23. Lie To Me Ronan/ Silene
23
Lie To Me: Ronan/ Silene
Ronan:
E veryone immediately begins talking over one another, grabbing at the map to try and make a point or ask a question regarding the logistics of some half formed plan yelled over someone else. The chaos of it all is interesting. We’ve all been cautious of each other, walking on eggshells and casting sly allegations. I welcome the current frenzy.
“I’m just saying, we have no idea where the tunnels lead, and if these two are being tracked, then we’re sure to have company at the end of whatever path we take,” Nate says. I come back to reality, pulled from whatever stupor I was stuck in when he speaks. I’m not surprised he was the one to say something logical through all the questions, not when I know how smart he is. How smart he’s always been, apparently.
Silene and I remain unspoken, but I don’t miss the pleading glance she throws my way when I refuse to look at her for too long.
“You live long enough to remember.” That’s what she said to me the first time we saw each other, and now I do. My memories though, I’m not sure how to process them, let alone what to think. I’m not sure how to tell her that it’s not what it seems without her accusing me again when we’re on shaky ground as it is. I don’t know how to get her to believe it wasn’t me.
I can’t even look her in the eyes knowing that none of this was ever about killing us, but breaking her will enough to leave him alone.
“We use a diversion,” Silene says, feeling on the back of her neck.
“A diversion?”
“You three take the tunnels while Ronan and I take off through the woods. They’ll assume we’re all together and follow me and Ronan. No one will know.” When she says this, I turn to face her before looking at the rest of the group, waiting for a response.
“I go with you,” Carmen says quietly, though something in her voice feels final. Like she won’t be deterred from her decision, and if Silene didn’t interject, I would have.
“No, you don’t.”
“You promised,” she says, pleading with Silene to understand what she means, even though the rest of us don’t. I see the way she fights to keep her tears at bay, refusing to let them fall as she begs her, but it appears to be for nothing because the woman I love shakes her head no. And if there’s one thing I know, it’s that Silene would never willingly risk the life of someone she cares about. All plans are meticulously calculated, and if she thinks Carmen is better off with the other two, then I will stand by her side and support that decision.
“I didn’t promise this. People are going to be coming at us from every direction. You’ll be safest going with one of them.” My gaze continues to flick between the two, knowing who will win the argument, but amazed at Carmen’s persistence. An impossible task, but an admirable effort.
“What about you two? When do you go through the tunnels? Or do you even care if you die out there?” Silene stills as the words leave Carmen’s mouth, and my heart stops as I realize the probability of what her answer might be. The probability of her knowingly running into a fight she won’t win. Shame washes over her face, coloring her cheeks pink as she looks away, and I have my answer.
Though, I would die before I let her. A world where she doesn’t exist is not one worthy of living in, and I would never let her do something that would get herself killed.
“There are access points to the tunnels. We can go far enough out to ditch the trackers, run in a different direction, and if we calculate it correctly, we should be able to meet up with the rest of you at the end,” she says slowly, as if it’s a new part of her plan. Something she’s unsure of, but saying it anyway in case it helps her case.
“Carmen, she’s right. It won’t be safe out there, and her plan could easily work,” Nate says, reaching out to softly grab her arm and pull her away from inside the circle we formed after taking several steps towards Silene. But she pulls her arm out of his grasp and turns to face him.
“If it’s not safe out there for me, then it’s not safe for anyone. I don’t care how skilled she is, one person can only handle so much at a time,” Carmen counters. She turns to face Silene, but her eyes meet my gaze instead. I’m surprised that she’s fighting back. The woman who tends to speak in riddles and dreams, who feels more attached to the metaphysical rather than reality. This is the first time I’ve heard her words spoken with conviction. She sounds more like Silene than herself.
“No, and that’s final,” Silene responds before turning back to the group before Carmen has a chance to argue any further.
“Let’s just solidify a plan,” Adonis interjects, commanding the attention of everyone in the room. He’s been staring at the map since the women started arguing, but now he’s looking at Silene, withdrawn and curious. “Silene isn’t off to a bad start, and she’s not wrong.”
“I told you th—”
“I didn’t say you were right, either,” he says over her voice, cutting off whatever else she was about to say. This only results in another staring contest, a battle of wills that he, to my surprise, wins.
The next several hours consist of fine tuning the details of our escape. Tonight we’ll eat, drink plenty of water, sharpen weapons, and rest. Anything that can help with tomorrow. If all goes right, we’ll be out by tomorrow night, finally escaping all of this. We’ll survive, and I’ll spend however long it takes proving to Silene that my loyalty remains to her. Always.
As long as I breathe, my life is hers to give or take.
But when everyone is settling in for the night, and I see Silene exit the upstairs death room, refusing to acknowledge my presence as I come out of the bathroom, I know something is wrong. Especially when I see a piece of folded paper clutched between her fingers with ink smudged onto them. As she pockets it, I can’t help but reach into my own pocket and feel the note I’ve kept hidden from her for the past several days.
* * *
Silene:
Everyone wants to leave. They want a quick break, a way out—they want to survive. I don’t share their sentiment because I know this doesn’t end when we escape. It will never end until he is dead, and since I know there isn’t anyone I can trust to not turn their back on me at the first sign of danger, so I’ll be leaving alone.
Tonight.
Carmen may never forgive me for leaving her behind, but one day she will see I had to. If I survive what I’m about to do, then I can explain it to her in a way that, I hope, she’ll one day understand. Without me doing this, there will be nowhere to hide from his madness.
Leaving in the dead of the night while the others sleep is a calculated risk I’m taking. I know anyone could wake at any moment or that the stairs could creak and give me away, but I’m hoping if I keep my footfalls nice and light, no one will know until the morning. But as I move to take the first step, I hesitate.
I freeze with fear of what might happen here without me. The consequences I may have to bear if I live and someone doesn’t. I look over my shoulder at the men in the room, sleeping soundly. Nathaniel and Adonis in their respective corners, Ronan taking a small sliver of the couch, unmoving except for the gentle rise and fall of his chest. My fists clench as I lightly step away from the stairs and check the room Carmen chose to sleep in all alone. Her long limbs are spread out over curtains and a blanket to give her some cushion on the hard floor, and her hair partially covers the delicate features of her face. My heart squeezes at the betrayal she’ll wake to find.
Though I don’t trust the men with my life, I do trust them with hers. In the way, I’ve already seen them worry for her here and there.
I’ll see you soon, my little dreamer. I just have to do this one last thing for us, I think to myself as I quickly approach her sleeping form and lay the letter next to her before I return to the staircase and begin my ascent. Thankfully, the short trip up is silent. The wood doesn’t groan under my weight as I keep to the sides of each step rather than the center, and when I get to the top, I take a deep breath before walking the distance to the room at the end of the hall and stepping through the hole in the door.
One minute later, and I’m taking quick, careful steps through the tunnel to my right, the one I’m hoping will lead to the estate based on the building shape on the map we found.
Successful in no one waking and finding me gone. That’s what I thought, at least. Now, as large hands grip my wrists and pin them above my head, and a muscular body presses into mine against the stone wall, I know I was sorely mistaken.
“And just where do you think you’re going? Huh, Killer?”
His voice is dark, carrying a menacing undertone, yet there’s no bite to it.
Taking a deep breath, I try to assess the situation, looking anywhere but him. My lack of answer and avoidance of his gaze, despite the full body contact, does nothing but frustrate him. At least I can assume as much based on the way that he grips my chin between his fingers and forces my gaze to lock onto his.
“You know there is nowhere you can go that I wouldn’t find you,” he says in such a way that I almost believe him. I almost have no choice to believe him, given the fact that he’s here . And for what? He has no reason to be here, not when he all but handed me a death sentence. Not when he’s the reason we’re all in this situation right now.
“And why is that? Huh?” My voice carries so much hostility, and I refuse to feel sorry for it when this is what his love has done for me. “Why won’t you leave me alone? Haven’t you done enough? Was this not enough? Let me guess, you’re the traitor, right? Putting me here wasn’t enough for you, but you needed to watch it happen?”
“What do you even mean? You really think, for even a moment, that I could do anything to hurt you when you’re—”
“I’m what? I’m crazy?” I say, cutting him off. I’m trying to keep my voice low, considering the echo in the tunnel, but I’m struggling. And anger and confusion are living things coursing through my veins with every beat of my heart. If he could see it in me, I don’t know, but one second my arms were pinned above my head, and the next his lips were on mine…
His lips were on mine, and it is the most terrifying and beautiful thing I have ever felt. It is pure desperation in the way his mouth molds with mine as he softly bites and tugs on my lower lip to pull a reaction from me. It takes everything in me to stay standing. However, even if my legs had given out the way that they so desperately wanted to, I wouldn’t have fallen. Not with the way his left arm wraps around my waist, hand gripping my hip and pulling me so close to his body that it feels like we could become a single physical being.
He just has to keep holding on.
He kisses me as if he’s trying to use his lips to write poetry onto my skin, a story of everything we had once been—of everything we were supposed to be. The thing about poetry though is it usually ends in tragedy, and for that reason alone, I remove my hands from where they have taken their place—tangled in his hair, and slowly place them onto his chest to stop this from going any further.
Words fail to escape me as I try to regain my thoughts, but every single one of them is just his name tattooed into my soul.
I know this moment is delicate, but I also know that there is so much that needs to be said even if it was everything I didn’t want to have to voice. Words that would hurt more than anything has ever hurt me before. Words that no one would understand except a version of myself that I’m not even sure he even remembers.
A version of me that loved him more than I had loved anything in my life and had let myself surrender to him.
I loved and I loved and I—
“Lie to me again,” I whisper against his lips before gently resting my forehead against his. Our breaths mingle with each other, and I begin to feel as if he’s breathing his own life into me.
“Silene, I—” I know his eyes are open…that he’s looking at me, waiting with bated breaths for our eyes to meet again, but I can’t bring myself to make eye contact with him in fear that I’ll fall into my desire to believe anything he says. I refuse to give in that easily, but I grab two fistfuls of his shirt, and pull his body impossibly closer, shaking my head no.
I can’t let myself give in. I can’t allow myself to accept this fall again, not when I know what he did, and not when I still have so many questions for him that he can’t answer right now.
That he refuses to answer right now when we no longer trust one another.
“I wish I never loved you,” he says, and then he’s removing my hands from his shirt and taking a step back. My closed eyes are now wide open and watching him intently as he turns away from where I stand and crouches down before roughly running his hands through his hair, tugging on the ends in frustration.
“I said, lie to me,” I say quietly. It was barely a whisper but I guess he heard it because he abruptly cuts me off when he stands back up, dropping his hands and looking at me, his eyes holding an unspoken plea, but my gaze holds nothing more than a challenge. Once he realizes that I’m not moving from where I stand, his head tilts up to the ceiling as he shakes his head and storms back to where he left me.
“Fuck it.” His hands slide through my hair and pull, forcing me to tilt my head back and allow him better access as his lips claim mine again. And there was no mistaking the fact that this kiss was just that—a claim. A promise. A prayer.
I’m frozen, rooted in place, for no more than a second before my own hands are gripping his hips and pulling them against my own. Consequences be damned. Trust and truth be damned. The familiarity feels too good to let go of, but he’s pulling away too soon, leaving a trail of small kisses from the corner of my lips up my cheekbone, and then he’s whispering in my ear.
“Come back. Whatever you were planning on doing, we’ll do it together. But never alone.” He pulls back to look at me, still forcing my head to look at him, but my eyes drift downwards. One of his hands trails down the length of my neck and along my arm before landing on my waist, squeezing on the area of bare skin left exposed after my shirt rode up during the kiss. “Please, Silene. I’ll get on my knees if I have to.”
“You’re asking me to trust you, and I don’t know if I can,” I reply, still not looking at him, but when he squeezes my waist, my green clashes with his blue, and I can’t ignore the rightness of it all. The invisible string that has done nothing but pull us together time and time again.
“Okay,” I whisper, gazing up at him through lowered lashes. I may be unsure if I’m making the right decision, but I follow him anyway. Back through the tunnel, up the stairs and to the doorway where Carmen stands with disappointment and betrayal reflected in her hazel eyes while she clutches the note I had written to her between her delicate fingers.
“You said… No, you promised we both make it out of here alive,” Carmen grits out, and I can’t bear to look at her knowing how she must feel or what she must be thinking.
“I did mean it. I thought it was the only way for us all to be safe. I was hoping to return before anyone noticed, but I was stopped,” I say, trailing off and sneaking a peek at Ronan who doesn’t look surprised at all as he places his hand on the small of my back. Relief floods my system at the small show of support, even as my heart breaks every time I look at the woman in front of me. I know at this moment she probably feels as if I haven’t meant a word I’ve said to her in the past twenty-four hours, but the reality is that I’ve meant every single word and knew that escaping wasn’t living.
It was just surviving.
“Then why did you say goodbye?” she questions, frantically shoving the letter into my chest, and my hands clutch the paper, attempting to grab onto her hand as well but she pulls away too quickly. “Just in case I didn’t succeed. I felt you deserved to know that I didn’t mean to break my promise. I wanted you to know that—”
“It doesn’t matter,” she cuts my explanation short as she backs away, wrapping her arms around herself, and as she turns around to leave, I hear her say one last thing that sends a chilling numbness through my entire body.
“Your apology means nothing to someone who’s already dead.”
I don’t remember what happened after that. Not leaving the room, or walking downstairs. Nor do I remember getting settled on the couch, and Ronan draping a blanket over my body. I remember nothing other than the nausea settling in my stomach as dread pulls me into a fitful slumber.