Page 2 of Jax
No clutter. No noise. Clean lines and neat corners. Credit was boringly healthy. One card, no loans. Rent paid on time every month. Utilities in her name. Zero flags. It read like the fucking instruction manual for “how to look normal.”
And the absence of chaos? That was the red flag.
I muttered under my breath and rubbed the back of my neck. My cock had finally cooled off, but my brain wasn’t letting this go. Her information felt…manufactured.
My fingers tapped faster, chasing threads. No social media of any kind. Nothing. What twenty-two-year-old woman didn’t have at least one account? Even Kane had one, though he swore he never touched it.
That itch under my skin wouldn’t stop. The one that made me toss and turn when code didn’t line up, when a lock didn’t crack fast enough, when the pieces of a puzzle looked right but didn’t fit. My body wanted her, sure. But my gut—the part that never lied—told me she carried secrets.
Secrets got people killed.
I scrubbed a hand over my face, groaning low, and shoved the chair back from the desk. The office smelled faintly of heated metal, old coffee grounds, and leather. I’d been holed up in here too many nights lately.
Sleep. That was the smart play.
I cut the lights, headed down the hall, and shoved into my room. The space was simple—a king bed with dark sheets, a couch against the wall, and a flat-screen TV above the dresser. The closet was half open, with boots lined up, and an extra cut hanging inside. The bathroom door was cracked, the smell of my soap and cologne wafting out.
I stripped down to my boxers and sprawled across the bed, my arm over my eyes. Tried to let the quiet take me, but it didn’t. My body twitched with leftover adrenaline. Even worse, every time I closed my eyes, I saw her face. Not smiling, not posing—just looking at the camera. Brown hair pulled back, pretty brown eyes steady.
I rolled onto my stomach and grunted in frustration. It was too fucking hot in the room.
I turned. Tossed. Flipped the pillow. Swore.
An hour later, I gave up, cursing as I yanked on sweats and padded barefoot back down the hall.
My office was waiting, screens cold until my fingers woke them. The glow painted my skin pale, glasses flashing with reflection as I pulled her file up again.
There had to be something.
Line by line, I went through it all. Address history: neat. Job history: passable. Education: a little light but explained by a quick course online. I pulled the metadata on her employment record.
And froze.
There.
One tag buried deep, something most systems would never show unless you peeled the code apart. I knew it because I’d seen it before. A badly scrubbed signature in the metadata—one that screamed federal hands.
WITSEC. Or at least, the shadow of it.
My stomach twisted. Not with fear, but with rage.
Whoever had built her legend had half-assed the work. They had pushed a twenty-two-year-old into a new name and new city, then sent her out into the world with the digital equivalent of a bright fucking orange vest. The thought of anyone touching what belonged to the Redline Kings had me itching to touch back harder.
What. The. Fuck.
I leaned back hard in my chair, the leather of the seat creaking as I scrubbed both hands over my face. My heart beat steady, but my head roared.
She was supposed to be hidden. Protected. And instead, she was sitting at one of Kane’s tracks, right under our roof.
Fuck.
I stared at the screen until the lines blurred, the glow etching her picture behind my eyelids when I blinked.
Possessiveness hit me like a sucker punch. Not caution, not distance.Possessiveness.The kind of instinct that said she wasmine already even though I hadn’t heard her voice or seen her move.
And that pissed me off more than anything.
Because I didn’t have time for this shit.
