From the kitchen, the sound of sizzling oil and the faint aroma of something cooking drifts down the hallway. Hawk is humming—low, tuneless, the kind of absent sound a person makes when they think no one is listening. The domesticity of it is so absurdly at odds with everything else about our existence that it almost makes me laugh again.
Almost.
I press the shoes against my chest one final time, feeling the velvet against my chin, the ribbons threading through my fingers like something alive and gentle, and I close my eyes.
“Happy birthday to me.”
CHAPTER 3
Birds Of Prey
~HAWK~
The eggs are going to burn.
I know this because I’ve been staring at the skillet for approximately forty-five seconds without moving the spatula, which is thirty seconds longer than any reasonable person should stare at eggs before intervening. The whites are crisping at the edges, the yolks are beginning to firm in a way that Victoria will complain about—she likes them runny, borderline dangerous, the kind of undercooked that would make a health inspector weep—and the toast in the oven is producing a smell that’s transitioning from “pleasant” to “charcoal” with alarming efficiency.
Focus, Kennedy.
I don’t focus.
Because Victoria walks into the kitchen.
And whatever functional capacity my brain was clinging to evacuates the premises with the urgency of a building on fire.
She’s wearing a leather bodysuit.
Black, naturally, because the woman’s entire wardrobe operates within a color spectrum that ranges from midnight to obsidian with the occasional detour through charcoal when she’s feeling adventurous. The leather fits her the way goodleather always does—like it was poured rather than pulled on, conforming to the architecture of her body with the kind of precision that makes you acutely aware of every line and curve and angle beneath it.
Her legs are bare.
I bite my lip.
Hard enough that the sting registers through the haze of something far more primal, far less civilized, that’s currently waging a hostile takeover of my higher cognitive functions. Because Victoria Sinclair’s legs are not just legs. They are the physical record of a dancer’s discipline married to a fighter’s necessity—long, lean, sculpted with the kind of muscle definition that comes from years of pointe work layered over years of combat training layered over years of simply refusing to stop moving no matter how many times the world tries to knock her down.
The muscles in her thighs flex with each step as she crosses the kitchen—the quadriceps engaging and releasing in a rhythm that speaks of controlled power, of bodies trained to be both weapons and instruments. Her calves are defined, the gastrocnemius curving with elegant specificity, and even the way she walks—that particular gait she’s developed to compensate for the reduced sensation in her left leg, a slight asymmetry that most people wouldn’t notice but that I catalog with the obsessive attention of someone who has made this woman’s survival their unofficial occupation.
Victoria.
The Emotionless Queen.
That’s what they call her in the corridors of Savage Knot, the students and the fighters and the administrators who see the blank expression and the empty eyes and the deliberate absence of reaction and assume it’s all there is. A woman without depth. A surface so still it must be shallow.
They’re idiots.
Every single one of them.
They don’t get to see what I see. The way the morning light—thin, persistent, filtering through the kitchen window in dusty golden shafts—catches the subtle highlights in her dark blue hair and fractures them into threads of pale blue and soft blonde that shimmer like something broken and beautiful. The way her storm-gray eyes, even in their practiced emptiness, carry cobalt rings that darken or brighten depending on stimuli she thinks no one notices her responding to.
They don’t get to witness the grace.
Not the performed kind—not the deliberate, choreographed elegance she displays in the ring or the corridors. The unconscious kind. The way she reaches for a coffee mug with fingers that extend and curve with a dancer’s muscle memory, turning even the most mundane gesture into something that belongs on a stage. The way she tilts her head when she’s processing information, the motion fluid and precise, a bird studying something it hasn’t yet decided is threat or curiosity.
They don’t get any of it.
And I have no intention of sharing.
I don’t know when it happened.
