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He was too big for the small cheerful cottage. Too menacing in the bright kitchen where he couldn’t look more out of place if he tried. He pulled out a pot from the fridge and a loaf of bread wrapped in a linen towel from a drawer.
“How will you handle it?” I asked him.
“You think I’m going to kill a priest?” he asked, like it was a joke.
“I’m asking because I don’t know what you’ll do. I don’t know you at all.”
He struck a match and lit the stove. Set the pot on the burner and then found a long serrated knife and cut thick slices off the bread.
I stood, walking into the kitchen. “Father Patrick said the church used to be a school—”
“Sit down,” he said, but I ignored him.
“Was this the school you went to? When you were a kid? The priests who hurt you?”
“I’m not talking about this with you.”
“Did Father Patrick—?”
“Sit the fuck down, Poppy.”
“Why would you bring me here if—?”
It was like he flew across the kitchen, grabbing my elbows and pulling me up against his body. His eyes were wild on mine. “Do you think I want to be here? Do you think I would be here if there was any other choice?”
He wrapped one arm around my waist and for a second, I thought he was going to kiss me, and I was breathless wanting it. Hungry for it. But he lifted me off my feet and walked me to the bedroom. Once inside, he put me on my feet and stepped away so fast I wobbled.
“Ronan? What—?”
He left without a word, and the sound of the door being locked from the outside was so loud I flinched. “Ronan?” I walked over to the door and tried to open it, but he really had locked it. “Ronan! What the hell are you doing?”
Silence was my only answer. I screamed and pounded until I was weak. Until I was empty. Until I was remembered who he was. And who I was to him.
Nothing.
And the galling thing, the truly galling thing, was I’d been here before. I’d been here so many times in my life, and every time before I’d just curled up and let someone else’s opinion of me be the only thing that mattered.
Well. Fuck. That.
I was different. If I was going to survive this and save my sister, I had to be.
Ronan didn’t know who he was dealing with. I didn’t, either, really. But I was ready to find out.
CHAPTER FIVE
Ronan
Pikey Tom was a kid who’d slept in the bunk across the hallway from mine at St. Brigid’s. I had no idea if he was really a Traveller, but he introduced himself to everyone as Pikey Tom, and if you said anything about it, he’d punch you in the throat. That he let me call him Tommy had seemed like a badge of honor. That we became friends was even more so.
He was the same age as me, and by the time I’d showed up in that hallway, he’d already been there awhile. And he was an absolute legend. He’d thrown rocks at the stained glass from inside the sanctuary, rumor had it he’d bitten the earlobe off one of the priests, and he’d tried to escape three times. At bedtime, Father McConal himself came and locked him to his bed with handcuffs.
“Ah, you like this, don’t you, you dirty fecking pervert,” he’d spit at the old man.
For whatever reason, Tommy had liked me. Or maybe he’d just pitied me—scrawny and far more scared than I was going to admit. And that had been enough for friendship at St. Brigid’s. That first night, he’d taught me the most important lesson surviving that place.
We owe ’em nothing and we give ’em nothing.
“Them,” of course, being the priests.
He told me not to cry or apologize. To never—no matter what they did to me—ask for forgiveness.
That’s how they get you.
It had been hard, that first month, not crying. But by the second month, I was stone dry. The priests wanted us to apologize for who we were and how we’d been raised and the things we couldn’t control and the ways we’d never been taught any better. But all those things were how we’d survived. And those boys who’d cracked under the prayers and the beatings and the fasting and the work, and begged for atonement for the sins they didn’t even understand, walked around with their eyes glowing with zeal and hot food.
Fuck them cunts, Pikey Tom had always said.
“Fuck them cunts,” I said now, staring up at the church until the kettle whistled.
I doubted Poppy was awake. The daft girl had been practically asleep on her feet, but she needed food, so here I was, putting a tray of lunch together for her.
I also needed answers and her back under my control. I needed her to think we were a team until I figured out what the Morellis wanted, and only then could the mistakes I’d made regarding one Poppy Maywell be forgotten.
