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, Ilacked. 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 otheralmost 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 witch had ruined me. I only had to hear the wordWeaverand 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 fuckinghatedhim 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.
The fucking candles flickering on the sideboards froze.
Shit.
Bryan Hawk steepled his fingers, his eyes narrowed and dark. “That was a rather uncalled for outburst. Do you want to rephrase that, perhaps?” He never looked away.
