“Talk about you?” I finish for him. He nods, his neck reddening slightly to match his hair. He is nervous, I realize, and the thought makes me smile.
“No.” His shoulders slump forward slightly in disappointment. “But my mother didn’t talk about a lot of things. I think, for her, talking about the past was a painful reminder of what she had to run from?”
Liam’s brows furrow in confusion.
“Run from?” he asks. “What do you mean run from? She left. Twice.”
Neil coughs awkwardly from his chair before taking a large gulp of his beer. So he hasn’t told them anything about what happened to my mother.
“My mother didn’t run,” I snarl at him. “She was kidnapped. Then sold. Then raped and abused.”
The table is silent. Even the men in the corner booth had stopped their hushed conversation to look over.
“She never said anything.” Liam holds my glare. “Not once when she came back after being gone for months. She never once said a thing, and then she was gone less than a week later.”
“And so you think she ran? My mother may not have ever talked about you, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t notice things,” I say. “Like the way she looked at you in every photo I’ve been able to dig up. Or how she used to say no to the single dads at my school when they asked her out because she said she already met her soulmate. Elias used her as a hostage to keep her parents from expanding in Seattle. I didn’t put two and two together at first because all I’d ever grown-up knowing is that he is my father. That my last name was Moore.”
“How could you possibly know what?” Liam argues. “Just because Elias used you doesn’t mean he had…”
“She’s telling the truth.” Oh, goodie, Neil is finally growing a backbone. “Elias Ward had Katherine McDonough kidnapped and sold at a private auction three days after her disappearance. Originally, his plan was to rape her and give her back once her father backed off the port contracts, but he became…obsessed with her. Took out his sick, twisted fantasies on her.”
“And how do you know this?”
Neil sighs. “My father was the one who set it all up, and both of my parents were the one who helped her escape the first time.”
“Your father set it up and then what? Felt bad?” Seamus sneers.
“My father was in debt up to his eyeballs to Elias after a failed business venture,” Neil states. “Elias told him that he’d forgive the debt if he did him this one favor.”
“Kidnap my mother.”
Neil nods solemnly.
“From what I’ve gathered from my father’s journals, he hadn’t known Elias’s full plan or that he would become so entranced by her,” Neil continues. “Not until he was invited to a private party, and Katherine was the entertainment. They did things to her that—well, let’s just say it wasn’t pretty. Two weeks later, my mother stopped by under the pretense of meeting with Kendra. With my father’s help, she managed to help Katherine escape without being noticed.
“Elias didn’t know how she escaped, and he went searching. Offering a large bounty to anyone who brought her back to him and found out who helped her escape.”
My heart is racing and my stomach churns at Neil’s words.
“Your parents’ deaths weren’t an accident,” I whisper in horror. “Were they?”
Neil shakes his head.
“No,” he turns to face me fully. “Elias executed them without permission from the Don and set it up to make it look like they died in a car crash.”
“Oh my God, Neil.” Tears run down my cheeks.
He doesn’t let me continue.
“Someone turned Katherine in,” he informs Liam. “Someone close to you. She didn’t come back under her own power.”
“How did she escape a second time?” I asks.
“Kendra.” Her name pours from his lips in disgust. “She never liked your mother, and she knew what her having a Kavanaugh baby would mean.”
I can sense there is more he wants to say, but from some reason, he keeps quiet.
“I don’t know.” Liam’s lower lip trembles. I’ve never seen a man show this much vulnerability before, especially not in front of him men. “Fuck.”
