Chapter 43: XIX. Ronan-2

I was fairly certain that my heart was flatlining. My breathing stopped, and I didn't know how to start again. Everything inside me dropped as the realisation hit me. I felt like I was being assaulted with bombshell after bombshell. Things that I shouldhave known, should have realised. Oh my God. My dad was one of them. My dad was … my dad wasn't human. My daddy. "Sara, honey, breathe," Mom urged. "You're turning red." I forced myself to suck air into my lungs. It felt like acid. "Do you want me to stop?" Mom asked. "No," I whispered, my voice hoarse with emotion. "I tried to be okay with it, as okay as I could be. Ronan brought me into the pack, as he called it. There were so many people, and they were all completely normal, and they treated me like a beloved family member. I did like them. I even made a few good friends. I really liked Karen Braverman. She had a little boy named Shea," she said, eyeing Shea, "and she was a few months along with her second child. Karen's friendship really helped to normalise everything for me. I didn't feel like we were Ronan and Amanda Bryant anymore. We were different. But seeing Karen, and seeing her as just a normal mom, helped me to feel like I could be okay with everything, even though it was just utter insanity to think that this all existed. "It wasn't long after finding out about your daddy that I realised I was pregnant with you. Ronan was so excited. Beyond excited," she remembered fondly. "And for a while I thought we could be just like Shea's family. If she could raise a happy baby in this world, then so could I. Around that time, Ronan started to tell me about some issues he was having with a rival pack. Their Alpha, his name was Kurt, I think, was particularly aggressive. I don't remember exactly what the conflict was, but all I do remember is Ronan coming home night after night with injuries, really frightening cuts and slashes. It was escalating. The anxiety that I felt was overwhelming. I was scared all the time, for my husband, and for my unborn baby. But he was never scared, and I had never seen him happier than on the night you were born. He called you his angel, his gift from God, and that's how we picked your name." A tear fell from Mom's eye. "When you were born, everything changed for me. You became the love of my life. I would have died before I let anything happen to you. I still would. And when your daddy, in the midst of all the violence that was going on with the other pack, presented you to his pack as his heir, I have never been more scared of anything in my life. In that moment, I saw you, my precious, perfect, innocent baby, being maimed and ripped apart by vicious creatures. I saw your whole future in that moment, and I didn't want that for you. I wanted you to be as far away from that life as possible." I wasn't entirely sure how much of this information I was absorbing in this moment, and how much of it would hit me later. But what did occur to me was the terrifying realisation that my father, my lycan father, called me his heir. Did that mean that I was … one too? My heart started to race. I had never felt any different to how I felt now. I felt normal. But was my normal … lycan? Mom grabbed my attention back as she continued. "The love I have for you gave me the strength to break your daddy's heart," her voice cracked with emotion. "That was the hardest thing I've ever had to do in my life. But I couldn't raise you there. I couldn't put you in harm's way. I couldn't let you be groomed for a life of violence, a life where you didn't have any other option but to put yourself in danger." She didn't describe how she broke my dad's heart, and I didn't think I wanted her to. Shea told me that it wasn't the same for humans. They could leave. Lycans couldn't. He would have only ever loved my mom. "I transferred colleges and we moved to New York. A little while later I heard that both he and the other Alpha had been killed in a fight." Mom's voice was so delicate as she spoke those words, and I knew that she had grieved hard. She played with this thin gold wedding band that she still wore on her left hand. I, however, had never learned the circumstances of my dad's death. Mom had only ever described it as an accident, and I assumed that she meant a car accident. But to learn that he had been killed? I felt bile rise in my throat as I thought of Shea in that same position. Shea had been severely injured by Lex. God, what might happen? "I raised you as best I could, Sara. I wanted you to have what I didn't. Ronan told me once that the first shift happens when you turn sixteen. I was fully expecting to have this conversation with you then. But you didn't change, and I realised that you have more of me inside you than I thought. Somehow, you didn't inherit that gene, and I felt such relief. I thought that I didn't have to worry about you any more than a mother would normally worry about her teenager. That's the only reason I even accepted this job. You weren't a lycan. You could go to school and still be a normal girl and have normal experiences. I just didn't count on you … I just didn't count on Shea." Mom trailed off, and I realised that she had reached the conclusion of her tale. Holy. Shit. I felt like my brain was imploding inside my head. Everything that I thought I knew was wrong, and yet, everything she said made sense. Every lie, every lie she'd ever told me was bubbling into my head. Mom had always told me that we'd moved to Bedford when I was two, after Dad died. But by the sounds of it, I hadn't been very old at all. I didn't have much information about my dad to compare, but I was strangely glad to know what I now did about him. My dad loved me. My dad wanted me. He wanted our family. I didn't even know what he looked like. Mom didn't have any pictures. Did I look like him at all? Did I behave like him at all? But I knew that he loved my mom and he loved me. And Mom took me away from him. She took us both away from him. "Humans have the power to brutally destroy a lycan," Shea had told me. And then I burst into tears. "Oh my God, you destroyed him, Mom," I shakily accused. How could a person, in that much pain, possibly think coherently, or make decisions properly? I wondered. My mind, as it was tending to do, started to race. Mom said that she had found out he had died only a little while after. He couldn't have been in his right mind. It had to have affected him. He wouldn't have died otherwise. He wouldn't have. ---- I had all my friends texting me saying they could hear me screaming from their houses and did they need to send an ambulance hahaha. When he kicked that goal we all screamed so loudly we scared the crap out of the animals hahaha!!