Raw: Devil's Fighters MC (9 page)

For some reason, the coffee tasted bitter. It was funny; after what they had just shared, Alyssa would have thought anything would have tasted sweeter. But reality crashed back on her, fast and furious and unavoidable.

Xavier seemed to share her feelings, because he was quiet as he nursed his cup of coffee. Eventually, though, he spoke, albeit uncertainly.

“Should we…”—he began—“…uh…should we talk about what just happened?”

Alyssa looked up, studying him from over the brim of her mug. “I don’t know, should we?”

She could feel herself slipping back into a defensive attitude, but she couldn’t help it. She hated the thought of her heart getting broken again, and yet she had the sinking feeling that she would be unable to stop it.

Xavier seemed to think about it for a moment. “I think we should,” he finally said.

“OK.” Alyssa took a sip of her coffee, wishing that it was alcohol. “Did it mean anything to you?”

Xavier blinked, taken aback. “Of course it meant something to me!” He hesitated. “Didn’t it to you?”

“It did,” Alyssa admitted. As much as she wanted to protect herself, she also knew that being honest about her feelings (to Xavier as well as to herself) was the only way she was ever going to get out of this alive—emotionally speaking.

Xavier nodded. “So what do we do now?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, I…I think I never stopped loving you.”

Alyssa stared at him in shock. A million things she could say flashed through her head. Of all of those, for some reason, she blurted out the less kind: “Are you fucking kidding me?”

Xavier’s eyes widened in surprise at such brutality. “I…uh…I’m not. I told you; it wasn’t easy for me either.”

Alyssa scowled fiercely. “You can’t just drop a bomb like that on me, Xavier.”

“What else do you want me to do? Lie? This may be the only chance I get to say it. You’re going back to Canada in two weeks.” He hesitated. “Are you?”

“Yes,” Alyssa said firmly. “I am.”

“Maybe you could consider—”

“No. I couldn’t.”

“Oh.”

“I love you, too,” Alyssa said, unable to stop herself. She smiled at the shocked expression on his face. “Come on, I know you knew.”

He smiled weakly. “Frankly, I was starting to have my doubts just now.”

Alyssa rolled her eyes, but she sobered up quickly, the weight of their situation rapidly squishing any humor out of her. “We both know it can’t work, Xavier.”

Xavier nodded sadly. “I guess not.” He hesitated. “Maybe we could make the best of these two weeks?”

Alyssa shook her head. “No. We can’t.”

“Why?”

“It would be too hard.” It was only a half-truth, but it was a truth nonetheless.

Unfortunately, Xavier picked up on it instantly. He looked at her carefully. “What is it that you’re not telling me, Aly?”

Once again, Alyssa didn’t bother to tell him not to call her Aly; after what had just gone down between them, she figured it would be quite pointless.

“Nothing,” she said quickly.
Too
quickly, she realized.

“Alyssa,” he said pointedly.

Alyssa sighed. “Bennie paid me a visit early this morning.”

Xavier’s handsome face darkened instantly, and that was when Alyssa recognized the shadows on his features and in his eyes for what they actually wore—the Devil’s Fighters.

“What did he want from you?” he all but growled.

Alyssa shivered at the fierceness in his voice and eyes. Not for the first time, she wondered what Xavier was truly capable of. She quickly decided it would be wiser to tell him the truth. He would find out for himself anyway; she knew that as well as she knew her own name.

“He gave me a warning,” she said. “He told me to stay away from you.”

“Son of a bitch!” Xavier hissed furiously.

Alyssa cringed. “Should I, Xavier?” 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.

Xavier 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, Xavier?”

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.”

Xavier 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?”

Xavier’s father was the source of all of his problems. He was a drunk and a gambler who had spent most of Xavier’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 Xavier’s face. After his mother’s death from cancer, Xavier 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.

Xavier 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.

Xavier swallowed visibly. “You know he has a gambling problem,” he said.

“Amongst many others,” Alyssa spat, unable to stop herself. She cringed. “Sorry.”

Xavier 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?”

Xavier nodded. “He still is, actually,” he said.

“How much does he owe them?”

Xavier 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,” Xavier 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.

Xavier 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.”

Xavier 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 Xavier 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 Xavier had started his tale, but hearing it out loud made it all too real. She suddenly felt like throwing up.

“Oh, Xavier,” she said, horrified, her voice coming out in a choked sound. “And you said yes?”

“What choice did I have?” Xavier 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?”

Xavier 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,” Xavier 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.

Xavier 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.

Finally getting the whole awful story off his chest seemed to have exhausted Xavier, 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 Xavier 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, Xavier 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 Xavier. 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 Xavier, 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 Xavier’s seemingly inexplicable change of 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 Xavier’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 Xavier. 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 Xavier 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 Xavier—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.

Xavier 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 Xavier. 

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 Xavier 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 Xavier 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 Xavier’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 Xavier 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 Xavier had been one of the men her father had treated privately, and she knew he probably was.

As worrisome as the physical scars on Xavier’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 Xavier 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 Xavier 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 Xavier 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 Xavier behind once again. As far as Alyssa was concerned, that was no choice at all.