Page 15 of Texas Hold Em’ (The Devil’s Luck MC #3)

JAMESON

T he Assistant Director blinked at my badge sitting on his desk. “What the fuck is this, Jameson?”

I removed my gun from the holster on my hip and set it down, too. “I quit.”

“You what?”

“I quit,” I said again, this time through clenched teeth.

Abraham, my director, pressed his large, scarred hands to the top of his desk and stood up.

He was only fifty-one, but he had the body of a much older man.

His youth had been eaten away by working as a Ranger himself, and he’d acquired dozens of injuries, some of them life threatening, in his relentless and fearless pursuit of justice.

For the longest time, I’d wanted to be just like him, and I’d seen his career trajectory as a path for myself.

All that had gone up in smoke, though.

“You can’t quit,” he said. “This shit is in your blood. You’re a Ranger. Put your fucking badge back on and pick up your gun, son. I’m in no mood for fuckery today.”

He didn’t understand.

How could he?

This wasn’t a choice. Fuck. Nothing in my life felt like a choice anymore.

I was being run out of town—pushed out by a fat bastard with no sense of honor.

He’d threatened my family when I went after him.

He’d sent files to my house full of black and white photographs of my mother at the grocery store, my father on his back in the driveway working under the old Jeep, my sister waiting in line outside the cinema with her boyfriend.

They were so much more important than my badge.

“This isn’t fuckery, Abraham,” I said. I never called my boss by his first name, and it made his already furrowed brow crease even more deeply. “I quit. I’m done.”

“Did you get an offer from somewhere else?” He grasped at straws. “Tell me who poached you. I’ll match whatever they’re offering. You’ve just made a name for yourself here, Jameson. Don’t throw it all away for some opportunity from a pompous ass in a fancy office.”

“There isn’t another job.”

“Then why are you walking away? Where are you going to go?”

I shrugged. “Anywhere that isn’t here.”

He massaged his still furrowed brow. “Is this about a woman?”

I almost smiled. “No.”

Abraham fell back into his chair. It creaked under his weight as if crying out for help.

“This doesn’t make sense. If there was a woman, I’d tell you to cut her loose.

No woman is worth throwing it all away for, no matter who tells you otherwise.

Believe me, I did it. I got the girl and the house and the kids, and you know what?

She fucked me. Took me for half of what I was worth because I was spending too much time here.

The job is the love of my life, son. And I know for a fact it’s the love of your life, too. You’re making a mistake.”

Abraham had been a good boss to me, but I’d never believed he was a good man.

He had an edge to him, and he had his vices.

He stayed late at the office gambling on online games four days a week.

He drank too much vodka, even on the job, and rumor had it he’d been caught evading paying his taxes for years.

Still, he’d been a pillar in my life for almost a decade, and there was a part of me that was flattered he was trying so hard to change my mind.

“It’s not about the job,” I said, “or a girl, or you. I just… I know when it’s time to walk away, and that time has come. ”

“You can come back anytime you want.”

His words stung because they weren’t true.

I could never come back. I’d sealed my own fate the night I walked into O’Hare’s warehouse and let him know I was onto him and his seedy business deals.

I knew about the drugs he smuggled on passenger airlines out of the city.

I knew about the guns he shipped in cargo trains.

I knew about the three hookers he’d murdered, the mail order bride he’d brought to Austin from Russia only to beat the shit out of her and leave her for dead, and the cocaine.

I knew everything, and I was going to bring him down.

Turned out, I wasn’t the only one good at digging. He’d looked into every corner of my life and found all the possible leverage he could to get me off his tail. I hated letting a criminal get away with it, but he’d taken away all my options.

If I moved on him, my family would die.

If I passed the file I had on him to any other Ranger, my family would die.

If I so much as looked in his direction again, my family would die.

Leaving was the only way I could guarantee getting him off my tail. O’Hare would know I was no longer a risk if I was thousands of miles away, and my family could continue living their blissfully ignorant lives, knowing nothing of the danger that was nipping at their heels because of my mistakes.

“I’m done, Abraham. Really done. Throw my badge in the ocean done.”

He sighed heavily. “Fine. So be it. You want to run? Run.”

I turned and made for the door.

“You won’t tell me where you’re going, will you?” he asked.

I paused at the door and shook my head. I didn’t know where I was going yet. “I’m just going to hit the open road and see where it takes me.”

“You’d like Montana,” he said. “It would suit you.”

I didn’t know what that meant, and I didn’t ask, so I just thanked him and left.

Nobody looked up from their desks as I made my way through the office. They had no idea I was leaving, and I wanted to keep it that way. I’d never been very good at goodbyes.

I was better at driving away.

My folks would be pissed. My sister, too.

They wouldn’t understand. But I’d decided it was better that way.

I never wanted them to feel the kind of fear I’d felt when I realized the danger I’d put them in.

If I could spare them that, then leaving without a word was the right call.

They deserved a normal life free from the weight of knowing what kind of evil lurked in the shadows at the end of their own streets.

Sometimes I wished I was that lucky, but as Abraham said, this shit was in my blood.

Danger always had a way of finding me.

Or I found it.

Outside headquarters, I got on my bike and revved the engine. A few women shot me curious looks and flirty smiles, but I ignored them and tore away from the building, leaving everything I’d spent the last fifteen years of my life building behind me.

Maybe I’d find a new life in Montana. Maybe I’d fall in with the right people.

Or maybe I’d just find trouble all over again with a new name and a new face.

I sat up in bed and rubbed at my chest where I used to wear my badge.

I hadn’t thought about Abraham in a long time, and now there he was, visiting me in my dreams. I rubbed at my eyes and shook off the lingering nostalgia of the dream. Austin had never felt as far away as it did then.

With a sigh, I settled back under the covers, rolled toward Carrie’s side—and found it empty.

“What the fuck?”

I sat back up and looked around. My ears strained as I tried to listen for her moving around in the apartment. Maybe she’d gotten up to go to the bathroom or grab a glass of water. But the place was silent.

She was gone.

“That woman,” I growled as I threw the blankets off and hunted in the dark for my phone. I’d left it in the living room. I punched out an angry text demanding she tell me where she’d gone off to at this hour. It was damn near four in the morning .

What was she doing running around behind my back like this?

Was this the first time she’d snuck out?

Had Jackson been right all along? Could she be trusted? Was she playing me?

Fuck.

Had I been so easily distracted by sex that I missed all the red flags?

No , I told myself. Carrie wasn’t sneaking around behind my back. She was working.

She was trying to catch a big fish, but she had no idea how unprepared for the fight she was.