So uneasy that Dex caught onto it before we'd even left the hotel room. He was standing in the doorway to the bathroom, buttoning his jeans, when he frowned at me. "What's wrong?"

I wanted to say “Nothing” but I didn't. No more lies and all, right? I had to settle for giving him a sheepish smile at the same time I stole a glance at Uriel. Who am I kidding? I was looking at his nipple piercings, remembering briefly how they'd felt on my back hours before.

Snap out of it!

I tried to hide my awkward cough. "I think I'm a little nervous."

"Why?" he asked like my admission was absolutely stupid.

"I don't know. I think I'm nervous to see my dad since it's been so long, but I also kind of feel like we should be on a bounty hunter show or something. Does that make sense?" I scratched at my throat.

Dex narrowed his eyes, pulling his toothbrush out of his mouth slowly. "No."

Well.

"Don't be nervous, babe. What you got to be nervous about? We're gonna find your pa, and then we're gonna figure out a way to get this shit handled before I get sent to jail for murder," he said so nonchalantly, I almost could have dismissed the fact that he even brought up the possibility of going back to jail.

For murder. Because of me.

Oh lord.

I'd shank him before he did something that stupid, so I chose to ignore that part of his comment. "I don't think it's that easy."

He gave me a hard look, shoving his toothbrush back into his mouth. "It is."

I left it at that because in reality, how the heck could I explain to Dex why I was so nervous to see my dad? It wasn't like I didn't already accept the way things were.

He'd left me and my family. Check.

He'd left me at sixteen in the middle of radiation with a dead mother. Check.

And then he'd left me again to deal with his mess at twenty-four, obviously knowing what kind of people he was dealing with. Check.

It hit me right smack in the face. A hard smack that might have knocked a few teeth loose.

He sucked. Plain and simple.

He was no Sonny. He wasn't even a Will because I knew that if I told my brother people had been showing up to my job threatening my life, he’d do whatever he could to fix it. Literally, he would have done anything. I just hadn't wanted to drag him into this mess.

Curt Taylor was no Luther even. Lu had gone as far as to let Dex and I borrow his car to come look for my dad. He'd helped me look for his crappy ass. And he barely knew me.

Curt Taylor was absolutely no Dex either. No Charlie. There was no fierce possessiveness or loyalty. Nothing. Besides both being males and members of the Widowmakers MC, that was it. There was no other trace of similarity between the man standing in front of me and the one who had walked out on me.

This was a man that had left people who needed him hanging a million and a half times. What in the friggin' hell did I have to be nervous about? If anything, he needed to be nervous about meeting me. There wasn't a single thing that I owed him. This wasn't about reconnecting with him or seeking the love and guidance he'd ripped from me when I was too young to understand it.

He should be scared of me.

At least his organs needed to be. Because I swore to myself right then, sitting on the edge of the hotel bed, that I'd make sure he paid the damn Croatians back somehow.

The old bastard owed me that much.

~ * ~ *

“He’s a sneaky son of a bitch,” Sonny sighed on his end of the line.

Bracing my feet on the bottom rung of the stool, I glanced around the diner like my dad could be hiding in a booth. That friggin’ asswipe. “The guy at the front desk told me he checked out yesterday. Yesterday, Sonny. It was like he knew what happened or something.”

“Maybe he did, Ris. Wouldn’t hold it past the old bastard.”

“It’s bull crap.” I cast another glance around the diner, this time looking for Dex. He’d left for the bathroom a few minutes before but he hadn’t come back yet. “We’re going to try to go to a few different motels around the area and see if we can find him.”

Yeah, the chances were slim, and Dex and I had both acknowledged that my dad would have to be a complete moron to move hotels within a few miles distance but...I’d never said he wasn’t a total moron. I could hope for the best, it was all I had.

Sonny hummed in response, the tension awkward between us still. I almost hadn’t called him, but after the phone conversation I’d overheard the night before between him and my tattooed behemoth, I figured it was the best option. The truth was, it pained me that Sonny was still mad at me. Even after I’d told him all about the incident at Pins, he’d sounded angry but still so distant. It wasn’t the way I felt he would have responded if things had been fine between us.

And it was my fault, which was the hardest thing to swallow but probably the most important. Actions always have consequences, right?

I looked over my shoulder while I waited to hear if Sonny said anything else, to see Dex standing just outside the bathroom with a waitress crowding his space. Not our waitress, just a cute one that had smiled at us when we walked in. Whore.

Okay, that was rude.

“Keep me posted on whether you guys need me to drive down there or not, I should be getting to Austin in a day or two depending on how many times Trip wants to stop,” my brother said.

Still looking at Dex as he shook his head at whatever the waitress was saying to him, I swallowed back the weird feeling in my throat and focused on my conversation with Sonny. There was no way I wanted to spend minutes of my life worried about whether or not Dex was doing something suspicious behind my back. I mean, he was right there. He’d never given me a reason not to trust him.

I closed my eyes and tried to imagine the many, many times Sonny had eaten something he didn’t like all because I wouldn’t eat meat. Or the hundreds of times he’d worried about my health and well-being. Sonny mattered to me. And I needed to try and fix what was wrong with us. That mattered.

“Son, I love you. A lot. And I’m sorry I’ve been such a lying shit and I know that my promises probably don’t mean anything to you anymore but I swear I won’t lie to you again. At least not over anything so stupid. I mean, if you ask me if I finished the last PopTart, I might lie but that’s it. Nothing else important.”

And then I waited. And waited. And waited.

Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, he really was that pissed off at me. Holy crap. I’d finally done it.

“Kid,” he finally spoke after what felt like a year. “You pissed me the hell off but I love you anyway. Nothing will ever change that. Not even that dumb monkey you got playing bodyguard.”

“I like my dumb monkey.” Like hell was I going to bring up him being mad at me again. I was going to focus on something other than that.

Sonny sighed again, this long, suffering sigh. “That’s unfortunate.”

“He’s really nice to me,” I whispered into the phone, turning around in the stool to look for said dumb monkey. He was still standing by the bathrooms with the waitress talking to him. “I’d like to keep him, so I hope you aren’t planning on murdering him.”

“Kinda ruining my plans there, kid,” he said, and I wasn’t sure whether he was joking or not. More than likely, he wasn’t. “He didn’t exactly keep to the truce between the Club, of leaving family alone. He knows that’s not cool.”