by Paula Cox
Alyssa cringed. “Should I, Prince?” she said after a moment. “Should I stay away from you? He knows I want to take you away from here.”
There it was, the whole truth. Somehow, Alyssa still hoped.
Prince smiled at her with a mixture of fondness and sorrow. “I love you for saying that, I do,” he said. “But I told you, I can’t leave.”
“Why?” Alyssa asked again. “What’s in Pinebrook that holds so much power over you? What’s your obligation, Prince?”
He shook his head, lapsing into a silence that tore at her heart.
Alyssa reached across the table and took his hand in hers. “Please,” she said, squeezing his fingers. “Help me understand.”
Prince entwined their fingers together in an almost automatic gesture. He took a deep breath, and she knew he was finally about to talk. When he did talk, however, his answer was unlike anything Alyssa had imagined.
“My dad,” he said.
She blinked, stunned. “Your dad?”
Prince’s father was the source of all of his problems. He was a drunk and a gambler who had spent most of Prince’s childhood beating up his mom, whom everyone regarded as a heroine for having somehow managed to avoid that her husband’s fists never once connected with Prince’s face. After his mother’s death from cancer, Prince had left the house at the age of fourteen and never looked back. His father still lived in Pinebrook, but as far as Alyssa knew, they had no contact.
Prince sighed heavily. He took his hand away from hers to run his fingers through his hair in a nervous gesture. Alyssa noticed that his hand was trembling.
“Tell me,” she said gently.
Prince swallowed visibly. “You know he has a gambling problem,” he said.
“Amongst many others,” Alyssa spat, unable to stop herself. She cringed. “Sorry.”
Prince smiled. “No worries. It’s the truth.” He took a long sip of coffee, and Alyssa was pretty sure he was also wishing it were alcohol. “Anyway, it turns out he was indebted up to his ears, and the worst part is that he was indebted to the club.”
Alyssa stared at him in shock. “He was indebted to the Devil’s Fighters?”
Prince nodded. “He still is, actually,” he said.
“How much does he owe them?”
Prince waved a hand dismissively. “It’s not important,” he said, with a finality that Alyssa didn’t feel like arguing with. “Anyway, they came collecting that summer.”
“The summer of eight years ago?” Alyssa asked. Her stomach was in knots. She had the horrific feeling that she might know where the whole sordid tale was headed, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to hear it. But she had asked, and she would have to sit through it.
“Yes,” Prince said. “He kept saying he would pay them back, and in the meanwhile he kept gambling and his debt kept growing. He never so much as gave them one instalment as proof of his good faith. They were fed up with it. They made it very clear that he was to pay them back soon or they would kill him.”
“Why didn’t you go to the police?” Alyssa blurted out without thinking.
Prince arched an eyebrow at her. “Really?” he said pointedly.
She blushed. “Right,” she said, clearing her throat in embarrassment. “That was an idiotic question. Go on.”
Prince sipped from his coffee again. “Dad didn’t have that kind of money, and I sure as hell didn’t. Bennie suggested an…uh…alternative solution.”
Alyssa narrowed her eyes in suspicion. “What alternative solution?”
“He’d seen me fight once or twice, you know, when I got into a fight at the bar those couple of times.”
Alyssa groaned. She remembered those two occasions all too well, and even though Prince had admittedly been provoked, she didn’t like to remember them. She nodded and gestured for him to continue.
“He said I could earn the money to pay them back by fighting in their rings.”
There it was. Alyssa had begun to suspect it ever since Prince had started his tale, but hearing it out loud made it all too real. She suddenly felt like throwing up.
“Oh, Prince,” she said, horrified, her voice coming out in a choked sound. “And you said yes?”
“What choice did I have?” Prince said. “I know you may think my dad did not deserve anything from me, but he is my dad.”
Alyssa thought exactly that, but she knew better than to say it out loud.
“I’ve been earning that money since then. It’s a lot of money; it’ll probably take me a few more years.”
Alyssa thought about it. “I’m selling the house, you know,” she said after a moment. “Would that cover it?”
Prince smiled. “Thank you,” he said sincerely. “But no, it wouldn’t cover it. Besides, I’m pretty sure Bennie will never let me go, even once I’ve earned my fee. I’m too good.” There was no hint of bragging in his voice as he said the words, and there shouldn’t have been; they both knew it was more of a curse than anything else. “He’ll keep me until I’m too old to fight.”
Or until you end up dead, Alyssa thought bitterly, but she didn’t voice that either.
“All these years, you never told me,” she said. “Why?”
“I didn’t want to pull you into it,” Prince said. “And you didn’t want to listen, anyway.” He wasn’t being accusatory; once again, he was merely stating a fact.
“Maybe,” Alyssa admitted. “But all these years, you let me believe you didn’t love me anymore.”
“I’m sorry,” he said sincerely. “I’m so sorry about that, Aly, but I had no choice. Please, you have to understand that.”
“I don’t,” Alyssa admitted again. “I don’t understand any of this. I’m not mad at you,” she said quickly when she saw his face fall. “But I don’t understand it.”
He nodded. “I know you don’t. I guess I understand why you don’t understand.”
“So where does that leave you?” Alyssa finally found the strength to us.
Prince was silent for the longest time. “Nowhere,” he finally said, shattering all of their dreams and hopes—as false as those hopes might have been—with one single, final world. “It leaves us nowhere.”
Alyssa knew he was right, but she couldn’t find it within herself to let that word be the final one.
Chapter Twelve
Finally getting the whole awful story off his chest seemed to have exhausted Prince, who now lay asleep next to her on the sofa bed. They had opted to sleep in the studio, which would allow them to hear Rick should he stir or call out.
Alyssa could not sleep. There was something surreal about having Prince in her arms again. Oddly enough, for all of the years that she had spent obsessing about her lost relationship with him, she couldn’t pinpoint the last time they had slept in the same bed. Now, she allowed herself to savor the feeling. When he slept, Prince looked less like the hardened man that life had forced him to become and more like the sweet-tempered boy she could remember.
Alyssa pressed a kiss to his temple, relieved when he didn’t wake up. There was a quiet rage bubbling in her chest and burning in her veins. She simply could not wrap her mind around how unfair life had been to Prince. She could not wrap her mind around what a lousy—for lack of a better word—father Alfred Wheeler was. What kind of man allowed his son to enter a fighting ring to pay off his gambling debts? As far as Alyssa was concerned, the bastard should have let Bennie Lenday kill him before he allowed for things to go down that road.
She was never going to breathe a word of this to Prince, of course. He didn’t need to hear it, and besides, it was Alyssa’s own hatred to deal with.
She couldn’t wrap her mind around Bennie Lenday and the Devil’s Fighters making money off men killing each other, yet they still slept peacefully at night.
She couldn’t wrap her mind around any of it. She couldn’t wrap her mind around herself; she had never once considered the possibility that there might have been more to Prince’s seemingly inexplicable change o
f heart. She should have dug deeper. She should have insisted. She should have fought. She should have asked. She should have listened.
“You left me.”
“So did you.”
She couldn’t get Prince’s words out of her head.
“So did you.”
It was true. She had left him. She knew he didn’t fault her for it, and she knew she couldn’t give up her life for the Devil’s Fighters like he had done. But she should have found a way to be there, somehow.
The whole thing was backwards. The whole thing didn’t make any sense. The whole thing was too crazy to be true. Except that it was, and Alyssa knew that life truly was stranger than fiction.
She thought about everything that had happened and everything that had been said. She had always known, deep down, that she had never stopped loving Prince. But to know that he had also never stopped loving her was something else entirely. It filled her with a sense of purpose, and with that sense of belonging that she had never found in Pinebrook.
She wondered if that changed anything, the fact that Prince loved her as much as she loved him, and she knew that it did. It changed everything. But could she really allow that change to occur? And how did that change translate into action? She couldn’t leave her life in Vancouver—nor did she want to. However, she also knew she couldn’t leave Prince—nor did she want to. She had to get him out of there, somehow.
The trouble was, she had no idea how. She had virtually no allies in Pinebrook, no one to ask for help. Not for the first time since her parents’ passing, pain flashed across her chest. Her mom and dad would have known what to do. They would have helped. But they were gone, and Alyssa knew that it was all up to her now.
Prince shifted in his sleep and pressed closer to her, and Alyssa tightened her hold protectively around him. Bennie Lenday could threaten her until he was blue in the face; Alyssa was not going anywhere. Not without Prince.
It wouldn’t be easy, that was for certain. Alyssa had always made so sure that she wouldn’t have anything to do with the Devil’s Fighters, that she didn’t have the first clue of what it was like to deal with a motorcycle gang—or with any gang, for that matter. “Dangerous” probably didn’t begin to describe it. But it was a danger she was willing to face if it meant setting Prince free.
Before she could do that, however, she would have to make sure that he actually wanted to be set free. There was a resignation to the way Prince approached his predicament that worried her. It was as if he had already given up any hope that he would ever be able to have a life. Maybe that was exactly the case, and if it was, convincing him of the opposite would be extremely tricky. But she would have to do it. She couldn’t get him out alone; he would have to help her.
The more she thought about it, the more Alyssa realized that Prince’s chains weren’t only physical ones. She couldn’t even begin to imagine what he must have seen, and she knew the word “baggage” was an understatement to describe the weight that Prince most probably bore on his shoulders. She had noticed the scars, earlier on as they had sex on the floor in her parents’ kitchen. She didn’t want to even try to imagine what could have caused them, or the way the wounds had bled. She wondered if Prince had been one of the men her father had treated privately, and she knew he probably was.
As worrisome as the physical scars on Prince’s body were, Alyssa knew that they were only the tip of the iceberg. There was no way anyone forced to live such a dangerous, trauma-filled life could escape unscathed. The weight that Prince shuffled around must be overbearing. Alyssa didn’t have the tools to even begin to comprehend it, but she knew it was something she would have to deal with too, along with her own issues.
She knew that coping with her parents’ deaths would be almost impossible; she had yet to allow herself to really take it all in, and she was postponing that moment for as long as she possibly could. She knew it would break her, and she simply wasn’t ready to break in such a shattering, overwhelming way. Staying in that house without them was already almost more than she could take.
Alyssa tried to be strong and as proactive as she could, but it was hard not to have a meltdown every time her gaze would fall upon something that reminded her of her mom and dad—which in their house happened to be everything. Back when she had lost Prince to the Devil’s Fighters, she had thought she had known loss. As it turned out, she had known nothing about loss until now.
She allowed herself a few moments to stop and take it in now, as gently as she could. She still couldn’t believe it had happened. Every time she had heard about a devastating car accident on the news or read about it in the paper, she had always felt oddly detached from it. She had felt sorry for the victims and their families, but she had never been able to really put it into focus. Now, her focus was only too sharp. She wondered how many of the people who had offered her their condolences had lacked that kind of focus too—probably most of them, if not all.
Alyssa took a deep breath when she felt the pain starting to mount at an alarming rate within her chest. Now was not the time, she decided. She had to keep herself sharp and present; it was the only way she could ever hope to get Prince and herself out of Pinebrook.
The more she thought about it, the more overwhelming a task it seemed. It would be a huge undertaking. It would be the hardest thing she would ever have to do. On top of the practical difficulties, she knew now that they were both damaged. They were both struggling. They both had to relearn how to love—provided that they had ever known how it was done. They would have to relearn each other. They would have to relearn how to lean on each other, like they used to do.
More importantly, if they wanted to survive, they would have to learn how to talk about their ghosts. They would have to open up in ways neither of them had ever opened up before—with each other or with anyone else. They would have to learn to share their respective weights with each other.
Alyssa wondered if she was strong enough to take that weight on. She wondered if she was ready to embark on a journey that would really and truly entail risking everything—her emotional sanity as well as her physical safety.
She didn’t have to think much about it; she knew that she was strong enough. She knew that she was ready. The alternative choice was to go back to her life in Vancouver and leave Prince behind once again. As far as Alyssa was concerned, that was no choice at all.
Chapter Thirteen
To Alyssa Kelley, the world was a question mark. After swearing off Pinebrook, she was going back to her hometown for the second time in the span of just a little over two weeks.
The drive from the New Orleans International Airport across ninety miles worth of Louisiana was still a hot and monotonous affair, but for some reason it didn’t feel as miserable. Alyssa’s perspective had shifted. The southern heat still made her clothes stick to her skin with maddening determination, but she didn’t care.
Anything and everything she had ever hated about where she came from had become an ally—from the insufferable heat to the marshy landscape, to the corrupt agents in Pinebrook’s police corps to the ruthless motorcycle gang that ruled the town. Everything was a reason to move faster. Every single component of Pinebrook’s rotten reality spurred her on and acted as a constant reminder that she needed to get Prince out of there sooner rather than later.
Alyssa had carved herself a way out of Pinebrook and its dead-end reality years ago, but Prince’s story was a completely different one…and it was now permanently inked on Alyssa’s skin. It stuck to her being like the clothes sticking to her body in the heat.
It had taken her a few days to really absorb Prince’s dark tale of how and why he had become a competitor in the Devil’s Fighters’ illegal fighting rings. It just wasn’t the kind of story that one can listen to without being deeply affected by it, and the fact that the one telling it was her best friend/long lost boyfriend/newfound lover had been especially heartbreaking. Still, the time to wrap her mind around the enormity of it was over.
/> Alyssa had taken Prince’s words in, had given herself some time to deal with their overwhelming impact, and was now wearing them like a badge of honor. Prince’s story also was a constant reminder. It wasn’t just a sad tale; it was concrete, gut-wrenching facts. And every day those facts worked towards spelling out the minutes, hours, and days left before Prince or Alyssa simply couldn’t take it anymore.
She knew there was an expiration date on Prince’s life, as well as on their relationship (if one could even call it that). During her time in Pinebrook she had always made sure to steer as clear of the Devil’s Fighters as possible, and so she didn’t know much about their ways, but she wasn’t naïve enough to believe that Prince could remain unscathed much longer living the life he lived. However, she wasn’t going to wait for something to happen to him. Soon after learning his truth, Alyssa had made it her mission to get him out.