Silene says. She reaches a tentative hand out to Carmen, a silent offering of comfort and support, that she willingly—albeit, slowly—takes.
I notice the way that Nate shifts toward her. Even if it’s only one foot that’s now closer to Carmen than the other. A small but tentative step forward. I find it strange that he does this every now and again. I find it even stranger that he had nothing to say about her when he seems to always be searching for a reason to be near her. He never questions or challenges her the way he has the rest of us, and I wonder if maybe his fondness of her is similar to Silene’s. He seems to care for her in a similar manner, though I’m not sure Carmen realizes it.
Si definitely catches it though.
“I don’t remember things the way all of you have, at least it doesn’t seem that way…to be quite honest, I’m not even sure how to explain everything,” she starts with a shaky and uncertain tone. Silene, ever present, gives her a silent and reassuring nod. A way to tell her she can continue whenever she’s ready.
“The second I saw Silene, I had an odd sense of déjà vu, or something similar to it at least. I wasn’t sure how well we had been acquainted or how close we had been, but I knew that, around her, I felt calm. Safe, even. The cold bite of the iron railings reminded me of my childhood. Bitter, harsh and unforgiving. There was no picture, but just this feeling that growing up hadn’t necessarily changed my circumstances, whatever they may have been.”
Her hand, still clutching Silene’s, tightens so much that I know it has to be painful, but Silene never wavers. She remains present, firm and strong, never flinching away from Carmen’s touch. An anchor, I realize, ensuring that her friend doesn’t drift too far away.
“I saw the binds of the books on the second floor and remembered the words that I would write to escape the reality I was born into. The words I had given in the hopes I would one day leave. To survive.”
A shuddering breath releases itself from in between her lips as a tear slowly rolls down her cheek. Still, her gaze remains faraway, distanced. As if summoning an old reality is a task so heavy, it does nothing but weigh her down and chips away at her current self so much that even dragging her eyes away from the ground would be too much effort.
“At the sound of the birds chirping, I had heard the voice of my mother singing. When they were struck down, I felt waves of grief that I know were not just an echo of something that has long passed, but a reminder that all things come to an end eventually.” Another tear falls, chasing the words that have been spoken as we all process the odd memories.
“So, I don’t remember events as all of you do, but I feel them all the same.”
No one makes a sound for a while. I still wonder what she could be hiding, but now…now is not the time to push for answers.
Then she’s standing and removing herself from the small huddle we had formed, her shoulder brushing past Nate’s, who had slowly inched closer the longer she spoke. Her arms curl around herself the further that she gets, and only when she’s at the door to the closest room does she stop moving just long enough to briefly look back at us and whisper one last thing.
“I feel everything.”