"He's okay," Dex insisted, nudging me back with the muscles of his forearm. "Finish up, babe."
Holy crap. He probably wasn't lying. For about the hundredth time in five minutes, I nodded, pushing back that sickening sensation in my chest again. “Okay.” Zipping the bag halfway, I yanked it off the bed and looked at him. "I think I have everything, I'm going to go hunt this moron down."
I didn't bother waiting for a response before I took off down the hallway to the opened door of Sonny's bedroom. The fan light was on, illuminating the room and the figure sitting on the edge of the bed with a duffel bag next tohim. Even from behind, his features looked loose. Tired. Worn-out.
But it wasn't until I rounded the bed and saw the side of his face that made me gasp. "What the hell, Son?"
His cheek was swollen to twice the size it shouldhave been. The skin was broken and purple, only slightly worse than the awful split on the corner of his mouth. Yet, he managed to give me a little grin out of somewhere.
"Ris," he greeted me in a lower voice than usual. He patted the bed. "I'm fine, kid. Come sit down."
"My ass you're fine," I told him, taking a step to stand in front of him.
Sonny tilted his head back to give me a better view of the ass-beating those sons of biscuit-eating whores gave him. The entire right side of his face looked deformed from the swelling. I was kind of worried that maybe he'd lost some teeth but I couldn't be sure.
"I've had worse, believe me," he argued softly. "Come here and quit worrying."
I gave him a look that said it'd be a cold day in hell before I stopped worrying about him.
"C'mon, I don't have a lot of time before Trip gets here," he said, patting the bed again.
I wanted to argue with him but logic told me not to. My poor, poor brother looked like complete crap.It made my stomach tense horribly, like I was having contractions or something. My hand was out and clinging to Sonny's instinctively.
"You remember I told you the sperm donor came down and asked me for money?"
Like I'd forget. "He asked Luther for money too, right?"
Sonny nodded slowly. "Yup, and he didn't give it to him either," he explained. "He didn't want to tell anybody what the money was for, except he just needed it real bad."
"How much was it?"
It looked like he tried to make a face but immediately stopped the effort once he remembered he looked like the Elephant Man's cousin. "Ten grand."
An ugly guffawing noise sprang out of my throat. "What?"
Sonny nodded again. "Exactly. No one in their right fucking mind is gonna let him borrow that much money for no damn reason. So nobody in the Club did." And I suddenly had a really bad feeling about the word choices my brother had chosen. No one in their right fucking mind...
"So what does that have to do with you exactly?" I asked him hesitantly.
"It turns out this wasn't the first time dear old daddy asked for money. A few months ago, he'd come down and borroweda healthy chunkfrom the Reapers."
Oh crap. Oh boy-crap.
I'd never heard of the Reapers before but the puzzle pieces were making too much sense. "Those men?"
Hesighed. "Yeah,Ris. Daddy didn't stick to the payment plan, and from what Trip figured out today, they aren't exactly happy that he came into town, and then bailed. They want their money."
This had to be a bad dream. An awful dream.
"But you don't even—" What was I going to say? That he didn't matter to our father? It was the harsh truth.
He must have known what I was trying to explain because he lifted a shoulder in lame agreement. "I know, Ris. I know. But I'm not paying for his shit, and I'm not lettin' them come after you next now that they know you live here. I'm sure they know you're his too."
I gagged, earning a slap to the back from my brother.
"Quit it, kid. It's fine. I'm gonna go find this motherfucker and make sure he pays his shit now. I’m not sitting around, waiting for God knows what to happen. The last thing he deserves is to get rescued by one of us. I’m not paying for his mistakes any longer and neither are you,” he stated evenly.
Every minute just seemed to make this entire scenario seem so much more like a dream. A very hard dream that I couldn't swallow. "So we're going to go find him?"
