Chapter Ten
Dixon
This isn’t how I wanted my night to go.
What seems like a lifetime ago, I was a man about to escape his problems for a night with a woman with a sharp tongue, sexy eyes, and seductive hips. Now I’m a man with knuckles bloody from killing someone, who’s lifting that same someone up from the kitchen floor, smelling the unmistakable smell of that man’s post-mortem release, and I’m burning up with some twisted sensation of hope that maybe I’ll find out that what I thought happened with Lucas Reyes isn’t the truth. Then, at least, I can give Alexandra the closure that she so desperately needs.
And rub it in her face.
Because damn, do I hate that conniving snake. Drugging me, tying me to a chair, making me save her life, then handcuffing me while she gets drunk on tequila and threatens to shoot my cock off? She’s absolutely fucking insane.
Yet every time I look at her and see the pain she’s been living with, my heart beats in a way it’s never beaten before.
“Grab him by the hips and throw him over your shoulder. Don’t you know how to do this?” She says, gesturing with the gun as I bend over to pick up the man with the roadrunner tattoo.
I freeze in mid-motion and shoot her a withering look.
“Know how to do what?” I say. “Are you really asking if the volunteer firefighter knows how to put the dead man over his shoulder in what is commonly referred to as a ‘fireman’s carry’?”
“Trust me, I’m as shocked about it as you are. But from the shitty job you’re doing, you’re making me glad I never had a situation where I would’ve had to rely on the vaunted services of the Costa Oscura fire department. No wonder you’re just a volunteer — the skills you put on display definitely aren’t worth paying for.”
I drop the dead body back to the floor with a heavy thump. Alexandra flinches at the noise, but I don’t — the asshole’s dead. He won’t feel a thing.
“Are you fucking serious right now?”
“Are you? Because you’re handling that dead guy like you’d rather cuddle with him than get rid of him.”
I gesture to the bottle of tequila in her hands. “If you want me to keep putting up with your bullshit and do the work that you are clearly too drunk to do, then you better pass me that bottle.”
She does. “Drink up, buttercup.”
I take a drink. Then another, because I can see by the way she flinches that this bottle was probably expensive, and she’s already regretting sharing it with me. The tequila burns nicely. It’s quality stuff, so I drink even more.
Then, finished, I toss the bottle back to her and pick up the dead guy.
“Lead the way, princess.”
“Princess?”
My eyebrow raises. Does she really need me to explain? “Who’s your daddy?”
“Are you really trying that old line on me?”
“No, it’s fucking literal. Do I need to break it down for you? Has the tequila zapped that much of your fucking brain? Your daddy’s an MC prez, and your brother was an MC VP. That makes you a club princess, sweetheart.”
“This tequila-zapped brain was still enough to beat you. Now, brave soldier boy—“
I cut her off, because despite the undignified situation I find myself in and the death wish and self-hate I’ve carried for years, I still don’t have so low of an opinion of myself that I’d accept being associated with the Army. “I’m a Marine.”
“Whatever. Let’s get this body to the trunk.”
I don’t move.
“It’s important to me you know there’s a difference.”
“Fine. I accept there’s a difference — they’ve got better uniforms and better special forces units. Marines can’t hold a candle to the Green Berets.”
“You have got to be fucking with me.”
She laughs and gestures to the door. “I am. I honestly don’t care. It’s just one notch away from cosplay in my book. And in the wrong direction, too. So stop throwing a fit and let’s take care of this corpse before he stinks up my kitchen even more.”
I enter the hallway and head toward the elevator, body over my shoulder and Alexandra and her gun at my back.
“You ever done this before?”
“Just shut up and carry him to the stairwell. It’s the third door on the right.”
“Stairs? No elevator?”
She scoffs. “You think I’m going to put myself in a tightly enclosed space with you so you can attack me and get this gun? Right. Not going to happen. Go to the stairs.”
I stop at the entrance to the stairwell, see a sign on it denoting that we’re on the sixth floor.
“Great. Fucking six floors of this shit.”
Behind me, Alexandra laughs.
“No. Seven. The builders cheaped out and accidentally bought two sixes when they were labeling the floors, and they just ran with it instead of buying the correct signs. We’re on the second sixth floor.”
“I hate this place.”
“So do I. Only reason I lived here so long was because it was the best place to live to kill you.”
I’m flattered. That she would hate me so much that she’d live on the second-sixth floor of a rattrap building and make an entire life here in town just to get to me is the closest thing to a compliment that I’ve received in a long time. Maybe ever.
Stepping into the stairwell and going down a flight, I see the second sign for the sixth floor and curse, because a part of me had hoped that Alexandra was just lying, and then I shift the weight on my shoulders and keep going. This fucker’s heavy.
”You know, for a tough guy, you sure are huffing and puffing a lot,” she taunts, her voice dripping with sarcasm.
I bite back a retort, focusing instead on navigating the narrow steps without stumbling. The last thing I need is to drop this asshole and give her more ammunition to mock me with. As we reach the next landing, I pause to catch my breath, shifting the body”s weight. Alexandra steps around me, her gun still trained on me.
”Keep moving, buttercup. We don”t have all night,” she orders, gesturing with the barrel of the gun.
I glare at her over my shoulder. ”You drugged me, I’m hung over, and I had to beat this guy to death. I’ll go as fast as I go. Now, you want to take a turn carrying this dead weight? Be my guest, princess.”
She rolls her eyes. ”Please. I”ve got more important things to do than play pack mule. That”s what I have you for.”
I start down the next flight of stairs. The muscles in my back and legs burn with the strain, but I refuse to show any weakness in front of her. Never in my life have I wanted to help someone as much as I want to help Alexandra Reyes, younger sister of the man I murdered, and never in my life have I hated someone as much as I hate Alexandra Reyes, the snarky, gun-toting, drink-doping bartender who has no respect for the Marines.
When we reach the bottom of the staircase, I stop and wait for her.
The door to exit the stairwell is shut and I’ve got two-hundred pounds of killer on my shoulders, a crick in my neck, and my legs hurt like I’d just let Moose give them a dry, deep tissue massage with a pair of wooden rolling pins. He’d probably like that. Probably tell me about how he once moonlighted at a spa in Argentina and fucked the entire national soccer team. Twice.
“You going to get that?”
She shakes her head. “You’d make a woman open the door for you? Wow, some man you are.”
“I’m carrying this piece of shit and I’m the one who saved your life. Can you at least get the fucking door?”
“I’m the one with the gun, and I say you open it.”
My jaw clenches, a mix of annoyance and begrudging respect for her stubbornness twining together like barbed wire around my heart. I shift the dead weight on my shoulders again, angling my body awkwardly to reach the door handle with my free hand.
The door creaks open, revealing the dimly lit parking lot strewn with a few dented and forgotten vehicles that look like rejects from the post-apocalyptic Mad Max wasteland. As we step out into the muggy night air, the stench of garbage from a nearby dumpster greets us and a pair of cockroaches scramble over my feet as I step into the dark.
”Over there,” she instructs, nodding toward her car with a tilt of her head. ”The Ford Focus. Make it quick.”
I trudge over to the trunk, trying to ignore the throbbing in my muscles and the way my shirt sticks to my back with sweat. With a grunt, I deposit the body into the trunk. I slam it shut and turn to look at Alexandra, who is smirking in that infuriatingly confident manner of hers.
”There. Happy now?”
”Thrilled,” she replies dryly. “There’s a dead body in my trunk and it isn’t you. This is exactly how I wanted my night to go. Fuck you, Dixon.” Then she reaches into her pocket and tosses me a set of keys. “You’re driving. I’m directing. Like usual.”
She’s smart, I have to give her that; making me drive so she can keep all her focus, and her aim, on me. I slide into the driver”s seat, the worn leather groaning under my weight. The seat is about as stable as a contestant on The Bachelor. I can feel Alexandra’s eyes on me from the back seat, the cold steel of the gun pressing into the back of my neck while she sits, queen of all she surveys from her makeshift throne in the back of her Ford Focus.
As we pull onto the road leading out of town, I take a moment to reflect on tonight and realize that, out of everything that’s happened to me — the drugging, the kidnapping, the near-death experience, all of it — the most undignified thing is that I’m behind the wheel of a Ford Focus. I hope no one finds out about this.
The city gives way to dry coastal forest, then beyond that, the desert scrublands. The dry wilderness swallows us whole, an endless expanse of barren silence. I drive, each mile marker lulling us further into no-man”s-land, away from prying eyes and the reach of civilization.
As light creeps over the blasted landscape, Alexandra finally commands me to stop. I pull over and kill the engine, the silence of dawn enveloping us like a shroud. She steps out, retrieving a shovel from the trunk while I haul out our grim cargo for a second time.
I follow her lead. There”s a finality in our march that chills me more than the desert cold biting at my flesh.
”You seem pretty prepared,” I grunt, breaking the stillness between us as I drop the body to begin our morbid task. ”Like you already had this spot picked out.”
Alexandra stands silhouetted against the waking day, her eyes distant yet sharp as daggers.
”I did,” she says, her voice hollow. ”It was supposed to be your grave.”
I dig in silence, the hole in the ground growing in front of me. It is a sobering thing to dig what would have been your grave. I look at the gaping maw in the earth with a sense of wistful regret and something else — compassion and pity. Alexandra was someone else, someone happier, before I took her brother from her. And that she changed into the person she is now, a person bent on revenge who would go to the lengths to pick out a desert grave for a stranger, is just another grievous crime to go on the list of crimes I’ve committed.
”This isn’t my first funeral in the desert,” she says.
I keep digging. The hole grows larger.
“It was right after things went wrong when you ambushed Lucas. The people that died, the bodies. My dad said it was evidence that would make the cops ask the sort of questions that could lead to everyone even associated with the Crimson Fury going to prison. Me included. He and a few others, they had to protect the club and protect what was left of the family, so they went there, and they… cleaned it up.”
The shovel slides into the dirt, and the grave continues to grow.
Alexandra draws a shaky breath, then continues.
“They took the bodies east, out of town toward the mountains. There are spots out there that feel like the middle of nowhere. Dry, barren desert, kind of like this, and they just put Lucas in this hole in the ground. My dad didn’t even want me to be there. I wasn’t supposed to know about it, but I overheard the church meeting, when my dad was scrambling to put together the cover-up, and I followed them. If I hadn’t been there, I don’t even think they would’ve said some words before they put him into the earth. It was all so… thoughtless. The last memory I have of my brother is seeing him with a jagged hole in his head as my dad chucked his body into a pit. After they filled the hole in, I said my goodbyes, and then I came back later and planted a Joshua tree there to remember him by. He always liked the desert. I would visit it all the time… But someone cut it down a few months ago.”
Her sobbing begins and my digging ends; I throw the shovel to the ground and the body into the pit.
“I’m sorry,” I murmur, the words rough and heavy against the silence of the dawn. My hands, calloused and stained with earth, hang limply by my sides. I want to put them around her, to hug her, maybe, but it doesn’t feel right — she hates me, I hate her, and I still believe that these are the hands that killed her brother.
Alexandra wipes away the tears on her sleeve; her face is a mask I can”t decipher.
”Sorry doesn”t bring the dead back, Dixon.”
I know that. More than anyone else, I know the weight of lives taken can”t be balanced with words. But seeing her there, vulnerable and haunted by ghosts only she can see, ghosts that I made, something shifts inside me. We”re enemies, but under the vast expanse of a sky soft with the light of daybreak, we”re just two people with regrets heavier than the earth we stand upon.
I look away from her pain, unable to bear it.
There”s nothing beautiful about this, nothing romantic in the tragedy that has bound us together. Yet here we are — standing over a freshly dug grave, bound not just by hatred and vengeance, but by shared loss and aching emptiness that comes from living in a world steeped in violence while people better than us lie rotting in the ground.
”We should cover him up,” I say.
I dig while she softly sobs.
Shovel into the earth, earth into the pit, until the earth consumes the corpse.
“I really wanted things to turn out different, Alexandra.”
“Why should I care about words from a murderer like you?”
“You’d have every right not to. But the truth is, when your brother died, my life went to a dark place. I got mixed up in some bad shit, I was not myself, I hurt people I love, and the only reason I even lived as long as I did is because of the love of my sister, my best friend’s sister, and the support of my family in the MC. But even with all that, there’s still a part of me that believes I should be in this grave.” I pause, look at the half-hole that contains our would-be murderer, then look back to Alexandra’s teary eyes. I’ve decided. “But I’m not going to die just yet. Because I owe your brother and I owe you. Owe it to you both to be more than the asshole that I’ve been, to give you the fucking truth and justice you both deserve.”
She looks at me long and hard. “You mean that?”
”Yes. I mean it.”
For a moment, the desert is silent except for the wind whispering through the sand. She wipes her face one last time before squaring her shoulders.
”Fine,” she says. ”But I”m not doing this for you. I”m doing it for Lucas.”
”I know,” I reply. The weight of her brother”s name sinks heavy in my chest. “For Lucas.”
There”s a tension as fragile as spider silk between us, a mutual understanding that”s as terrifying as it is unexpected.
“You look tired. Let me take over the digging for a while.”
“You sure?”
“Yes. You rest.”
I hand her the shovel and sit down on the sand.
We fill the rest of the grave in silence, our movements synchronized in a somber dance.
”I”m holding you to your word,” she says once we”re done, her voice steady but fatigued. ”If you”re lying…”
”I”m not lying, princess,” I interject.
Alexandra nods once, sharply. ”Then let”s get out of here.”
“Where to?”
“My place. We have a mess to clean up, and I have cold beers in my fridge. There’s enough for both of us.”
“Scrubbing blood off a floor is thirsty work,” I say, the hint of a smile on my face.
We reach her car and I head for the driver’s door, settling into the seat with a relieved sigh. She skips by the passenger side door and slips into the back. As I slip the keys into the ignition, I hear a familiar sound: the hammer of the gun being cocked into place. It’s a motion that’s unnecessary to shoot the damn thing — in fact, the only use for it is to send a message.
“You can put that away. I’ve got no plans on dying until we figure out the truth about what happened to your brother.”
There’s a chuckle, and the kiss of cold steel on the back of my neck.
“That’s nice to know, but we got a long way to go before I trust you, Dixon. Settle for the win you’ve already got: I’m willing to share my beer with you. Now, drive before I change my mind.”