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“Jessie,” Shane sighs as he stands up from his desk and walks across the room. “We’re family, right?”
“Yes.”
“So, that means you get to say pretty much anything you want when you’re upset, and we’ll get over it,” he smiles at me.
“Yep,” Mikey nods. “And we know better than anyone how your past can fuck you up, Red. We got more skeletons in our closets than Calvary Cemetery.”
“Yeah? But you guys don’t freak out when you see a dead bird on the roof.” I arch an eyebrow.
“You didn’t freak out, baby,” Liam assures me. “And you are not the only person in this room who lets their past get to them occasionally.”
“Yep,” Conor nods. “We’re all fucked up here. That’s why you fit in so well.” He winks at me and I smile at him. God, I love him so much.
“Tell her why we left Ireland, Shane,” Liam says softly.
Shane looks between Mikey and Liam. “You sure?” he frowns.
“Yeah,” they both say.
“Okay,” he says, pulling over a chair and taking a seat in front of the sofa. “Conor told you that he was a bare-knuckle boxing champion, right?”
“Yes,” I nod.
“Well, Liam and Mikey used to fight too.” He looks between the two of them again and they nod for him to go on. “Well, back in Ireland, my father was often involved in these underground fights, where basically the two fighters would fight to the death.”
I open my mouth in horror. “He made Mikey and Liam do that?”
Shane runs his tongue over his lip and sucks in a deep breath. “Yes. But that’s not it. You have to understand that the fighters in these matches didn’t really have much choice, Jessie. Who the hell wants to go into a fight knowing there’s a fifty percent chance you won’t make it out alive?”
Conor shifts beside me and Liam starts taking deep breaths and I hold his hand tighter. “So, what happened if they refused to fight?” I ask.
“Then they would face a very angry crowd who paid a lot of money to watch two guys beat the shit out of each other, and they would both get torn apart instead.”
I swallow the bile as it burns the back of my throat. “That is so brutal.”
“Yeah,” Shane nods. “And Patrick Ryan entered his youngest sons in a competition. Against each other.”
“What?” My hand instinctively flies to my mouth. “So he expected them to fight? For one of them to kill the other?”
“Yeah,” Conor says.
“What happened?” I ask, looking between the four of them.
“It was fucking carnage,” Mikey says with a haunted expression on his face as Liam simply nods. “Obviously, we refused to fight each other. I begged that bastard to get us out of there. Both of us offered to fight anyone else if he would let the other go, but that sick fuck wouldn’t even consider it. And when we wouldn’t fight each other, that vicious cunt fed us to a baying mob.”
Liam shudders beside me and Mikey sits on the desk with a scowl on his face.
“It was fucking awful,” Liam sucks in a shaky breath. “Hands pulling at us and feet stomping on our heads. They were trying to tear us apart. Like we were animals and not even people.”
“How did you get out of there?” I whisper as my heart physically hurts at the thought of what they went through. And if it was just before they came to New York, they must have only been sixteen.
Mikey and Liam don’t answer, so Shane continues for them. “Conor and I found out about our father’s lunatic plan and we got there just in time to get them out.”
“They were in such a bad way,” Conor adds. “We thought we were going to lose them. Liam almost died on the operating table in the hospital.”
“And that’s why we hate hospitals.” Mikey arches an eyebrow at me.
“And that’s why you left Ireland?”
