I swallowed the tiny thrill at the thought of Kes spanking me and quickly sent another message before he could reply.
Needle&Thread: Where are we while you hit me? Bedroom? Forest? Countryside? Across your motorcycle?
His response was instant.
Kite007: How the fuck do you know I have a motorcycle?
I threw my phone away as if it had electrocuted me.
I couldn’t breathe.
Oh, God. It had to be. The strange connection. The glint and secretive smirk on Kestrel’s face. Even the two words were similar. They’re both birds of prey.
I’m so stupid!
All this time, I thought Kite stood for the winged paper craft decorated with bows and string, when in reality it was another bird of prey.
Don’t believe it until you can prove it!
My internal dialogue went unheard.
I couldn’t shake the overwhelming knowing.
My world ended again, and the one person who I trusted to be impartial and grant me strength to get through this was the vilest liar of them all.
Kite was Kestrel.
Kestrel was Kite.
He’s a Hawk.
I DIDN’T GO to Nila for two days.
Two long fucking days.
She’d successfully done what I’d sworn never to let happen again. She’d made me lose control. Bad things happened when I lost my ice. People got hurt. Possessions got broken.
Things did not go to plan when I stepped from the comfort of my arctic shell.
There was a reason people called me distinguished and shrewd—a carefully groomed perception. To be cruel but firm was the ultimate calmness—the persona that smoothed out my violent life.
I’d lived in the cold for so long, it’d become a part of who I was, yet all it’d taken was a silly little girl to burn cracks in my carefully designed control.
Those two days were a reprieve. Not for me, but for her. For my family. For every goddamn soul who had to live with me.
She thought I was a monster? Ice wasn’t a monster—it was unyielding and inviolable—a perfect cage for something like me.
She thought she understood me?
I laughed.
She would never understand. I would never permit her to.
I made sure food was sent to her morning, noon, and night. I spied on her with the bedroom cameras to make sure she didn’t do anything idiotic like break through a window or try to slit her wrists with a piece of crockery.
Two days I left her in the room of death, only to see the girl I’d taken evolve into a sexual creature who glowed like a beacon.
She spent most of the day on her phone—texting, reading, surfing God knows what. Sometimes, her face would fall. Sometimes, her lips would tilt into a smile. Sometimes, she’d pant, her small chest rising and falling. The flush of sex on her skin drove me fucking insane with jealousy.
Jealousy.
An emotion not permitted in my snowy world.
The second day I abandoned her, I went for a hunt. I let loose the hounds and thundered after a herd of deer. I stalked the poor creatures, and shot a quivering arrow through some feeble herbivore’s heart. Some things still functioned correctly in my world, even if most of it had been bulldozed into ruins.
The bloodlust was sated. Calmed.
The cracks that’d formed froze over.
Rationality and tranquillity returned.
That night, my father and brothers had a family dinner—just the four of us. The deer I’d shot graced a stew, roulade, and roast.
Dinner talk was sparse, but an undercurrent of anger hummed between us. Daniel smirked with his insane arrogance. Kes smiled occasionally for no good goddamn reason, and my father...
Shit, my father.
I was a fucking twenty-nine-year old man. I had blood beneath my nails and ice around my heart, but still I wasn’t good enough. Still, I lacked. I had something inside me that he’d tried to kill, but despite his best efforts, it survived.
I’d learned how to hide it.
But Nila…fuck.
She had the power to expose it.
I wanted to rage. To step into the truth and show my father who I truly was.
But I wouldn’t. Not yet. That would be weak.
And I wasn’t fucking weak.
I was one year away from inheriting it all. I had my own Weaver to play with. The power shift had begun—all the brothers of the Black Diamond knew it. My relatives knew it. The world fucking knew it, but my father…he wasn’t happy with the change.
His gaze ensnared me; I glowered back.
The animosity between us was rife tonight, unable to be buried beneath the rotting veneer of respect and mutual alliance to never challenge each other again.
The last time we did, one of us walked away broken and the other almost didn’t walk away at all.
Dessert was brought in, some raspberry soufflé affair. The matriarch of our family finally decided to show her face from her private wing at Hawksridge.
Bonnie Hawk might’ve looked bonny in her day, but she was well past her prime. At ninety-one, she moved painfully and with difficulty—the stubborn cow refusing to use a wheelchair or even a cane to get around.
“Hello, my son.” She nodded at Bryan Hawk then looked to Kes, Dan, and me. “Hello, my grandbabies.”
Daniel rolled his eyes, Kes shot up to help her into a chair, and I smiled the signature ‘warm-but-not-too-warm’ smile I’d perfected since I was ten. “Hello, Grandmamma,” the three well-trained Hawk boys said in unison.
Bonnie sat, snapping her fingers for the unobtrusive staff to ladle her plate with the raspberry sweet. She placed an over-piled spoon into her mouth.
Her brown eyes landed on mine. “Tell me, Jet. How are things going with the latest Weaver?”
My back straightened as my cock twitched unbidden. That damn fucking witch had ruined me. I only had to hear the word Weaver and I became fucking hard.
That’s why you’re avoiding her.
Another reason, I admitted.
I scowled.
Swallowing my one and only mouthful of soufflé, I smiled tightly. “She’s a work in progress, Grandmamma.”
My father jumped in. “The little brat had the audacity to speak back after her welcome luncheon. The cheek of her. If she was mine to discipline, she would be missing a body part by now.”
He spoke the truth. I’d seen what he’d done to Nila’s mother, and I fucking hated him for it.
The venison in my stomach rolled as a wash of ferocious rage exploded through my blood. I stabbed my butter knife into the table. “Thank fuck she’s not yours to torment, then. It so happens I like my women whole.”
The moment the words were out of my mouth, I froze.
The table froze.