Page 43 of Cold Hard Truth

He smirks, like I’ve been running in circles and I’m just now finally catching up. “Didn’t patch in.”

He didn’t patch in.

It takes me a moment to process what he’s saying because it’s nonchalant.

He brushes it off like it means nothing. Like I didn’t ask him a hundred times to reconsider what he was doing. Like the fact that his joining the club wasn’t the one thing that started to tear us apart before I ever did.

“You didn’t?”

“Nope.” He shakes his head.

Fate changed.

“Why?”

For the first time, his eyebrows lose their tension. His jaw relaxes, like he was prepared for any snarky comeback I could have tossed his way, but not for thatquestion. He stares at me, and I think for a moment I catch a glimpse of the man I remember. But, as if he senses me softening, he shakes his head and his defenses come up again.

“We’re not getting into this right now.”

Voices come from a distance, and Sage peeks through the slats in the stall. Three of the walls are solid steel and eight feet high, but the final one is a gate with slats only a couple of inches apart.

From the outside of the structure, these might look like horse stalls, but horses aren’t what’s really housed here.

“Kane wants to talk to you.” Sage opens the gate, slamming it shut from the other side. “I’ll be back.”

And for a moment, with his hand on the lock, he pauses, watching me. He stares through the slats, and I don’t blink beneath his attention. Part of me wishes I could run up and grab his hand, and the other part knows I left for the right reasons.

I don’t speak. I don’t breathe. Not until he turns and walks away.

Sage Jackson.

If he were a tarot card, he’d be the wheel of fortune. And I can’t decide whether that’s a good or bad thing.

15

Sage

Eight fucking years.

I don’t know how Lyla can look exactly the same and like an entirely different person all at once, but she manages it.

It’s those eyes—violet in certain lights. An inhuman purple that’s impossible to forget. Since the moment she branded me with them when she first stepped out of her mom’s car, I knew I’d never see eyes like that again.

One blink and she changed my life until slowly she ripped it to shreds.

Last time I looked Lyla in the eyes, she tore my soul from my chest. Now, she has the nerve to come back here and ask me questions.

She’d know the answers if she’d stuck around. If she bothered to give a shit. If she’d trusted me to do better than her father ever did.

What he allowed to happen to his daughters is half the reason I never patched in. But for her to think I’m just like him is like taking a bullet.

I’d give it all up for her—I did.

When I watched Lyla disappear eight years ago, I knew I’d signed my own death warrant. I’d broken a direct order from the president of the Twisted Kings on the night I should have been patched in.

But for her, I would have done anything. She was broken, beaten. And it was the result of her orbiting too close to the club I was dedicating my life to. I couldn’t bring her back there. Not when she asked me not to.

Even if Kane would ruin me for letting his daughter disappear. It was worth it if she could escape the hell she’d be damned to by being related to him.

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