He’d only taken it off for a minute to splash water on his face, but when he reached out to pick it up, it had vanished. Standing stock-still, he immediately played it up.
“Anyone seen my headset?” He called out, and the line cooks shrugged in pure innocence. Derrick wasn’t even there; he was probably out on a smoke break, gone just like the headset.
“Dunno Bossman, I can look when I’m done with this steak,” one of them replied, but Jax shook his head.
“No, it’s cool.” Leaving the kitchen, Jax immediately texted Tristan.
My headset is gone.
I’ll check the cameras,popped onto his screen a few seconds later.
Grabbing a spare headset, Jax went back to work, trying to concentrate while part of his brain rang like an alarm bell. Should he call it out? Blow this entire thing up? No, there might be accomplices, and Jax wanted to root out anyone who tried to destroy his dream.
Besides, he didn’t want to fuck this up by accusing a line cook and possibly having him quit. This needed to be addressed on Monday when Angelo was back.
Jax’s phone buzzed, and he glanced at the screen.
The cameras didn’t pick up anything. There were a lot of people around the station blocking the view, including Derrick, and the headset just vanished.
Of course it did; the cameras were obvious. Even though Jax hadn’t noticed them, it was easy to tell where they were pointed.
“Shit,” Jax muttered under his breath as he oversauced the plate. Wiping the edge, he focused, his anger rising.Hewas running the kitchen tonight, and if one more thing vanished under his watch, he would-
“Hi.” Tristan filled his vision, and Jax’s shoulders instantly dropped.
“Hey,” rushed out of him in a breath.
“You found your headset?” Tristan trailed Jax as he moved through the kitchen, checking stations and plates.
“No, this is a spare,” Jax tapped it. “Mine’s gone.”
“Everything else going okay?” Tristan glanced toward the line cooks, but Derrick was still missing.
“For now,” Jax replied, quickly saucing a few more plates and giving them a nod. Squinting, he noticed a glimmer by his shoe, almost under the station. “Are you kidding? Is that my headset?”
He pulled it out with his foot, and Tristan bent down, picking it up and handing it to Jax.
“If I didn’t have a history of things disappearing, I’d think this was just an accident. But I know someone did this deliberately.” Jax stared down at the headset, trying to control his anger as the beast within roared for the first time in a while.
“We really should talk to Owen and Angelo about this. I don’t want things to escalate any further.” Tristan insisted, concern in his eyes, and Jax couldn’t help but agree.
“Okay,” he sighed. “We’ll have a meeting about it on Monday when I see Angelo again.” A flicker in his brain told him that he’d taken too long and the kitchen needed him. “I have to get back to work.”
“At least the night is almost over, and then you get that massage.” Tristan gave Jax a quick peck on the cheek before returning to the main room, and Jax flicked his gaze over to find that Derrick had returned from his eternal smoke break and was now texting. Pretending to be unbothered, Jax kept an eye on him for the rest of the night. While there wasn’t any hatred coming from Derrick, his existence made Jax’s skin crawl, as if he were dangerous, but he couldn’t pinpoint exactly how or why.
The missing headset turned out to be the only hiccup of the night, and Jax began to breathe more easily as dessert finished. He’d been lucky, because all of the parties had gone smoothly, and by the time he’d made sure the kitchen was in perfect order for morning deliveries and the prep shift, he and Tristan were the last ones out of the building.
“Two days left,” Tristan announced as they walked to his car, although Jax was practically dragging himself across the parking lot. He’d never looked forward to a shower more in his life.
“Yeah. I hope there’s no hiccups tomorrow,” he grumbled.
But he shouldn’t have wasted his energy hoping, because he was instantly stressed from the moment he opened his eyes the next morning. Texts from Winter had him shaking Tristan awake, and Jax could feel the stress settling in his back, wasting Tristan’s excellent massage as they both scurried to The Pointe.
“I know we closed the walk-in,” Jax insisted to Winter as he watched the morning team take out boxes of room-temperature meat and fish that could no longer be served.
“I was there. It was closed. We were the last to leave the kitchen and we secured everything.” Tristan stepped forward, and Jax appreciated the defense, but he still wanted to throw up.
Apparently, the morning crew had arrived to find the walk-in open, which had turned a lot of their inventory into garbage. And that had happened on Jax’s watch.
