A mix of pain and relief washed over his features. He looked at her for a long silent moment before saying, “I’m ready, Trace. But I don’t have more pictures. I couldn’t go through her stuff after…I left everything behind.”

“That must have been hard to do, leaving your life behind. But I get it. You were trying to run from the reminders of what you’d lost.”

“God,” he said, more to himself than to her. “You really do get me.”

“There’s a lot of you to get, and I have a feeling I’ve only scratched the surface. But I want to understand all of you and what you’ve been through.”

“There’s no easy way to tell you about what happened, but you can imagine what it was like. When my mom got too sick to work, I took on hours at the Roadhouse as a busboy and a dishwasher. Tiny’s boys and I hung around the Dark Knights doing their grunt work, and some of the guys would give me odd jobs to make extra money. I didn’t care if it was shit work. But it still wasn’t enough. Then I met this guy Doug Wallace at the bar. He was a tough dude, a few years older than me, and we got to talking. He seemed like a good guy, like I could trust him. He told me he’d lost his father to cancer, and I told him about my mom. It turned out he was an underground fighter, and he brought me into the ring. That’s where I made our money. I quit school to take care of my mom, got my GED along the way, and fought to keep a roof over our heads and pay the bills.”

“What’s an underground fighter?”

“Illegal fighting. No rules.”

“Oh my God, Diesel. Isn’t that dangerous?”

He scoffed. “Yeah, but I was big even then. I was doing manual labor at the ranch and working out in their gym with the guys. I wasn’t as thick as I am now, but I was pissed off at the world. That and my size were a deadly combination.”

“I’m sure they were. That scares me, and I wasn’t even there. I thought the Dark Knights didn’t break the law. Did your mom know? What about your girlfriend? Were they okay with you fighting? Was Tiny?”

“My mom didn’t know, and my girlfriend thought it was cool. Tiny hated it. He offered us money more times than I can count. But I wasn’t going to take handouts from anyone. My mother had always supported me. It was my turn to support her.”

“That was incredibly noble of you, but you were just a kid shouldering adult responsibilities.”