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For once, he was the one to break the silence. With a heavy glance, he asked, “Are you going to tell me what’s on your mind, or are you going to just sit there and brood?”
I whipped my eyes away from him, looking down at the water instead. Bright shards of white moonlight danced on the inky black waves. “I’m not brooding. ”
He laughed. A Ronan laugh was a rare thing, and it unsettled me.
I changed the subject. “So your family lives here somewhere?” My gaze swept south, imagining the distant fishing village I’d once spotted from the water.
“I have people here, yes. In a manner of speaking. They’re like…my foster family, I guess you’d say. ”
Foster family? This was news. “What happened to your—?” I trailed off, uncertain what the protocol was for conversations like this. Already we were navigating depths that Ronan and I had never plumbed before.
“To my blood kin?” he finished for me. “They’re…elsewhere. But aye, they live. ” He phrased it awkwardly, his words bearing a strange echo, like awe, or fear.
“Why aren’t you with them?”
“It’s not my time,” he said. “I grew up here. I am required here. ”
His time? How weird was that?
But I quickly forgot about weirdness as something he’d said clicked. “So the sister you told me about…” My heart soared. “She was just a foster sister?” He’d once said I reminded him of his sister, but really, who wants to be sisterly?
“No, Annelise. Charlotte was my real sister. ” Damn him, he’d sounded amused. Or patronizing. Something I couldn’t quite put my finger on.
I cringed. Again I wondered, why was he doing this? It made me feel embarrassed, or like a kid. I didn’t even understand why we were having this conversation. Why had he brought me here? It gave me a stab in my chest that sharpened words I might have softened otherwise. “Where exactly is your blood family? Are they on another island?”
I thought of Mei-Ling, who’d escaped. Tom the Draug keeper had put her on a boat, headed toward what he’d called “friends. ” Might Ronan’s family be with “friends,” too?
“Aye,” he said, his words clipped and tight with emotion. “My mother…she’s on a different island. With others. ”
The honesty surprised me. There were so many stupid, frustrating secrets all around me. A million more questions sprang to mind, but I knew not to push it. This was already way more than I’d ever thought he’d tell me, more than I’d ever expected.
Again, why? Why was he confiding in me like this? Why this casual little glimpse into his life?
Aside from my Scottish vampire, Ronan knew me better than anyone on this island—now that Emma was gone, at least. I was certain he’d guessed at the connection between me and Carden, and yet, thus far, he’d kept his judgments to himself, and for that I was hugely grateful.
He got it. Got how complicated and lonely life on this dark isle could be. But he’d always maintained a veil of formality between us.
What had changed?
Did he just feel sorry for me? He’d seen how distraught I was, how much I needed it. Was this pity bonding?
The optimist in me said it was because he finally trusted me, but my inner pessimist countered that it was because I served some mysterious interest known only to him.
Who knew? Maybe the explanation was as simple as him assuming Carden had already confided everything.
Or…maybe he just felt safe telling me these things precisely because Carden was out there, somewhere, with a claim to me, and therefore Ronan couldn’t make one himself.
That last one gave me a shiver.
Regardless, he’d confided and now it was my turn.
“At least your mom is alive,” I said. “All I’ve got for family is a no-good dad and my”—I made air quotes with my fingers—“stepmom. ” I couldn’t even say her name without irony, she’d been that crappy to me. “I had what felt like a family here for, like, half a second. Emma and Yas. Amanda and Judge. Mei-Ling. But they’re all gone. ” I stole a look at him, a quick millisecond under my lashes, before looking away. I spoke the words before I chickened out. “Everyone’s gone except for you. ”
I could hear in the cadence of his breath that he’d heard what I was really saying—the implication that he was also like family. He didn’t press it, though. He didn’t make some elaborate show of thanking me or act like he had to return the sentiment, and I was grateful.
Instead he said, “Yasuo. You’ve seen him?” Something in his tone told me that he already knew what I’d suspected.
“I did see him. He’s been on me like white on rice, actually. ” I let out a humorless laugh. “He blames me for Emma. ”
