Elaris‘s Cruelest Gift

An Invitation

# Chapter 3 — An Invitation I Should Have Refused

By the fourth visit, I had stopped pretending, even to myself, that I wasn't looking forward to Thursdays.

Ronan had a rhythm now — never predictable enough to feel like a schedule, but consistent enough that some traitorous part of my brain had started checking the door every time it opened after nine. He never stayed past midnight. He never asked for my number, which I found more unsettling than if he had, because it meant every visit was a choice he was actively making, over and over, rather than a habit he'd fallen into. He always left a hundred-dollar bill for a fourteen-dollar drink, and I'd stopped arguing about it after the second time, mostly because arguing required maintaining eye contact with him for longer than my nervous system could currently handle.

"You're doing the thing again," Dee said, sliding onto her usual stool.

"What thing."

"The thing where you're smiling at absolutely nothing while you restock the garnish tray."

"I like garnishes."

"You have never once in the four years I've known you liked garnishes." She grinned into her glass. "It's Ronan Thursday, isn't it."

"There's no such thing as Ronan Thursday."

"There is now. I've named it. It's official."

I threw a lime wedge at her, which she caught with the ease of a woman who'd been dodging my projectiles for years, and didn't dignify the accusation with a real denial, because the truth was even more embarrassing than she suspected. I'd started thinking about him at odd hours — folding laundry, driving to the grocery store, the specific quiet stretch of two in the morning when my brain apparently decided it needed something to chew on. I hadn't done that for a man in longer than I wanted to admit, and I definitely hadn't done it for a man whose last name I still didn't know.

He walked in at nine-fifteen, which I noted with an internal eye-roll at myself for noting it at all, and took his usual stool with an expression I hadn't seen on him before — something more serious under the easy charm, like a man carrying a decision he hadn't fully made his peace with yet.

"You look like someone told you bad news," I said, setting his whiskey down without being asked, because apparently we were the kind of regulars now who didn't need menus.

"Someone told me confusing news," he said. "I'm still deciding how bad it is."

"Want to talk about it, or do you want me to distract you from it? I offer both services. Distraction's a little pricier."

That got the ghost of a real smile out of him, the tension around his eyes easing slightly. "Distraction, then."

"Excellent. Did you know the guy at the end of the bar has been trying to work up the nerve to ask me for a fake number for the last twenty minutes? I can see him rehearsing in the mirror behind the bottles."

"Should I be worried?"

"Only if you were planning on asking me something first."

I hadn't meant to say it. It came out before the sensible part of my brain could stop it, some reckless little spark of *fine, let's just see* that I usually kept on a much shorter leash than this. Ronan went very still, the whiskey glass halfway to his mouth, and looked at me with an intensity that made the bar around us go quiet and far away in a way that had absolutely nothing to do with the actual noise level.

"I was going to ask you something," he said. "Actually. Tonight."

"Oh." My heart did something complicated and unhelpful. "That's — okay. Ask, then."

"There's a gathering this weekend. Out at my family's land, a few hours from here. It's — complicated to explain, family tradition, a lot of people I'd need you to meet if this is going to keep going the way I think it's going." He said it carefully, watching my face for a reaction I was doing my best not to give him too plainly. "I know that's a strange thing to ask a woman I've known for a few weeks. I know it's a lot. I'd understand if you said no."

"Family tradition," I repeated. "That's ominous. Are we talking creepy cult vibes or just, like, aggressive board games and a lot of aunts asking about my intentions?"

"Somewhere in between, honestly."

"Comforting."

"I wouldn't ask if I didn't think it mattered," he said, quieter now, the joke dropping out of his voice entirely. "I wouldn't ask if I didn't think *you* mattered. More than I know how to explain yet."

I should have said no. Every instinct I'd built over twenty-six years of being a woman who didn't take reckless leaps for men she'd known a matter of weeks was screaming at me to say no, to keep this exactly where it was — comfortable, low-stakes, contained to a bar on Thursday nights where I held all the power because it was my building and my rules.

"Okay," I said instead.

His whole face changed — relief and something warmer underneath it, something that looked dangerously close to the way Dee had described it that first night. *Like you invented sunlight.* I filed the memory away with a small, uneasy twist in my stomach, because some part of me, some quiet instinct I didn't have a name for, was already whispering that I'd just agreed to something a great deal bigger than a weekend trip to meet some aunts.

"You won't regret it," he said.

"You say that like people usually do."

He didn't answer that one. He just reached across the bar, slow enough that I could have pulled back, and brushed his thumb once against the inside of my wrist — a touch so light it shouldn't have done anything at all, and instead sent something sharp and electric straight up my arm, strong enough that I actually gasped, quiet, involuntary, before I could stop myself.

His eyes went dark. "You felt that."

"What was that?"

"I'll explain this weekend," he said, and for the first time since he'd walked into my bar, he looked almost afraid — not of me, exactly, but of something bigger than either of us, something he'd clearly been carrying alone for longer than tonight. "I promise. I'll explain everything."

I went home that night and stood in front of my bathroom mirror for a long time, staring at the pale, thin scar on the inside of my left wrist — the one my grandmother always got strange and quiet about whenever I asked how I'd gotten it, the one she swore, every single time, I'd had since birth.

For the first time in twenty-six years, I actually wondered if she'd been telling me the truth.