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 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 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.