by Paula Cox
“Because I struck a deal with him. If I took on more fights, he’d let you stay.”
“Why?” Alyssa repeated.
“It’s more lucrative for them if I fight more often,” Prince admitted. “I have a certain fame in the rings. I’m one of the best.” There was no trace of bragging in his voice as he said this, and Alyssa could tell that he would have preferred to be “the best” at something entirely different than fighting in a ring.
“I don’t understand,” Alyssa admitted.
“I’ve made it so that your staying in town would be an advantage for them.”
Alyssa stared at him. The more Prince spoke, the more confused she felt. Emotions began mounting up within her, a mixture of feelings so strong and powerful that she almost felt sick with the force of it all.
“So you’re telling me that all the fights you’ve been in since I came back were because of me?”
Prince paused in his anger. He seemed to realize what he was saying for the first time. “No, Aly,” he said gently. “They’ve been for you. And for me, too. To have you with me.”
Alyssa was horrified. The thought that she had been responsible for even a part of the horrors that littered Prince’s life with the Devil’s Fighters—as indirect as her responsibility was—was more than she could handle.
“And you never thought of asking what I would think of all of this before you went and made deals with the devil?” she demanded. Under any other circumstances, her choice of words would have been melodramatic. Not so under these circumstances. As far as Alyssa was concerned, Bennie Lenday was Satan.
Prince opened his mouth and then quickly closed it again. It was all too obvious that no, he had not thought about it. “I just didn’t see any other option,” he finally said. If anything, he had the good grace to look slightly ashamed.
“I would’ve left,” Alyssa said. “If my staying here meant that you had to fight more, I would’ve left. I would’ve gone back to Canada, and I would’ve worked on getting you out from a distance. Somehow, I would’ve found a way to make it work,” she snapped when she saw Prince was about to protest. “I never would have wanted this. And I sure as hell don’t want you fighting a guy who’s known to kill his adversaries.”
“It’s too late,” Prince said. “I already told Bennie I’d do it.”
“Change your mind,” Alyssa said brusquely. “Tell him it’s not worth it. Tell him you’ve come back to your senses. I don’t care; tell him anything. You can’t do this.”
“I have to do this,” Prince repeated. It was clear from the angry but also lost and frustrated expression on his face that he didn’t understand how Alyssa did not get it. “Please, Aly. You have to understand.”
“Well, I don’t.” Alyssa stood, too, the mounting tension within her finally getting the best of her body; she just had to work the energy off somehow. “I don’t understand, Prince. You went off and put your life in horrible danger because of me, or for me, as you say. Do you have any idea how this feels?”
Prince swallowed visibly. The anger was slowly flowing out of him, and now he just looked at Alyssa in pain and confusion. “I thought you’d be happy.”
“Happy?” Alyssa replied, incredulous. She could not believe what she was hearing. “How could I be happy with this?”
“I’m doing something, Aly,” Prince said fervently, his green eyes shining. “For the first time in my life, I’m actually doing something. I’m taking action. I’m taking matters in my own hands. I’m offered the chance to decide for my life myself.”
“Don’t you see? Don’t you understand?” Alyssa retorted. “Bennie hasn’t offered you a chance. He’s offered you a death sentence.”
The realization had hit her during one of Prince’s speeches. It had hit her with the force of a punch in the gut. It had hit her like something inescapable, and it now clung to her clothes and skin, refusing to let go.
“I believe he thinks he has,” Prince conceded. “But he’s in for a surprise. I’m going to win.”
Alyssa watched him skeptically. He sounded way too confident for someone who had just been set up to fight against a notorious killer. “How do you know?”
“I know,” Prince said. He walked up to her and took her hands in his. His green eyes were ablaze. “I have too much to lose, too much to live for. I have you, Aly. I’m not going to lose. I can’t lose.”
Alyssa was already shaking her head before he had finished the sentence. She could feel tears forming in her eyes, and she did her best not to let them fall. “Please, don’t do this,” she begged, her voice breaking despite her best efforts. “I can’t lose you.” Again, she added quietly in her mind.
She had lost Prince once, all those years ago when she had left for college and he had not followed. Now that they had found each other, the thought of losing him again and in such a definite way made her physically ill.
“You won’t.” Prince reached up with one hand and cupped her cheek. “I promise you, Aly. You won’t lose me.”
Alyssa leaned into his touch. She smiled sadly. “You can’t promise me that, Prince,” she said quietly. “No one can.” My parents couldn’t, either.
Suddenly it was all too much. The pain from the loss of her parents was still a searing, living thing inside of her, and the devastation brought on by all that she had learned tonight was overwhelming.
“I can’t do this,” she said, choking on her own voice. She pulled away from him.
Prince frowned worriedly. “You can’t do what?”
“I can’t stay here and listen to this.”
Before Prince had the chance to stop her or say anything else, Alyssa pushed past him. She all but marched through the house, snatching the car keys off the hook on the wall by the entrance without even slowing down. She slammed the door on Prince and all of his words.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Halfway to the bar, it finally occurred to Alyssa that she had just stormed out of her own house. She quickly decided that she didn’t care, and that she needed a drink more than she needed to act rationally.
Greg Marchant’s bar had an improbable name—The Hollow-Horned Moose—but inside it was just your regular joint—smoky interiors, dimmed lights, old wooden furniture, a beat-up pool table, and a juke box in even worse condition.
She had not been here since she had come back to Pinebrook, and Marchant, a middle-aged man with still more black than gray in his hair, watched her in surprise as she walked in and approached the counter.
“Alyssa Kelley,” the man greeted. “I haven’t seen you in a decade. How are you?”
Marchant wasn’t Alyssa’s favorite person in town, but he didn’t rank amongst those she hated the most, either.
She nodded in greeting and settled on a bar stool. “Fine, thanks,” she said curtly. Remembering a shred of manners, she added, “And how have you been?”
“Can’t complain,” Greg said. “What can I get you?”
If anything, Marchant was a man of few words, which at that moment Alyssa could appreciate immensely.
“A beer, please.”
Alyssa didn’t stop at one beer, and after the second one she switched to Jack Daniel’s, because she loved clichés when it came to drinking, even cheap ones. And the more she drank, the more frustrated she got. Her head was spinning, and it had more to do with what Prince had told her than with her current alcohol intake.
She could not believe what was happening. While precarious, their situation had been somewhat stable. In the space of two days, everything had been upturned. She was getting sick of it. Life had been dealing her unexpected, horrible hands for almost two months now. It was blow after blow after blow, and she had yet to process any of it. She had not had time to deal with the loss of her parents. She had not had time to let her getting reacquainted with Prince really sink in. She had not had time to digest the truth about why he had turned his back on her eight years ago. She had not had time to deal with her hatred of Benedict “Bennie” Le
nday and his Devil’s Fighters.
And she sure as hell could not find it in herself to deal with this latest blow—or rather, blows. Plural. As it happened, Prince could pack a punch outside of the ring as well as within. In one evening, he had given her two horrible pieces of news. Alyssa still could not believe he had gone behind her back and allowed Bennie Lenday to dictate the rules of the game—once again. God, but she hated the man. It felt as though Lenday was the source of any and all pain Alyssa had ever suffered. The only thing he was not responsible for was the death of her parents. Unless…
Alyssa shook her head. She could not and would not go there. Life was complicated enough without looking for made-up conspiracies and imagined attempted murders.
The more she replayed her earlier conversation with Prince and tried to make sense of it in her mind, the less she succeeded. Eventually, she concluded that it was a blessing that his actions made no sense to her, because it meant her perspective wasn’t as screwed up as his was. She hated to admit this, and she did so without any malice whatsoever, but Prince was damaged. Eight years with the Devil’s Fighters, leading the life he led, had made sure that his views and morals were a little tilted, a little out of whack. Acquiescing to Benedict Lenday’s blackmail attempt, putting his life in danger, and seeing all of it as “the only way” was anything but a balanced course of action in Alyssa’s book. And yet, she also could see his point when he said he was taking his life back in his own hands for the first time in almost a decade.
She shook her head, pushing all thoughts away and trying to start from scratch. She was just so confused. She supposed the priority right now would be to find a way to stop Prince from going through with his foolish, suicidal plan. She had absolutely no idea where to start with that.
She waved at Greg for another whiskey.
“Drowning your sorrows? It doesn’t seem like you.”
Alyssa turned and was relieved to find Rick taking his place on a stool next to her. Seeing a friendly face in her general turmoil felt incredibly refreshing.
“Over the past two months I’ve been doing a lot of things that aren’t like me,” she said, nodding her thanks when Greg put a glass in front of her.
Beside her, Rick asked for a beer. He patiently waited for his drink to arrive before he spoke again.
“To things that aren’t like us,” he said, raising his pint.
Alyssa made their glasses tinkle together, and she drank another sip of Jack Daniel’s. The whiskery burned her throat, but she didn’t mind. In fact, she appreciated the sharp sensation; it helped her focus, oddly enough.
“I’m guessing he told you?”
She looked up at Rick. He was watching her intently. “You know about this?” she asked.
He nodded grimly. “I’ve been trying to dissuade him. It’s fucking suicide.”
“Yes, thank you!” Alyssa exclaimed. She was immensely relieved to discover that Rick shared her thoughts on this. “What can we do?”
“Nothing.”
Alyssa blinked. On the other hand, maybe they weren’t exactly on the same page.
“What do you mean, ‘nothing’?” she asked, appalled.
“There’s nothing we can do,” Rick repeated. “It’s his choice.”
“It affects us, too.”
Rick arched a dark blond eyebrow at her. “Do you really think he’s doing it for us?”
Alyssa frowned. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, he may say he is. He may also be telling that to himself. But there’s no way in hell that’s the real reason.”
Alyssa’s head had resumed its spinning, and this time it was mostly due to the alcohol—although Rick’s recent declaration also played a part. She squinted drunkenly at him. “What the fuck are you talking about?”
Rick looked surprised at her drunken tap into vulgar language, but he didn’t comment on it. “The man has been pretty much enslaved for eight years,” he began. “He’s not doing this for us; he’s doing it for himself. He’s doing it to prove to himself that he still has control over his own life.”
“But he doesn’t, does he? This is all part of Bennie’s plan.”
“It is,” Rick admitted. “But Prince won’t see it, or he doesn’t care. It’s in his hands, whether Bennie likes it or not, and he’s going to savor that feeling if it kills him.”
“Which it very well might,” Alyssa said darkly. She shook her head, pushing away all excuses and defenses of Prince’s actions. “Well, I don’t give a fuck why he’s doing it. It’s bullshit. I won’t let him.”
Rick gave her an amused grin. “I knew I liked you for a reason.”
“You mean other than the fact that I’ve saved your ass?”
Rick laughed. “Besides that, yeah.” He sobered quickly, his handsome features darkening. “Look, Alyssa. I don’t like this either. In fact, I fucking hate it. But to be honest, even though I will always tell him he’s being an idiot, I really do understand why Prince is doing what he’s doing. And if I had the chance, I would do the same.”
Alyssa stared at him. “I wish I understood,” she admitted after a few moments of silence. “Really, I do. I would love nothing more than to be able to just get it. But I can’t. I’m trying, and I can’t.”
“That’s a good thing,” Rick said. “It means your past wasn’t as awful.”
Alyssa sighed, feeling the familiar pang that hit her whenever she thought about Prince’s past. “Sometimes I think it was my fault, you know? What happened to Prince.”
Rick frowned. “How was that your fault?”
“I was too quick to believe him when he told me he had decided to join the Devil’s Fighters for no particular reason other than the fact that he thought they could offer him a sense of family.” She shook her head at her own stupidity. “I was too quick to let him go.”
Rick smiled gently. “It wasn’t your fault, Alyssa. You were young and in love, of course you felt betrayed.”
Alyssa shrugged. “It’s not an excuse.”
They lapsed into silence then, and once they broke the silence, they moved on to other topics of conversation that, twenty minutes later, Alyssa could not recall for the life of her. Things had gotten blurry. Sounds reached her from far away, as if from underwater and yet extremely loud at the same time. She felt vaguely nauseous.
“Christ, Aly. How many did you have?” someone asked her at some point.
It took her a while to realize that that someone was, in fact, Prince. He was leaning over her, exchanging what looked to be worried glances with someone over her other shoulder—probably Rick.
Alyssa squinted drunkenly up at him. “What’s it to you?”
“She’s hammered,” another voice said.
It was a female voice, and Alyssa turned her head to discover that Lynn was standing next to Prince. Unlike him, however, she appeared more amused than concerned.
“Lynn,” Alyssa slurred. “I’m so glad you’re here. Have a drink with me, girlfriend.”
Lynn laughed. Her plump, friendly face swarmed in front of Alyssa’s eyes. “I think you’ve had enough, girlfriend.”
Alyssa scowled. “Not nearly enough.”
“All right,” Prince said. “That’s it. We’re going home.”
Alyssa batted at his hands, pushing him away more or less effectively. “I’m not going anywhere with you. You’ve betrayed me.”
Prince sighed heavily. “Aly, come on. Don’t be melodramatic now.”
“Eight years ago, I mean. You betrayed me. You didn’t tell me the truth. I could’ve helped you, but you gave me a pathetic excuse so I couldn’t do anything.” Alyssa stared at him in open, drunken accusation.
“Where is this coming from?” he asked, dumbfounded.
“Somewhere in Tennessee, along with Brother Jack,” Rick put in helpfully.
“Alyssa, how much did you drink?” Prince looked shocked.
“Doesn’t matter,” Alyssa said, waving her hand in dismissal. “I’m sorry. I didn�
�t mean what I just said, you know?”
“What?”
“What I just said,” Alyssa repeated, as though she was dealing with the stupidest man on Earth. “That you betrayed me. That it was your fault. It wasn’t. It was my fault.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I should’ve realized you were lying to me.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Prince muttered, so ferociously that Alyssa actually drew back.
“Don’t be mad,” she said. “I’m sorry.”