AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“You got their numbers?” my father asked, sounding dubious.
“Can’t say I did,” Sully admitted, looking a little sheepish.
“Where’d you find them?” Fallon asked.
“Redemption,” Callow supplied. “We can go back a few nights to see if we run into them again.”
“Yeah, do that,” Fallon said. “Sober,” he added. “And you can ask Toll if he’s seen them hanging with any crews around the bar when you guys weren’t around.”
“Got it,” Callow said, nodding.
“I’ll call Junior in the morning,” Voss said. “See if he can do some looking around.”
“Good,” Fallon said, nodding “Think that about covers all we can do right now. You want me to me to fix you up?” he asked, looking at me.
“Think I’d rather a rabies-riddled honey badger fix me up,” I said, getting a snort out of him.
“I’ll do it,” my father said, giving me a nod toward the hallway.
I moved ahead toward my room, going into the bathroom to look at the damage.
It was worse than I’d anticipated.
I think I was still operating on a lot of adrenaline, because I should have been feeling a fuckuva lot worse than I did, judging by the swelling and bruising going on.
My father moved in through my bedroom and came into the bathroom carrying the plastic container full of medical supplies the club kept around because getting roughed up wasn’t exactly a rare occurrence.
“Guess I should be used to this shit,” he said, setting the container down on the counter as I sat on the lid of the toilet. “Your brother gave my medic skills a run for their money when he was young. But never gets easier seeing your kid all fucked up,” he said, laying out some supplies, then washing his hands.
“I’m alright,” I assured him.
“Yeah? Try telling your mother that when she gets an eyeful of this,” he said, exhaling hard as he looked at me. “She’s already worried about you.”
“I know,” I admitted with a sigh. “I’ve been working on that,” I added.
That had his gaze lifting to mine for a second. “Yeah?”
“Yeah. Did some research. And I’m… taking steps. Not gonna be an overnight fix,” I added.
“No,” he agreed. “But she’ll be glad to hear you listened to her. You know,” he went on as he started to swipe at some of the cuts with peroxide, the sting still a dull sort of pain, “think maybe it’s time to pick up a hobby. Or open a business like Seth did.”
Seth, with his shooting range that was all the rage in the area since it opened, and he started to do shit like girls nights and birthday parties and shit, focusing a little more on female clientele.
“Your brother, he always wanted exactly what he’d got here,” he went on.
That was true.
Fallon, being the eldest, was always going to take over for our old man, was destined to become the club president. It was a role he’d always been well-suited for, something that gave him drive and focus.
“And your sister, life came at her hard and fast, and that molded her into a fighting machine, and gave her purpose in life.”
Ferryn, who’d been kidnapped and held when she was a teenager, had seen and endured shit that no woman, let alone a girl, should have to endure. It had switched something on in her head that had her running away from home and dedicating her life to fighting traffickers.
“You didn’t have that,” he went on, swabbing some triple antibiotic onto the cuts on my face before setting his sights on my arm. “Think when you were young, you were enjoying the partying and fun the club offered. But as you got older, especially as your club brothers married, settled down, built other careers, you flailed. And that let that hollowness sneak in.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. My soul-searching had led me to conclude something really similar.
The problem was, I didn’t even know at this point what to take up, what hobby to try my hand at, what business I wanted to invest in. I didn’t know what I was good at, what I was passionate about.
“Not saying any of this shit is gonna be easy,” he went on as he reached back for the butterfly sutures. “But I think finding what drives you will make a big difference.”
“What drives you?” I asked.
“The club,” he said, even though he was mostly retired. “My woman. My family.”
That did kind of sum up my old man.
The club.
My mom.
Us ‘kids.’
And, now, his grandkids.
“Is this the part where you try to convince me to find a woman and settle down?” I asked, smirking at him.
To that, he let out a little chuckle.
“Know that shit ain’t for everyone,” he said, shrugging. “But a good woman… there’s nothing like it,” he said. “But if you tried to tell me that when I was young, I’d’ve scoffed too. So maybe that’s in your future, maybe not. Speaking of women…” he said, reaching for another suture.
