Beautifully Cruel (Beautifully Cruel #1)(87)

My heartbeat ticks up a notch. “I’m listening.”

He exhales slowly, then rolls to his back and tucks me into his side. He stares at the ceiling in silence for a while as the rain begins to fall harder outside.

Then, his voice low, he starts to speak.

“My father was a good man. A hardworking family man who went to church every Sunday and faithfully tithed ten percent of his income, though he barely had two pennies to his name. At that time, Ireland was in a nasty recession. There was high unemployment, hunger strikes, and a lot of social unrest. In the small town we lived in, people were starving. Nobody had any money, and there was very little food. The only people who had cash were in the mob, and they ran everything.

“I don’t know what started it. I doubt I’ll ever find out. But somehow my father ran afoul of a local mob leader named Eoin McGrath. He was the one who put the wooden stake through my gut.”

He pauses for a moment. He closes his eyes. After a moment of heavy silence, he continues.

“McGrath and his cronies started to harass my family. They chased my sisters home from school. Threw bricks through our windows. Killed the family cat and hung it over the front door. My mother lived in terror that one of us kids would be hurt, or worse, so she insisted we move farther out in the country to stay with her widowed sister, hoping the trouble would blow over.

“It didn’t. McGrath found out where we’d gone. One night we awoke to the smell of smoke and the sound of my mother screaming. When we ran outside, we saw why. My father had been hamstrung, tied to a tree, and lit on fire. He was still conscious, but engulfed in flames. In agony. Burning alive.

“It was Killian who had the presence of mind to go inside and get the gun.”

Liam stops abruptly and takes a breath.

I’m frozen in horror, seeing it all through Liam’s eyes. His mother screaming. His father burning. His brother raising his arm and pulling the trigger, the gun pointed at his father’s head.

It was mercy, but what a price Killian must have paid living with that ever since.

I can’t imagine.

“We buried what was left of my father under the blackened branches of the tree he died on, then Killian and I set out to find the men who killed him. We took the gun and my aunt’s car and drove back to town.”

“It wasn’t hard to find Eoin and his gang. They were in a bar. Celebrating. I had a butcher knife and Killian had the gun, but we were just boys, insane with grief, no match for half a dozen grown men.”

Into his heavy pause, I whisper, “How old were you?”

“Thirteen.”

My stomach turns over.

“They dragged us out into the street, took the weapons away, kicked us around a while for some fun. Then they tied us up and drove us back out to the farm.”

His voice drops an octave. “For me, they broke off blackened branches of that same fucking tree. They cut them up and sharpened them. Then they held me on the ground and drove one through my gut and another through my shoulder, pounding them deep into the dirt with a rock so I was pinned down.

“Killian wasn’t so lucky. There were five bullets left in my father’s gun. They threw a rope over a high branch of the tree, strung him up by his wrists, and gave him a kick to set him swinging. Then McGrath used him for target practice. He didn’t miss once.”

Horrified, I blurt, “Jesus Christ.”

Ignoring my interruption, Liam continues.

“At the first sign of McGrath’s convoy pulling up, my mother and aunt should’ve run straight out the back door and taken all the other kids into the fields. It was dark. They might have escaped. But they didn’t. Instead they watched from inside the house as McGrath and his gang worked me and Killian over. Then they blocked the doors, poured gasoline all over the front porch, and lit the house on fire. They drove away laughing as it burned.

“I pulled the stake out of my stomach, then the other from my shoulder. With what strength, I don’t know. Then I cut Killian down from the tree. I didn’t check to see if he was alive before I ran back to the house, but by that time it was consumed in flames. Through the window, I saw my mother on the floor, her arms around my brothers and sisters, all of them huddled together. So I punched through the window with my bare fists and jumped inside.

“They weren’t moving. Smoke inhalation got them before the fire did. I tried to drag my mother to the window, but she was so heavy. And the smoke was so thick…”

He stops again. Jaw clenched, heart hammering, he lies still and silent, lost in memory.

After a long time, he says gruffly, “Killian pulled me out of there. Even shot five times, he managed to save my life. I don’t remember much after that until days later when I woke up in a hospital bed. He was in the bed next to me.”

It feels like an anvil is crushing my chest. A tear leaks from the corner of my eye, straggling down my temple to drip onto Liam’s shoulder. “It’s a miracle you survived.”

“We shouldn’t have. That’s what all the doctors said. And Killian became convinced as time went on that we survived for a reason. That our family’s massacre shouldn’t be in vain. We were sent to live at St. Stephen’s Home for Boys, an orphanage right out of a Dickens’ novel. That’s where we stayed until we aged out of the system.

“Then Killian joined the military, and I moved to Dublin and got a job in a book store. I met a girl there. I thought we’d get married, live a normal life. But a few years later, she was killed in an explosion. The mafia targeted an enemy, and she was in the wrong place at the wrong time.