Chapter 3 Birds Of Prey
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 good leather 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.
When her survival became something that mattered to me—not as a general principle, not as the baseline empathy that most functioning beings extend to other living things, but as something specific.
Personal. The kind of mattering that rearranges your priorities without asking permission and installs itself at the top of the hierarchy like it’s always belonged there.
It shouldn’t matter.
I’m thirty-five years old, unbonded, feral-prone, and operating on borrowed time in every measurable sense.
My pack is dead—massacred in a politically motivated hit that was buried by wealth powerful enough to make evidence dissolve and witnesses forget they ever had eyes.
I survived because I was away. Because I wasn’t there.
Because the universe decided that the cruelest punishment wasn’t dying with them but living without them, carrying the empty space where four bonds used to anchor my neurology like a phantom limb that aches during storms and never stops reminding me of what it was connected to.
A bonded Alpha who loses his pack goes feral.
That’s the medical fact.
The clinical trajectory.
And I should be there by now—should be more animal than man, more instinct than thought, more destruction than function.
And yet.
She’s standing in the kitchen, bare-legged in black leather, half-asleep and probably still bleeding under those bandages, and the feral part of me—the part that claws at the edges of my consciousness during stress, that surfaces in episodes of dissociative violence I can’t always predict or control—is quiet.
Completely, unnervingly quiet.
The way it only ever is when she’s near.
I’m oddly obsessed with her. I can admit that to myself now—have been admitting it, grudgingly and incrementally, for the better part of three years.
The obsession isn’t rational. It defies the careful calculations that have kept me alive in a world that would prefer me dead.
She’s a liability, technically. An Omega whose very designation makes her a target in Savage Knot’s economy, whose survival depends on suppression and disguise and the constant, exhausting performance of being something she’s not.
Attaching myself to her is strategically indefensible.
And I did it anyway.
Because I know the skeletons in her closet.
Just like she knows mine.
And neither of us has flinched.
“You’re going to get cold without stockings.”
The words come out steadier than the internal monologue preceding them would suggest. I’ve had years of practice separating what I feel from what I express—it’s a survival skill, not unlike Victoria’s own emotional fortress, though mine is built from different materials and guarded by different demons.
She huffs.
That sharp, nasal exhale that communicates more than most people’s dissertations.
I’ve become fluent in Victoria’s huffs the way a meteorologist becomes fluent in barometric pressure—reading the subtle variations in tone, velocity, and nostril involvement to determine the current emotional forecast.
This one translates roughly to: I heard you and you’re right but I’d rather be stabbed again than acknowledge it.
“I don’t want to listen to you,” she says.
I chuckle, turning back to rescue the eggs before they cross the threshold from overcooked to inedible. The spatula scrapes against the skillet’s surface, and I plate them alongside the toast that is, admittedly, darker than intended but not unsalvageable.
“You never want to listen to me.” I set the plate on the counter and lean against the opposite surface, crossing my arms. “Like how I said don’t go outside last night because it’s been vicious out there lately.
Sector Three had two kills in the ring this week alone.
The enforcers are agitated. The lower tiers are scrambling for ration cards. It’s not a time for midnight strolls.”
I fix her with a look that I know she’ll see straight through but deliver anyway.
“But where did you go?”
She stares at me.
Blankly.
Those storm-gray eyes meeting mine with the vast, impenetrable nothing that she’s perfected into an art form.
No guilt. No defiance. No sheepish acknowledgment that she walked directly into danger approximately four hours after I specifically told her not to.
Just... flatness. The emotional equivalent of a dial tone.
I wait.
Victoria’s silences are their own form of communication.
Some are defensive—walls thrown up when emotion threatens to breach the surface.
Some are dissociative—the void taking her somewhere I can’t follow.
And some, like this one, are deliberate.
Strategic. The silence of a woman deciding exactly how much truth to allocate to her response.
“Outside.”
One word. Delivered with the tonal flatness of someone ordering coffee.
This woman.
This infuriating, beautiful, self-destructive woman.
I smirk, because what else can you do when the person you’ve dedicated yourself to keeping alive treats their own existence like an optional feature they haven’t decided whether to renew?
Anger doesn’t work—she’ll match it and exceed it.
Concern makes her retreat further into the void.
Lectures bounce off her like rain off that leather bodysuit she has no business looking that good in.
So I smirk, and I pivot.
“Come here.”
She drags her feet.
Literally, physically drags them across the hardwood floor—the bare skin of her feet producing a soft shushing sound against the wood as she shuffles toward me with the enthusiasm of someone approaching a dentist’s chair.
Her body language is petulant in a way that she’d never permit in public, where every movement is controlled and deliberate and calculated for maximum survival efficiency.
Here, in the privacy of this condemned little sanctuary, she allows herself the luxury of being annoyed.
It’s one of my favorite versions of her.