Sinner: Devil's Sons MC (21 page)

Rayan decided instead of gambling against the handful of friends he had remaining, all of whom he owed money already, he’d go down to the race tracks and place a few bets. He didn’t bother changing, which was unlike him. He smoothed down his wrinkled, dirty suit and stepped into his puke stained shoes, wrinkling his nose in distaste at the stench. He pocketed the jewelry and shuffled out the basement door that led outside, ambling to his car to take the short drive into town.

If he didn’t get the money for Jabar, his life might very well be in danger. Thinking on his options, Rayan only saw two. Either he won back enough of the ten grand to appease Jabar or he convinced Afia to turn from her wicked ways and marry the good doctor.  Chuckling mirthlessly, he fumbled for the start button and drove off toward the pawn shop. Better to start with the option which was most likely to give a return. He just prayed luck was on his side. He couldn’t afford to lose. His life depended on it.

***

The sleek, glossy beasts were lined at the starting gate, their jockeys perched upon their backs. Rayan peered anxiously through his binoculars and glanced down at his card for the post time, making sure he was watching the right race. He had already lost close to two hundred dollars. “This better be the winner,” he grumbled, putting the binoculars back to his bleary eyes.

He had been at the tracks all evening, and he reeked of cheap beer, but Rayan was more preoccupied with the horses on the track than his appearance. It seemed there was something about alcohol, even cheap beer, which lowered his standards.  Ever since he had started drinking again, he had begrudgingly noticed his fashion sense and poise going downhill. The more money he lost, the more debt he acquired, the less important it seemed to get snazzy unless he absolutely had to. He had wasted a perfectly good suit on that shitty dinner with Jabar.

On this round, Rayan had bet on the favorite, having watched the blow outs before the race and determined Gwen’s Park Champ had a higher likelihood of beating the rest of the horses in the same heat. It seemed a sure bet.

The gun fired to signal the start of the race, and the horse shot out of the gates.  Rayan pressed forward over the railing, yelling his head off for Gwen’s Park, as his pick surged forward and took the lead. The chestnut horse flew down the track and sent up clods of dirt in his wake, while his rippling muscles bulged and glistened in the sunlight. Rayan waved his fist, urging the jockey to be more aggressive. He could see his horse slipping to second place as the racers sprinted through the first curve of the furlong.

“You get ‘em, Gwen’s!”

Suddenly, the horse bolted slightly to the left, although he quickly regained his footing; but, the brief misstep was all it took for two more racers to zip past. “No!” Rayan cried.

He watched in disbelief as his pick, the crowd favorite, the horse who should’ve been the winner, came in at fourth place. Rayan paced back and forth in the nearly empty stands as another one of his bets fell short of his prediction and he lost more of his small sum of cash. “Fuck!” he shouted. A few heads turned, but the interest was short-lived, and Rayan didn’t care about causing a scene anyway. Most of the ragtag bunch lingering at the tracks in middle of the day on a weekday were the same as him, gamblers trying to get a fix. He shoved the remaining seventy-five dollars in his pocket and gave up before he left with nothing.

Grumbling angrily, he pushed away from the rail and wove his way through the thin crowd and out of the arena. He made it to his car, feeling overheated and overwhelmed, but having a need to keep going. There had to be some other way he could get the money. He still had seventy-five dollars left.

His stomach growled. Rayan knew his mother probably had dinner cooked at home, but he grew weary of sitting at his parents’ table waiting for hand-outs. He powered on his car and drove aimlessly through town, ignoring his hunger. He couldn’t ignore his thirst, however. The more streets he traveled, the less hope he had of making good on his debt to Jabar and the more worried he became about what might happen if he didn’t.

If Rayan could explain the anxiety, he would say it was like having bees in his blood stream.  It wasn’t just the problem with Jabar that made him antsy. It was his very existence. He thought about the totality of his life, as he pulled into a liquor store and stared up at the flickering neon lights. He knew with his potential and his capabilities he should have made something more of himself. He could’ve been a businessman. He could’ve been a lawyer or doctor. He hadn’t gone that route because…what? Because he’d been too busy having a good time. Now, here he was in his mid- to late thirties, and the good times were fewer and farther between.

The schmucks who’d gotten with the program and gotten degrees were out handling business. Schmucks like Jabar—although admittedly the young doctor came from a wealthy family and had a father who wasn’t stingy about taking care of his son the way Rashad was.  Even the laborers and tool pushers Rayan had once sneered at were out making money.

Meanwhile, there he was sitting in front of a liquor store with only seventy-five dollars to his name and no prospect of getting any more money anytime soon. There was a wealthy, spurned homosexual out to get him, his sister was being a harlot, and his mother was being difficult.  His hands were shaking from not having had a drink all day. It was enough to make a man want to drink.

Rayan shoved open the car door and climbed out, smoothing his suit. He went inside and purchased enough alcohol to get him through the night, leaving with thirty dollars left. When he got back in the car, he dug out his cellphone. With the situation with Jabar, it was time for plan B.

“Hello? Jabar, old friend! Yes, yes, I spoke with my sister. She has agreed to renew the courtship,” he lied. Rayan tore off the plastic seal with his teeth, as he ignored Jabar’s complaints about not wanting to marry his sister anymore. The promise of alcohol was more interesting, and he struggled to unseal the bottle.  “Of course, a good wife, an obedient wife is a blessing. She’ll make a very good wife. You’ll see. I’ll fix all this,” Rayan replied blithely.  Over Jabar’s protests, Rayan hung up the phone. He twisted off the cap of the vodka and turned it up to gulp down a swig. Wiping his mouth and smacking his lips, savoring the burn, he started his car and got back on the road as he sipped. He was going to get Afia to marry Jabar by any means necessary.

CHAPTER 22

Bionca shrieked at the top of her lungs when she saw the ring. Afia collapsed on the living room sofa next to her best friend, giggling in amusement at Bionca’s reaction. “He asked you to marry him?! So, that’s why you ran off in the middle of the night last night! Oh my friggin’ god! Please tell me you said yes!” The tattooed blonde grabbed Afia’s hand and turned it from side to side under the afternoon light filtering through the blinds and shrieked again.

“I told him not yet,” she admitted. Bionca groaned and stamped her feet against the floor dramatically.

“You’re in time-out, Afia. I don’t ever want to speak to you again unless you call that poor man up right this instant and tell him the answer is yes, yes, and more yes!”

Afia couldn’t contain her happiness because, despite her inability to blatantly accept Sam’s proposal, the fact that he was that serious about being with her sent thrills of joy through her very being.  She closed her eyes with a dreamy sigh and lounged back against the sofa cushions only to be shoved by Bionca. When she opened her eyes, her friend was glaring at her with a combination of pretend and real ire.

Bionca had been prodding Afia to be with the biker from the day the two had met. She couldn’t stand to see her friend miss out on the man of her dreams just to mollify her overbearing parents and intrusive older brother. “You can’t keep him waiting, Afia. If you let a guy like that stay on the market, someone else will come right along and snatch him up,” Bionca argued.

“I don’t have to worry about that,” Afia replied confidently. “And, you don’t have to worry about me keeping him waiting. I’m going to talk to my parents.”

Bionca shot up from the sofa and put her hands on her hips. “Ha! Yeah, I’ve heard that before.” She looked down at Afia.

Afia rose as well. “I mean it this time. If I don’t do it, I’m halfway convinced Sam will try to do it himself, and that would be disastrous. The point is, you’re the best friend in the whole wide world for taking me to that infernal biker bar. If it wasn’t for you, Bionca, I never would’ve met him.”

Bionca beamed and preened. “Well, naturally, I have superb taste in hang-out spots,” she said with a laugh. She walked into the kitchen and pulled down a bottle of champagne she had been holding onto until one of them graduated. Celebrating Afia’s engagement to the sexy biker seemed a better cause. She burst into the living room with the bottle and two plastic champagne flutes. “Fuck it! I’m just gonna name it and claim it and say you are as good as married, girlfriend! Whether your parents are ready or not, Mr. Elison doesn’t seem like the kind of guy to take no for an answer.” Bionca popped the cork and started pouring up.

“He’s not. Oh, Bionca, I’m so excited I could just…just explode.”

Handing Afia a flute, Bionca asked, “So, when are you gonna break the news?” Afia looked away and sighed. Bionca groaned again. “I don’t like that look. That look says you’ll tell them sometime in the near never. You know, you have to face it. You’re with him. You love him. You want to be with him, and your parents need to know that sooner rather than later.”

“Right, it’s just the timing is all wrong right now. I actually left last night because I got a call from my Baba. Rayan had apparently been missing since the weekend. I tried to tell Maman about his drinking getting out of hand. Of course, she turned it around on me. I told her I’d seen him drunk around town, and she wanted to know what sort of places I was going to that I’d run into my drunk brother. She forbade me from telling Baba and said I was over here living in sin.  It’s infuriating. It’s like Rayan could rob a bank right in front of them, and they wouldn’t even notice it for trying to keep an eye on me.”

“Oh, honey, I can only imagine,” Bionca replied, patting her arm. “You did the right thing by telling her, though. Just imagine if you tried to keep that a secret and something bad happened to him. He showed back up, right?”

“That’s the thing. He was in jail!”

“In jail?”

“Arrested for public drunkenness or something like that. I had to get Sam to bail him out. Maman and Baba have no clue that’s where he was, and I couldn’t very well tell them my non-Islamic boyfriend rescued Rayan.”

“But, what if you did, Afia? If you told your parents how much Sam has done to help you and take care of you, they’ll have to admit he’s a good guy. I know they will.”

“I’m glad you know that, because I don’t,” Afia scoffed. “Either way, I’ve already told Sam I’ll talk to them. Ready or not, I have to do it. I’m just trying to wait for some of the hoopla to die down. Maman finally came back around and said she believed me about Rayan’s drinking but told me she’d handle it herself instead of seeking out rehab, even though I stated I’d take a job to help pay whatever extra expenses are incurred. I want my brother back, the real Rayan, not this monster he’s become.”

Bionca frowned at the champagne and tossed it back anyway. “Oh, well, cheers to all being well that ends well.”

“I’ll drink to that,” Afia giggled. She took a small sip and set the champagne aside. It was Wednesday evening. That meant she had a mere two days to go before her routine visit home on Saturday for dinner with her family. Unlike the last time Afia had tried to get up the nerve to have this talk, she didn’t plan on preparing a speech. She would speak from her heart. She would tell them she’d met the most amazing man, and she was going to be his wife. What was the worst that could happen?

Her cellphone rang as she was taking a drink, and Afia reached for it excitedly, thinking it was Sam. When she saw her brother’s contact information flash across the screen, her enthusiasm died. Rolling her eyes, Afia answered. “What do you want, Rayan?”

“I thought we had an agreement, sister. You keep my secret, and I keep yours. Why’d you tell Maman all that stuff about me?”

Bionca glanced at Afia, noting her worried expression. “What’s wrong?” she asked.

Afia covered the receiver with her hand and whispered, “Rayan’s upset because I talked to Maman.”

Bionca smirked. “Screw him. He deserved it.”

Afia chewed on her bottom lip anxiously. She responded to Rayan. “I did it because you were missing. I had no choice. Maman and Baba had no idea where you’d been for three days. Can you imagine what your lifestyle is putting them through, Rayan?”

“I can imagine what hell they’ll go through if they find out about you and Sam. Can you imagine that?”

“Rayan, enough!”

“Listen to me, harlot,” he spat. “I had a heart to heart with Jabar, and he’s willing to ignore your dismissal of his courtship if you consent to marry him and announce the engagement before the end of next week. Now, I’m fixing this to where you won’t get in any trouble with Maman or Baba. They’ll be so ecstatic about you choosing a proper mate that they’ll look past any of your other transgressions.”

Afia sighed, shaking her head with an unamused smile. “You didn’t have to do that, Rayan. I’ll be talking to Maman and Baba myself about the situation with Sam. They’ll have to accept that he’s the man I choose to be with, so I don’t even know why you went through all the trouble of hunting down Jabar and making false pacts. I wouldn’t marry Jabar for all his money.”

“Afia, yield!”

She gasped. “You lack the authority, Rayan. With each passing day, I lose respect for you.  You have changed, brother. You’re not the man I knew and loved. What happened to you?”

“I’m trying to save your reputation, Afia. Sentiments aside, be reasonable. Do you think that infidel will do the honorable thing and marry you? He knows no honor. For him to marry you would even defile you.”

Afia hung up the phone as her anger started to grow. Bionca grabbed Afia’s glass of champagne and shoved it back into her stiff fingers. Raising her own glass, she said, “You sure told him.”

All Afia could do was keep her lips in a straight, firm line to keep from screaming out her frustration.  Rayan’s words reflected exactly how her parents would likely feel about Sam Elison. For him to marry her would even defile her. She rose from the sofa without another word, putting aside the champagne glass, and stoically walked to her bedroom. When Bionca followed after her and tapped at the closed and locked door, Afia didn’t respond.

“Are you okay?” Bionca asked softly. She gave up knocking and left her friend alone with her thoughts.

Afia wondered if her parents would ever understand.  She had once believed as they did that to marry someone outside of her religion would be a misalignment. After meeting Sam, she knew intrinsically that all other matches would be off the mark. He was made for her, and she was made for him. But, as long as her family believed the things they believed, they would never accept her relationship.

What was the worst that could happen? She could lose them all. Not just Rayan, but Maman and Baba, too. She stared down at the diamond encrusted engagement band on her ring finger. Could she sacrifice her relationship with her family to be with Sam Elison?