My internal dialogue went unheard.
I couldn’t shake the overwhelmingknowing.
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.
Chapter Eight
Jethro
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 didnotgo 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 wouldneverunderstand. 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, surfingGod 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 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.
