Chapter 37 Dex - Past
thirty-seven
Dex - Past
TROUBLE.
“We have to run,” Jonah told me, hands holding mine and panic in his beautiful brown eyes. Still burning like fire, but a fire uncontrolled. A fire burning too rapidly. Unpredictable. Threatening to consume him and everything in his path.
I placed a soft kiss on his forehead. Over the past two days he’d been volatile, switching between panicking about what he and Henrik had done and clinging to me like a life raft in a storm.
Like he needed me more than air. He needed me just to be.
Just when I thought he’d stabilized, Deltran Police Force had found the bodies.
I’d tried and failed to contact Henrik. He wouldn’t answer his phone, not to me, not to Jonah when I stole his phone, and not to any of the Strays I’d called. No one had seen him, and the bastard better have been dead or dying to disappear after all the shit he had caused.
While I wanted to hunt him down and get some fucking answers, Jonah was increasingly becoming a flight risk, and I didn’t want to leave him alone for even a moment.
“I won’t let anything happen to you, Rabbit,” I promised him.
“I can’t leave here, not while the Strays need me, but if it comes down to it, and there’s no other way, then we’ll go.
Okay, baby? I won’t let anyone hurt you or take you away from me.
” Words spoken with a calmness I didn’t feel.
But I wouldn’t let him see it. I was his anchor, and an anchor needed to be strong, firm, immovable.
“What if you get hurt again?” he asked, hands holding mine tighter.
“I won’t.”
“You don’t know that!”
“I’m just going to go to work, baby. It’ll just be me and Roy. There’s no danger there.”
It was a lie.
I intended to go to work. Roy had been accommodating of me taking even more time off, but he needed more of an explanation, and I needed to get Jonah’s car finished.
Maybe if he had his own way of getting around, he’d be able to relax a little more, knowing he wouldn’t be trapped in place without me to take him everywhere.
I just hoped he’d never use it to run without me.
After the shop, though, I was going to find Henrik.
“Why don’t you call Bee? She can come hang out here, or I can take you to her place on the way to work.”
“No,” he answered quickly. “I don’t want her to know.”
“You don’t have to tell her anything you don’t want to.”
“I can’t lie to her. She’s too perceptive. Pisses me off.”
I kissed his forehead again, if only to cover the smile that threatened to pull at my lips. “Okay, I won’t be long. And I’ll have my phone on me, so if you need anything at all, you just call me, Rabbit. Whatever I’m doing, I’ll drop it to answer you.”
Jonah huffed, burying himself in my arms as he locked his own in a cage around me, pulling me close and tight. I held him back the same way.
“Everything will be okay, baby.” I’d make sure it was.
Jonah shook his head, arms tightening around me. “No.”
“No?”
“No, don’t leave me.”
I sighed, rubbing his back soothingly. “I need to go to work.”
“Then I’m coming too.”
If I denied him, I expected there’d be little chance of me prying myself out of his koala grip, and if I was honest, I didn’t particularly want to. I’d just have to hope Roy would be okay with Jonah being my shadow for the day, and look for a moment I could get away to find that big bastard.
Roy raised an eyebrow when we walked into the shop. His eyes flicked from Jonah to me, a question on his face I was going to force him to ask before I answered with as little detail as possible.
“All good?” he spoke after a moment.
“Will be.” Because it wasn’t yet, but we’d find our way through.
Roy nodded his head once, looking back at my rabbit again. “Jonah, I assume?”
Jonah’s fingers caught the back of my jacket as he stepped in closer, that harsh mask he always wore around people he didn’t know firmly in place. He nodded.
Roy grunted. “Well. I ain’t paying you if you ain’t workin’.”
I huffed in amusement, and Jonah stiffened, obviously trying to figure out how to respond to that.
“You can start by getting the coffee order,” said the grumpy mechanic, already putting Jonah to work. No doubt sending him off so we could speak privately.
He pulled cash from his wallet and held it out to Jonah, who was still trying to figure out the situation he was in and how to respond.
Roy made that decision for him. “Black, no sugar. Whatever this one wants.” He gestured his head toward me.
“And you.” Jonah looked at me, mild panic beneath the scowl as Roy stepped forward and slapped the cash into his hand.
“Go on, then.” Roy ushered him out, and I smiled and gave him a reassuring nod as he was whisked toward the entrance.
The door chimed, and I heard Jonah grumble something under his breath, but he started walking toward the diner.
“Well then.” Roy turned his attention back to me. “You takin’ time off and then bringin’ him here. Now, I don’t have a problem with that, provided he doesn’t get in the way, but I need to ask you, son. You boys in trouble?”
Briefly, I wondered what might happen if I told Roy everything. Would he still have the same level of care for me? Would he still want me working here for him? Would he still call me “son?” I couldn’t risk it. Couldn’t lose him.
“I’m sorting it out.” I settled for. Not a lie.
Roy nodded and waited for me to continue. When I didn’t, he sighed, crossing his thick arms over his chest. “Boy, you want him to stick around here, you’re gonna have to give me more than that.”
“You really gonna kick him out, Roy? He doesn’t want to be alone right now.”
Roy stared at me, and I stared right back, both of us waiting for the other to give in. He huffed, and I won.
“Just… what do you need from me, kid?” he asked.
I wasn’t sure what I needed, but I had the urge to confide in him, like a scared child seeking the guidance of a parent, someone older and wiser who could make promises like “it’s going to be okay,” and it’d be believable because there was no reason to doubt them.
But that wasn’t my life, and Roy wasn’t my father.
That was something I didn’t have anymore. I had to do this on my own.
“I need to go somewhere for a bit. Can you keep Jonah busy? Tell him I had to do something for work? I don’t want him to worry.”
“Should he worry?” I knew what he was really asking was, “Should I worry?”
“No, everything’s going to be just fine.” Words spoken with hope rather than confidence.
Roy stared at me with an intensity that threatened to shatter the walls I kept between us. “I don’t talk much, ’bout your pa.”
The mention of my father was so unexpected that I couldn’t help the sharp inhale it provoked. “You don’t talk much about anything.” I tried for teasing, but it fell flat.
“We didn’t talk much ’bout what really mattered.
And I could see—” Roy cleared his throat.
“I could see he struggled, and I’d ask him if he was good, and you know what he’d say to me, son?
He’d say, ‘Everything’s going to be just fine.
’ Now, I ain’t no fool, and I knew he wasn’t feeling all that good, but like a fool I let him go with that.
Because that’s the type of men we were. But—” He cleared his throat again, his jaw clenching, his eyes piercing right through me, and I felt heat behind my own as he continued.
“But maybe if I hadn’t, he wouldn’t have—” His eyes glassed over. “He wouldn’t have done what he did.”
My throat tightened, and as a tear escaped the pale eyes of a man I was used to always seeing so stoic, it felt like my own were being unwillingly drawn from my depths like water from the bottom of a deep well.
Because I’d been selfish enough to believe I was the only one who’d missed him, who remembered him, who’d cried for him.
“But I can’t fix that now. He’s gone, and I can’t bring him back. He asked me somethin’, though. Made me promise him somethin’. You know what that was?”
I shook my head as my vision blurred.
“He made me promise if somethin’ ever happened to him, that I’d look out for his boy. Now I’ve tried, kid, and maybe I coulda tried harder, and I’m sorry for that. But I failed him once and I’ll be damned if I do it again. So, I’m gonna ask you one more time. You boys in trouble?”
The bucket pulled to the surface of the well and spilled its contents in rivulets down my cheeks. “Yeah,” I whispered. “We might be.”
Roy nodded firmly. “Alright, then. Now what do you need from me?”
“Time.” I cleared my throat. “I need to find someone, and Jonah can’t come after me.”
“Okay. I can handle that. What else?”
“I don’t know.”
“You gonna be safe?”
“I don’t know,” I repeated, and the honesty of it threatened to pull more tears from the well.
“Whatever this situation is you’re in, you ain’t alone. And I’m not losing you too. So if I can help, you tell me.”
“What if you don’t like what I tell you?”
“Mm, I suspect I probably won’t. But I’ll help you all the same.”
I wasn’t about to tell him that my rabbit was directly involved in the murder of three people, whether they deserved it or not, but maybe I could tell him something.
Maybe it was safe—he was safe—like my father had been safe.
“I have to go before Jonah gets back or he won’t let me leave alone, but later? ”
Roy nodded, clearing his throat and wiping away any remaining dampness on his cheeks. “Right. Best get on with it, then. You need me—”
“I’ll call,” I finished for him. “I know.”
I didn’t have high hopes that Henrik would be at the Strays’ house. With the bastard being as mysterious as he was, I really didn’t know where to find him if he didn’t want to be found. But I had to try.
When I walked through the front door, I heard a commotion from the next room over. It was Archer, tearing apart the cushions of the sagging sofa like they owed him money.
“All good?” I asked from the doorway.
He startled, scrambling to his feet to face me. “Oh. It’s you. What do you want?” he asked, returning to his destruction of the furniture.
“I’m looking for Henrik.”
“Haven’t seen him,” Archer responded distractedly.
“Do you know where he might be, then?”
He didn’t respond, instead flipping the sofa over onto its back with a crash.
“Archer?” I snapped.
“What?” he shouted, turning to glare at me. “I don’t fucking know where he is, okay? I haven’t seen him, and I’m fucking busy.”
“Busy?” I scoffed. “Is this why you’ve been so hard for everyone to contact lately? Because you’re fucking up sofas?”
“The point, dickhead, isn’t to fuck up the sofa.”
“Then what is the fucking point?”
“I’m looking for something.”
“For what?”
“Just something!” he snapped, but I wasn’t tolerating it.
Archer had been a shitty leader lately, but that hadn’t always been the case.
When he’d first brought this group of misfits together, he’d been an anchor, the solid foundations that held up everything we’d built.
He’d found broken people and given them a home, a purpose.
But he’d been absent far too often lately, and the ripples of whatever was happening with him were echoing throughout the Strays.
It wasn’t just my conversation with Henrik, there was doubt creeping in when it came to Archer’s leadership. Some of the Strays had lost their faith in him. He was unreliable, unreachable, unfocused, and therefore they sought me out instead.
“If you tell me, I can help you,” I said through gritted teeth.
Archer glared for a moment, giving me a long, assessing look before sighing as he relented. “My knife.”
All this over a knife? “What’s it look like?”
He chewed his lip as he looked skyward and inhaled deeply, as if seeking patience and composure. “Switchblade,” he said after exhaling. “Pale wood handle.”
“Alright,” I said, stepping forward to look. Maybe once he had the damned thing he’d calm the fuck down so I could ask him about Henrik.
We searched the living room, the kitchen, and despite telling me it had to be there because he didn’t go anywhere else in the house, we searched the other rooms too. Still no knife, and the longer that passed without it, the more I could see him unravel.
“What’s so important about it anyway? Can’t you just get another one?”
“No!”
“Why?”
“Because.”
“Because fucking why, Arch? I’m trying to help you here. Can you stop being so fucking unreasonable?”
Apart from the most recent fight night at the pier, I rarely had reason to be confrontational with Archer. He clearly didn’t like it, but at least this time the words sank in instead of bouncing off.
“My father gave it to me,” he said after a moment, and the words were soft, like an exposed wound. “It’s the only thing he’s ever given me. And it’s lost.”
I knew very little about Archer’s father, except that the man was still alive. I wondered what kind of father would only ever have given his kid a knife, but if I could assume Archer and Henrik were products of their environment, I’m not sure I wanted to know.
“Where else might it be?”
“Nowhere.” Archer ran his fingers through his hair, leaving it sticking up in every direction instead of the purposefully styled waves he was always meticulous about. “I’ve searched everywhere else. It’s gone.”
The panic and rage burned away, revealing something vulnerable and raw he never let anyone see, and given the conversation I’d had so recently with his brother, I wasn’t sure I deserved to see it either.
It lasted only a moment before he pulled those walls up again. “Doesn’t matter. Just a knife, right?” he said clearing his throat. “Bigger things to worry about.”
“Arch…”
“No. It’s fine.” He exhaled, slow and measured.
“It’s fine,” he repeated, and I knew it wasn’t me he was trying to convince but himself.
“Listen… I know I haven’t been around as much lately.
I’m slipping up, I am, and I know that. But I’m trying.
Just… just give me a little more time. I’m sorting everything out.
Then it can all go back to normal.” That part was harder for both of us to believe.
“Is it the Drakes?”
He scoffed. “You could say that.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means they know things they shouldn’t know, and I’m trying to find out why.”
“You think one of us is working with them?”
“Do you have the money?” he asked, changing the subject.
“What money?”
“The money I asked you to get from Phillips.”
“I gave it to Henrik. He said he’d give it to you.”
Archer’s face did something complicated before the mask slid back into place. “Fine.”
“I need to find him.”
“Yeah. You and me both.”