Chapter 20 - Ronan
I don’t sleep, not really.
Instead, I lie in my bed that suddenly feels too big and too cold.
I never noticed that before, but now, without her, it’s all I can think about.
I bet she’s been awake half the night, too.
She lied about needing sleep; it was written all over her face.
I knew she’d come to me if I asked her to, but she was fighting it.
Something is definitely wrong with her. Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised.
I wanted her to give in, and she did, but that doesn’t change the circumstances that brought her here.
But then, a witch at the island wards two nights running, and a witch under my own roof, flinching every time I look at her, can’t be ignored.
I’ve spent my whole life being able to see trouble before anyone else knows it’s coming, and I know when something is wrong. I’ve been lying here telling myself what we have is real; my wolf wants it to be, but wanting something and it being true are two different things.
It won’t be light for another couple of hours, so I get up and head for her room.
The door is pulled shut, but the latch isn’t on, and I listen to the sound of her breathing.
She’s asleep. Moving with all the stealth my wolf provides, I move around the side of the bed, acutely aware of how sexy she looks with the covers thrown back, her legs exposed, and her hair a riot around her on the pillow.
She’s lying on her side, and it takes everything in me not to slide in next to her and pull her into my arms. But then I see the tablet sticking out from under the pillow and remember why I’m here.
I take the tablet, and she stays asleep; her breathing doesn’t change, and I stand there just looking at her for a minute, hoping I’m wrong.
Taking it through to the kitchen, I sit at the island and fire it up.
There’s a message waiting from her coven, the address I set up for her to write to the old women who raised her.
I hover over it. Part of me wants to just go back to bed, think about the pack, the war, a million other things than whatever she’s talking to an old woman about.
But I don’t; I open it because I don’t trust easily and I suddenly feel like I should.
It isn’t from the old woman.
Selene, it’s starting. We’ve talked to our mates.
I read it once. Then I read it again, slower. Taking it all in and making sure I don’t miss anything.
It’s all there. The harbors. The council meetings.
My half-brothers’ names dropped with such familiarity, as though she’s been saying them for weeks.
Tell them the full story of their brothers.
Stop it on that end. Our mates. Ours. Like she’s one of them.
Like she’s been working against me the entire time she’s lying in my bed.
Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised. She wanted to escape; of course, she did. Maybe nothing really changed for her.
I scroll back because I need to know how deep it runs, how long it’s been going on for, and how compromised my plans are. And it’s all there, weeks of it. Messages in, messages out, and only a handful from her actual coven, mainly warning her to be careful as she betrays my pack.
There’s one sent the morning after the ambush.
The night I came home half torn open, and she patched me up so tenderly before giving me her body and her magic.
She wrote to the island the next day, while I was stupid enough to think the fact that she gave the bond magic so willingly meant something.
Which begs the question, why did she?
There are more from days after I told her about my mother, feeding information back across the water to the sons of the man who might as well have put my mother in the ground himself.
There’s one where she tries to convince them I’m a good man. Those exact words. He’s a good man underneath all of it, she tells Emily, if you’d only let yourselves see it. She’s been defending me to the three men I’ve sworn to bring down. Giving away my secrets, talking about me behind my back.
Emily tells her to delete the messages, but she didn’t delete all the folders, so I scour them for more information. I can’t believe it’s a coincidence that I’ve had a witch trying to break through the wards on the island, and here she is spilling everything to one of my half-brother’s witch mates.
She’s completely stolen the edge I’ve spent years building and handed it to them. Every day I sit still now is one more day they get more ready for what’s coming.
Fine. Then I won’t sit still anymore. She’s done this.
I set the tablet down on the counter. Carefully, because if I don’t, I’m going to put it straight through the window.
My chest feels tight, and there’s a roar building in my ears like a storm.
I brace both hands on the counter and wait for the cold to come, the flat, clear calm that takes over in a crisis and has kept me alive this long.
It doesn’t come. For once, it doesn’t come, because this isn’t a raid or a fight. This is her, and my wolf still wants her; he still claims his mate.
I stand there in the murky gray before dawn, and I try to temper my rage, because I’ve never hated someone in a moment and wanted to keep them safe, too. Even if that means protecting them from myself.
I don’t remember crossing the house. I’m just suddenly in the bedroom doorway with the tablet back in my hand and my wolf so close under my skin I can feel my own teeth aching with the urge to shift.
“Selene,” I say, my voice tight.
She’s awake before I finish speaking, and she sits up, sees the tablet in my hand, and I watch the color drain clean out of her face. That’s my answer, right there.
“Ronan…” she replies, pulling the sheets up.
“Don’t,” I reply, and it doesn’t even sound like my voice. “Don’t you dare tell me it isn’t what it looks like.”
“It isn’t…” She stops, because it is, and we both know it is. “Please. Just let me explain.”
I throw the tablet onto the bed between us. “Explain, then.”
She doesn’t touch it. She looks at it, then back at me, and her chin comes up the way it does when she’s decided to stand her ground, and even now, a part of me wants to cross the room and hold her, and I hate that more than I’ve ever hated anything.
“I was just trying to stop the war,” she says.
“By handing me to my half-brothers,” I snap.
“By saving you.” She’s up on her knees now, the sheet forgotten.
“I never gave them anything that could hurt you, Ronan. I swear it on my life. Not your numbers. Not your plans. Not the settlement on the island. I don’t even know where it is—not the wards, nothing that could get a single one of your people hurt.
I’ve been protecting you this whole time.
I was trying to make them stand down or keep offering peace before they had a reason to come here and put you in the ground.
“The women, their mates, don’t even want this war,” she goes on, faster now and desperate. “Ava, Emily, Serena. They’ve been working on your brothers for weeks, holding them back, and it was working. It was actually working, until…”
“Until they found out I was closer than they thought,” I say, having read Emily’s last email.
“I never gave them that.” Her voice breaks clean in half. “I never gave them anything they could use. You have to believe me.”
And goddess help me, I think I do believe her.
But she still gave them enough. She went behind my back, and she gave them too much. The fact that she reached out to them at all is the betrayal. I don’t want to talk to these assholes, and I’ve made that clear. There is nothing to say.
“You gave them me,” I say, and my voice has gone to gravel.
“You have fed them things they have no right knowing, like a scrap under the table. On the tablet I put in your hands. That’s the part I can’t get past. I gave you a way to reach the people you love, and you turned it around and used it to reach my enemies. ”
“I told them who you really are.” Her voice cracks. “I wanted them to see…”
“I don’t want them to see me.” It comes out low and dangerous, and she feels it. “I stopped wanting that a long time ago. I don’t need to be understood by them, Selene. I want to be the last thing they ever see.”
She flinches as though I’ve physically struck her.
“And you.” This is the part I can barely get out.
“You, I let all the way in. Do you have any idea what that costs me? I gave you the one thing I’ve never handed anyone else.
And the second my back was turned, you took it to the people who put us out in the cold to die.
So don’t stand there and try to justify it.
” I make myself say the rest. “There’s never been one single person who’d pick me over the family that didn’t want me.
Not one. I let myself forget it for a few weeks. That’s on me.”
“Ronan, I told you I wanted to stop the war.” She’s crying openly now and furious about it, dashing the tears off her face with the back of her hand. “But I didn’t betray you.”
“Stop,” I growl.
“No.” And when she looks up this time, it isn’t just the guilt on her face. It’s anger, and it stops me in my tracks. “You want to know what I actually see when I look at you right now? I see a man so eaten up with hating Ralph that he’s turning into him.”
The room goes very quiet.
“It’s what Ralph did, isn’t it?” she says, calmly, with her chin tilted in defiance.
“He threw away the people who needed him to get what he wanted. His own sons. And here you are, about to do the exact same thing—you’d throw away or use anyone you can.
Your pack. Ryder. Me. Feed all of us into the fire so you can have your revenge.
That isn’t beating him, Ronan. That’s becoming him. ”
For a second, I genuinely can’t breathe.
My wolf, that’s been snarling for blood since the moment I opened that message, goes dead silent. Because no one has ever said that to me. Ryder touched on it but knew when to pull back. She doesn’t seem to understand how close my wolf is to losing control.
I shut down because I have to. If I don’t, I don’t know what I will do, and I can’t risk her or her safety. Despite everything, when I look at her, I know I’ll never hurt her and never let her go. Even if that means never trusting her or letting her live with freedom, because she’s blown that.
I close the door on all of it. On her face, her tears, and the terrible thing she just said.
She clocks the moment it happens. She sees me go, watches whatever we’d built between us disappear, and she scrambles off the bed toward me with her hands out.
“Ronan, no. Don’t do this. Please, this is exactly what they want. You go in there like this, and you’ll lose everything…you’ll lose Ryder, the settlement, everything you’ve built…”
“No, I won’t.” I step back out of her reach because I can’t let her touch me. “All you’ve done is move up the timeline, and all that is lost is the trust I’d stupidly put in you and your freedoms. You’re the one who has lost something, not me.”
“No,” she says fiercely, and grabs for my arm as I step back again. “No, it doesn’t have to be like that. I care, Ronan, that’s why I did this. I care about you and the pack. I care about these people. I don’t want anyone to get hurt. Please just stop and listen to me, let’s talk about this…”
“You lost the right to stand in front of me,” I say, “the first night you wrote to them and betrayed this pack and me.”
She goes white, and it almost pains me to see her natural defiance fading from her eyes.
“Get up and get dressed,” I say, and my voice is flat now. Even. Dead calm. And I watch that scare her far more than shouting would.
“Ronan…” she pleads.
“We’re done hiding.” I’m already turning away, already pulling the phone from my pocket, because if I stand here one more second, I’ll do something I can’t take back, and I’ve done enough of that tonight.
“You wanted to know when this is happening. It’s now.
And you can tell them,” I tell her, and make a point of smashing the tablet on the dresser, completely destroying it.
I call Cole. He picks up on the second ring, the way he always does.
“Move them,” I tell him. “All of them. Every boat, every wolf that is combat-ready, everything we’ve got left on the mainland. We’re not waiting for the season, and we’re not doing it quietly anymore. I want us on that island in force. Now.”
A pause on the line. “Ronan. That’s not the plan. What’s happened?”
“The plan changed,” I tell him. “We’ve lost any element of surprise, and so we’re doing this now before the wards break.”
“Okay, we can go now,” he says calmly, already thinking it through. “If we go loud, the island sees us coming, and they’ll…”
“I know exactly what they’ll do.” That’s the point. I want them to see us on the water. I want Callum standing on his harbor wall, watching the whole horizon fill up with everything he thought he was safe from. “Now, Cole. That’s an order.”
I hang up before he can ask me anything else.
She’s still on the edge of the bed, looking so achingly beautiful it’s almost hard to look at her, watching me. But I make myself look at her, because I’ve never been a coward about the things that hurt.
“You’re coming with me,” I tell her. “To the island. You’ll have a front row seat to all of it.”
“Ronan, please…” she starts.
“I’m not leaving you here to just find another way to warn them. I don’t trust you.” My voice doesn’t soften at all. “You wanted a hand in this war. You’ve got one now. You’re going to be standing right next to me for every minute of it.”
She says my name one more time. Soft, and wrecked, and it goes through me like nothing waiting on that island ever will.
I walk out anyway and don’t look back. I have the bond magic, and I’m ready to use it.