Page 23 of Vengeful Ties

We had married back then, as children that stood under the apple tree thinking the world would be laid at our feet to conquer. Ronnie officiated.

He’d thought it was the sweetest thing ever.

Now I was bereft of the real wedding and the children we spoke of having. We had promised each other we would do better than what our parents had. That we would love and cherish them and allow them to be free.

Happiness unlike I’d ever felt, other than when I was with him, was pillaged from my life, now I had the insatiable urge to hurt those who deserved to be hurt. It was one of the reasons I worked so closely with the Kings Wolves. They were good men, brilliant men that did the Devil’s work in punishing the sinners and making this world a safer place. It was only the darkness that I was left with and I had no other choice other than to make it my home.

“You don’t need to be hated, Alessia. You need to be loved,” he croaked it so hoarsely, it broke through my tortuous thoughts. I felt the vibrations as they ebbed through me where I still cradled his face. I almost couldn’t believe this strong, dark and unyielding man had just said something so sweet.

Something so wrong.

I resented the statement, because it wasn’t true, it’d never be true. “Tonight, Killian. I need to be hated. I need you to keep looking at me the way you are right now. In anger. In disdain.”

12

Killian

God, she was killing me.

If only she knew, she never killed that boy.

He was standing in front of her about to give her everything he had.

Even if I died that night, it would have been at her father’s hand. Not hers. She was just as weak and as helpless as I was. She did exactly what I asked her to do, what I pleaded with my gaze, hoping she’d understand, she survived.

Rían Killian Kavanagh.

Heir to the Irish mafia.

I’d learned a lot as a dead man.

The first thing was who and what I truly was.

My family wasn’t like Alessia’s.

I knew the violence and I knew the strain. My father rode me almost as hard as Luigi rode Lessie. But I never had a clue about what the mafia was or the fact that I was a part of it too. I just thought my father was an asshole sometimes. An unwavering man with even greater strength and was so set in his ways that you either followed his orders, or he’d make it so you couldn’t follow any orders ever again.

It wasn’t until I woke up cold and bleeding by the quarry, fighting for my life that I really understood how fucked we both were from the moment we were born into this dark world of corruption.

There was nothing we could do to escape this life.

Nothing other than die.

My life ended where it started.

As my pulse throbbed and I couldn’t speak, I’d woken up with my throat slit. You’d think you’d know or at least could’ve guessed the magnitude of being traumatized. Even as a child, it came in the form of a scary nightmare that would leave scars long into adulthood. You may not have known the definition or had some profound understanding of it, but it’s bled into our genetics, into our very DNA. Something brutal every human being could anticipate. But when I lived it, it devastated me more than the brain could ever comprehend.

Thinking I’d truly died and ended up in the bowels of a place I couldn’t even begin to fathom. That night, a storm fell like it wanted to punish Ravensdale and I was caught in the middle of it. Left feeling like it was me destined to be punished. All until a passerby found me and took me home to his wife. In pretty bad shape, they nursed me back to health and taught me how to speak again. Every time I tried, it came out as nothing but broken static that croaked from my fractured vocal cords.

Luigi took everything from me that night.

He took my future and he believed he’d taken my life too.

When I found out who my parents were, Tríona —pronounced tree-n— and Cormac Kavanagh, I couldn’t understand why they never retaliated. Tore this town apart and destroyed everything in its wake to find out what happened to me. But they never so much as stirred the waters.

I had no idea why we’d been here all those years ago. Why or how I’d met Lessie. Only when I woke up, I had nothing but my anger and grief to keep me company.

I’d stayed with the family. Leo and Amelia Madden. I offered up no information about who I was or what had happened to me. They just assumed I was the victim of some serial killer passing through town or some pedophilic cunt my new father was hell bent on murdering should that have turned out to be the case.

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