They Threw Me Away at Twelve, So I Came Home Undefeated novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Welcome Home
Thora wins in the cage, pulls off her mask and finds her brother Perry frozen in the shadows; the other brother tells her the family buried her five years ago.
The bell rang and I moved first.
My left hook buried itself in the big man's liver.
He grunted and folded, and I brought my elbow around into his temple.
It was not a clean hit.
He went down anyway, and the whole cage shook when he landed.
Two hundred people packed into the basement of the old warehouse screamed for Mask.
That was the name they knew me by.
The man on the mat stood a foot taller than me and weighed twice as much.
Dutch had picked him to tear me apart, and he did not even try to get up.
The referee counted him out anyway.
I knelt beside his ear.
"Stay down," I told him. "You're done."
Thirty-one fights, thirty-one wins, and nobody had ever really hurt me.
Dutch picked my opponents, and he had never picked wrong.
He stood at the cage door with his phone against his ear.
It buzzed before every fight, and he never said who called, and I never asked.
I stood up and reached behind my head for the knot of the mask.
Dutch had told me that afternoon that two men in good coats were asking about a girl with a long braid.
I knew who had sent them.
My father sent me away at twelve, to a truck stop, with forty dollars and a backpack.
That was five years ago, and nobody had come looking since.
So I pulled the mask off in front of the whole room and lifted my face to the lights.
The crowd roared, because they had paid for a monster and got a girl.
I did not hear them.
I was looking at the back of the room, where the stairs came down into the dark.
A tall man stood in the shadow of the stairwell with his hands hanging at his sides.
Sandy hair, a narrow face, and gray eyes I would have known anywhere.
Perry.
My middle brother, who used to carry toast and peanut butter up to my bed at midnight and whisper that I was his Jellybean.
All the blood left his face.
He stared at me and did not blink.
He did not move toward me, and he did not look away.
He was the last face I had seen from that car, and he looked like he wanted to be sick.
I stepped through the cage door and walked straight at him across the concrete, and the crowd opened up to let me through.
My knuckles were still taped, and my braid was soaked.
I stopped an arm's length from him.
"Welcome home, Perry," I said.
His mouth opened, and nothing came out of it.
Behind him, a bigger shape pushed out of the dark and put a hand on his shoulder.
A camel coat, a buzz cut, a grin I remembered from every bad day I ever had in that house.
Rhett.
My oldest brother looked me up and down.
"Look at you," he said. "Dad said you'd turn up looking like a freak."
The grin stayed where it was.
I watched his weight instead of his hands, because Dutch taught me to.
It sat on his back foot, easy and loose, because Rhett had never been afraid of me in his life.
Heavy boots came up behind me, and Dutch's big hand closed on my shoulder.
"Kid," he said. "You know these two?"
"They're my brothers."
"Say the word and I'll have them thrown out into the street."
Rhett laughed in his face.
"Try it, old man."
Dutch did not answer him.
He looked past me at Perry instead, and Perry gave one small shake of his head.
Dutch's hand slid off my shoulder, and he stepped back.
I noticed it, and I did not understand it, and there was no time to ask.
"Get your bag," Rhett said. "Dad wants you home tonight."
"Dad wants me home," I said. "Dad."
The word felt strange in my mouth.
"The man who dumped me at a gas station."
Rhett's grin finally slipped, just a little.
Then it came back wider, and he leaned in close enough that I smelled his cologne.
"Thora," he said, very softly. "We buried you."
I stared at him.
"Closed casket, the week after you left. Half the county came. Mom cried so hard she needed a doctor."
Behind him, Perry shut his eyes.
My legs did not shake, because I had trained them not to.
For five years I had told myself that nobody in the world knew I was alive.
It had never crossed my mind that my family had made sure of it.
"There's a stone in the garden with your name on it," Rhett said. "You should come see it."
Want to keep talking to characters like these? Chat with AI romance characters: AI Boyfriend · AI Girlfriend · Dark Romance · Fantasy Romance · BL (Boys’ Love) · Billionaire Boyfriend · Mafia Boyfriend · Possessive Boyfriend · Hockey Boyfriend · Older Boyfriend · K-Drama Boyfriend · Anime Boyfriend · Vampire Boyfriend · Werewolf Boyfriend · Demon Boyfriend · Fae Romance · GL (Girls’ Love) · Anime Girlfriend · Goth & Alt Girlfriend · Gamer Girlfriend · Tsundere Girlfriend · Fantasy Girlfriend