Tex (Hell's Ankhor #5) - Aiden Bates Page 0,59

ignored the way my heart lurched and held up the tablet. “This is what I’m here to talk about.”

Jazz looked like he wanted to argue back, but first he cut his gaze down to the tablet. Then his expression turned terrifyingly blank. He reached out and flipped through the photos. No reaction.

The silence hung heavy between us. I waited—waited for him to have some sort of explanation, some story that would explain all of this. Because there had to be a reason. He couldn’t be lying about this. Not the Jazz I knew.

Except nothing came. He didn’t say anything, didn’t try to defend himself—nothing.

The disappointment in me boiled into rage. “What the fuck is wrong with you? I know you don’t want to go back to San Quentin, but you’re sure as hell not acting like it if this is what you do the second my back is turned.”

Jazz winced. I hated that I’d produced that reaction in him, but part of me also wanted to shove him, shake him, anything to get him to fucking react. To say something. But no matter how long I waited, he said nothing. Like he didn’t have anything to cover what he’d done.

“How could you betray the club like this?” I asked. “Blade gave you a second chance. And now you turn around and pull something like this? I thought you’d changed. But apparently not enough.”

Finally, finally, Jazz’s eyes blazed with anger. Quick as lightning, he gripped my shoulder and shoved me bodily out of the way, enough to open his bedroom door and walk out without saying a goddamned word.

15

Jazz

I shoved Tex out of the way, hard—it was easy now that I had some muscle on him.

I’d barely been back in my room for two hours. I’d ridden back to Elkin Lake early in the morning, sober but with a hangover from hell. Luckily, I’d arrived back before the rest of the club had woken up. All I’d wanted was a little bit of time to myself to catch up on sleep, nurse my hangover, and figure out what to do about my spontaneous meeting with Crave.

And then Tex had barged in, guns blazing. I’d thought he was pissed at me because I’d kissed him like an idiot and then spent the night blowing off his calls. Hell, I’d be pissed at me, too. And I’d been ready to talk about it, try to salvage what I could of our friendship. But of course, he’d apparently said all he needed to say when he’d run out the door after the kiss.

Of course I’d assumed that’s what he wanted to talk about. How the hell would he have known that I’d seen Crave? I hadn’t noticed any tails in Monterey—but I hadn’t exactly been looking. How had he gotten those pictures?

I was so caught off guard, and confused, and afraid, and the hangover had slowed my brain to a snail’s pace. And Tex had taken my shocked silence as confirmation of what he was already suspecting: that I was working with Crave.

I’d thought his rejection of the kiss hurt me, but that was nothing compared to this, pain like an ice-cold knife cleaving into my sternum and dragging down. I could handle Tex turning me down when I kissed him—I could even handle him wanting to put distance between us because of it, as much as I’d hoped that wouldn’t be the case.

But I’d never imagined he thought so lowly of me that he really thought I’d work with Crave, and I didn’t know how to handle that.

What was the point of even talking to Tex if that’s what he thought? My voice had been frozen with the lump in my throat anyway. I’d needed to get away from him, to go somewhere alone and lick my wounds before I could talk to him.

“So that’s it?” Tex called as I walked out of the room. “You’re just going to walk away? You’re going to avoid this, pretend there’s nothing wrong?”

The pain suddenly burned, like frostbite spreading through me. I turned on my heel.

“Yeah,” I said coldly, “I am. That’s what you’ve been doing to me all these years. Now you can see how it feels.”

Tex’s angry expression faltered slightly as a line of confusion formed in between his eyebrows.

Of course he didn’t know what I was talking about. He’d been oblivious to my feelings for more than a decade—why would a stupid half-awake kiss change anything? He was probably willfully ignoring it, pretending