“I’m willing to start again, but I’ve got questions, Rune.” She exhaled a dry laugh. “I’m not even sure that’s actually your name.”
“It is,” he said.
“Your first, or your last?”
A tendon pulsed in his jaw. “My only name.”
“But not always.” She stared at him, and he knew she saw the tell.
He forced himself to hold her sharp gaze, even when she seemed to look right through him. “No, not always. But it’s the only name I’ve used for a very long time.”
She didn’t say anything. Her silence measured him, and he knew he owed her more than that.
“I was given a different name at birth, but when I left my father’s Darkhaven, I left behind everything he gave me.” And he would never utter that man’s name again, unless it was to curse the bastard to hell as he took his hideous life. “My name is, and will always be, Rune.”
Tenderness softened Carys’s gaze as she listened to him. She sat very still, compassion written across her face. “It must’ve been difficult, being on your own at such a young age.”
A young age? He’d been a grown man by the time he had finally cut ties with his past, not a child. He frowned, unsure what to say. Not quite certain where she was going.
“I’ve heard a bit about your background from the other fighters, from things I’ve picked up here and there. You know, how you grew up on the streets here in Boston, all alone. Doing whatever you had to in order to survive. It couldn’t have been easy for you.”
Rune felt himself nodding absently. He’d told a lot of different stories about his past over the years, some of them more or less true. But leave it to him to get tangled up in one of those tales with a woman gifted with photographic memory.
“I never expected life to be easy,” he murmured, and that much was the truth.
As he spoke, the group of guys from before circled back and began to approach the table.
The one in the lead awkwardly cleared his throat. Rune ordinarily might have scattered them with a glower, but given the uncomfortable path of his conversation with Carys now, he was actually grateful for the interruption.
When he glanced their way, the three young men gave him eager looks. “Excuse us, uh . . . We just wanted to say, uh, really great match between you and Jagger the other night.”
Another nodded enthusiastically. “You were awesome, man.”
Rune smiled blandly and murmured his thanks, but they weren’t leaving. “We know you’re kinda busy here, but, uh . . . could we maybe get a picture with you real quick?”
Carys grinned over the rim of her wine glass as Rune nodded and waited for the men to crowd in with him and snap the photo. He made sure to turn his head at the last moment, a subtle dodge of the camera’s eye.
Or not so subtle.
Carys’s knowing stare held his gaze as the fans finally moved on. “You don’t like the attention, do you?”
He grunted. In fact, he hated the attention. “I didn’t get into fighting for the fame. Not for the money either.”
“Then why did you?”
A dozen different answers rushed to the tip of his tongue, every one of them a lie. Shit he’d casually tossed out to deflect interest or get rid of anyone who started digging around in his past.
But Carys wasn’t just anyone. He hadn’t set out to deceive her, no more than he wanted to now.
“First time I ever took a real punch, I was eight years old. My mother had died that spring. I didn’t take it well. Not long after, my father started bringing me to the pit. To toughen me up, he’d said. To teach me how to be a man.”
Just speaking the words brought the memories back in vivid clarity. The cold stone of the old circular fighting pit. The soft dirt floor beneath his small, bare feet.
The sudden, unexpected crash of an adult Breed male’s fist connecting with his child-sized jaw.
He could still smell his own blood, then the sharp, pungent stench of his own vomit as the pain had rocketed through him and turned his stomach inside out. He could hear his father’s laughter above him, followed by the stern command for him to get up on his feet and take the next blow like a man, not a whimpering little girl.
“I learned quickly under the old man’s training. Pain didn’t frighten me. My gift made me impervious to it. In the beginning, that’s how I withstood it. After a while, I didn’t need to rely on that ability. Injury could slow me down, but it didn’t stop me. I became fearless, relentless. Merciless. By the time I was ten, I was handing my adult Breed cousins and uncles their asses in the pit. That’s about when my father decided to make things interesting. He started bringing in opponents from outside to fight me in the pit. A few of them came willingly. Stupidly. Others weren’t so willing. My father’s message to me before each match was plain enough: Fight to the death. He didn’t care who came out on top.”
Carys had stopped eating now. She’d stopped moving at all, her gaze riveted on him with a look hovering somewhere between horror and heartbreak. “Rune . . . my God.”
“I fought to stay alive,” he said, pushing on, before her softness made him retreat behind the lies and remoteness that had long been his shield. “I got brutally good. Lethally good. I survived. Then, eventually, I left. And I never looked back.”
Her brows knit, pain swimming in her gaze. “Wasn’t there anyone who was there for you during all that time?”
“To do what? Save me?”
“Yes. Or, I don’t know,” she murmured. “To show you some kindness. To give you some kind of hope, or .
