Vaughn was to blame foreverything.
He stole her from me. His fucking meddling hadn’t ceased. He brought shame and suspicion onto my house. His tampering couldn’t be allowed.
Nila had been free for days—there was no reason to continue to spread gossip—in his mind, he’d won. I hadn’t made any attempt to contact Nila under another of my father’s conditions.
“Stay away until the drugs have worked.”
I should’ve guessed then that the drugs had two targets: help me, but collar me. I could no longer remember why I wanted to help Nila. Yes, I had feelings for her...but they felt so long ago. She was a Weaver. My family’s mortal enemy. Why would I deviate from my destiny when so many others relied on me?
Every breakfast, my father would turn on the news, YouTube, and every social media platform available today. Slowly, he filled my heart with hate.
He showed me disgusting lies and slander all originating from Vaughn. Twitter ran rampant with hashtags of#BastardHawksand#InnocentWeavers. Facebook hosted debates and surveys on their opinions of the Debt Inheritance.
Everyone had a hypothesis.
Everyone was wrong.
But they all had something in common.
They wanted ourblood.
It was Vaughn who put me back into the icy blizzard I’d escaped from. His twin had thawed me, but he froze me all over again.
He’d gone to every journalist and reporter imaginable. He’d divulged ancient tales of filthy deeds and contracts and debts. He spilled our private affairs to the fucking world.
Every day the phone rang for interviews. Our sources with buyers on the black market grew wary—not enjoying the slander our family suffered—in case it smeared them, too. Our staff began whispering. Our fucking lives started to unravel.
We had money. We controlled police, Customs, and made a livelihood of manipulating those in power for our own means, but we had no clout when it came to strangers on the internet.
Vaughn Weaver harnessed this new age influence and brought a mob to our door, and in doing so, he made my family rally together. Hawk against Weaver. Just like before.
He proved we weren’t untouchable, after all. Cut didn’t deal with the knowledge well. He fucking raged at how little he could do to stop this storm of antagonisers. He never had to worry about social media when he had EmmaWeaver—but in today’s society, it was a bigger beast than we ever anticipated.
Our empire was built on greased palms and ancient ‘blind-eye’ agreements. We all knew whatever contract we had giving us ownership of the Weavers was bullshit.
Nobody could own another.
Only imbeciles believed such a thing.
But I did believe in our power. Our wealth. Our status.
The tales of our rise from rags to riches had been told so many times, they’d reached phenomenon status within our family—spoon-fed the same crap since birth and believing in the power of a binding parchment that gave uscarte blancheto do what we pleased. Not because it granted us immunity, but because it showed just how many people obeyed us now that we had control.
But what good was control when it unthreaded with a fucking rumour?
All of this was a game. Only Vaughn had changed the rules by bringing in spectators demanding answers.
I’d kill Vaughn for that.
He was already dead—just a nail in my rapidly freezing coffin as I popped pill after pill.
Hour after hour, I slowly gave in.
Day after day, I slowly felt nothing.
I was done being the man everyone thought was weak. I lived with a disease, but I wasn’t a cripple.
I didn’t need snow anymore. Or ice. Or pain.
