Chapter 3 Birds Of Prey #3
In thirty-five years of existence, through the years before the massacre when I had a pack and a purpose, through the years after when I had nothing but fury and the grinding determination to not die on someone else’s schedule—I never developed the capacity for the softer arts.
Romance requires a belief in continuity, in futures, in the premise that the person you’re holding today will still be there tomorrow.
My life has systematically dismantled that premise at every opportunity.
I don’t do tender.
Don’t do affection as a sustained behavior rather than an involuntary lapse.
Don’t do vulnerability outside the specific, controlled confines of physical need.
At least, I didn’t.
Until Victoria.
Maybe it was the story. The lore of it—her lore—that wormed its way into the parts of me I thought were dead and cauterized beyond revival.
The twin sister who schemed and manipulated and did everything in her power to erase Victoria from existence so she could claim the Sinclair empire for herself.
The cliff. The fall. The years of recovery and reinvention, hiding in the shadows of Knot Academy while the woman wearing her stolen name paraded through elite society like a trophy wife who’d killed her competition.
And then the reckoning.
I watched it. From a distance, through a scope that I’d been using to track Vivian’s movements for weeks before the Forgotten Omegas made their move.
I wasn’t supposed to be there—wasn’t part of their operation, wasn’t invited, wasn’t welcome.
But something about the intelligence I’d intercepted, the whispers about a woman in all black with empty eyes and surgical gloves who was going to end a family war in a Russian warehouse at Christmas—something pulled me toward that building the way gravity pulls objects toward the earth. Inevitable. Non-negotiable.
Three days.
Three nights.
Seventy-two hours of systematic deconstruction that I observed from my perch in the adjacent building, my scope trained on the windows, watching Victoria work with the clinical precision of a surgeon and the patience of a predator that knows its prey has nowhere left to run.
Each cut measured. Each wound deliberate.
No wasted movement. No emotional expenditure that wasn’t immediately recouped by the cold, focused clarity in those storm-gray eyes.
She never flinched.
Not once.
Not when Vivian screamed.
Not when the screaming stopped.
Not when there was nothing left to scream with.
And on the cliff—that desolated outcropping above the black ocean—I watched from a ridge three hundred meters away as she stood before the chair, delivered her final words to the ruined thing that used to be her sister, and kicked it over the edge with a force that was neither excessive nor insufficient.
Precise. The way everything about her is precise.
The chair crashing into the rocky waves made more noise than Vivian’s last breath.
It should have been morally wrong to witness.
Repulsive. Horrifying. The kind of act that makes you question the fundamental nature of a person’s soul.
Instead, it was the day I knew.
Not love. I don’t have the architecture for that word—not yet, maybe not ever.
But something adjacent. Something with the same gravitational pull and the same terrifying permanence.
The moment I watched her light that cigarette in the rain, standing on the edge of a cliff with her sister’s blood still under her nails and absolutely nothing behind her eyes, I wanted to imprint on this woman.
Wanted to make her mine.
To be the thing that stood between her emptiness and the void’s final claim.
How dare I say I fell for this Omega.
And yet.
Here we are.
The kiss deepens.
What began as gentle—my concession to her birthday, to the stab wound, to the fragility I’ll never insult her by naming aloud—shifts into something with teeth.
My hands find her hips, fingers spreading wide over the leather, gripping with a pressure that walks the precise line between possession and restraint.
I pull her against my front, and the contact is a detonation—her body against mine, the subtle curves of her pressed into the hard planes of me, her coolness meeting my heat in a thermodynamic exchange that turns the kitchen air heavy with the scent of arousal.
My groin presses against hers.
The hardness of me—already half-mast from the moment she walked in wearing that bodysuit, already straining against the thin cotton of my boxers with an urgency that has nothing to do with feral instinct and everything to do with this specific woman—grinds against the junction of her thighs through the leather, and the friction draws a gasp from her lips that breaks the kiss.
She pulls back.
Only inches. Her mouth is parted, her breathing disrupted from its usual controlled rhythm, and that porcelain skin is flushed with color that starts at her cheeks and spreads downward toward her throat.
Her eyes are different now—the practiced emptiness cracked open, the storm-gray darkened to something closer to thundercloud, the cobalt rings nearly invisible as her pupils expand.
There she is.
Behind the walls.
My girl.
I smirk, and I know it’s dangerous—know that the expression on my face right now is the one that makes her blush harder and huff louder and pretend she isn’t affected by any of this even as her body broadcasts the evidence on every frequency.
I’m careful with the stab wound. Conscious of the bandages beneath the leather, conscious of the damaged tissue that’s still in the early stages of repair.
My hands adjust their position on her hips, shifting pressure away from the injured side, rerouting the geography of our contact to accommodate the reality that the woman I want to devour is currently held together by gauze and stubbornness.
“How should we go about this?”
I watch the color deepen in her cheeks. The blush—that involuntary betrayal that she despises because it undermines the Emotionless Queen facade—spreads from pink to rose, coloring her porcelain skin with the kind of warmth that her body can’t produce on its own but apparently manufactures just fine when provoked by the right stimuli.
My precious Omega.
Doesn’t like to be told what to do.
But sure likes to order people around.
She mutters something.
Low, barely audible, directed at a point somewhere to the left of my shoulder rather than at my face because Victoria Sinclair can deliver a farewell address to her dying sister without wavering but apparently cannot look me in the eye while telling me where she wants to be taken.
“On the table.”
I smirk wider.
“Spread out all eagle, hmm?”
She huffs—the aggressive one, the one with the full nostril flare—and looks away.
The motion exposes the long line of her neck, the column of pale skin interrupted by the faintest tracery of old scars and the new tendons standing taut with the effort of maintaining composure while her body is actively conspiring against her.
I catch her chin.
My fingers are firm but measured, guiding her face back to mine with a pressure that says look at me without saying it.
Her storm-gray eyes meet mine, and the defiance in them is undercut by the heat—by the dilated pupils and the parted lips and the elevated pulse I can see hammering in the hollow of her throat.
“Is that why you put up with me?” I tilt my head, studying her the way she hates being studied—like something transparent, something readable. “Your infatuation with various birds?”
She grumbles.
“No.” A pause. Then, with the particular petulance of a woman who is currently aroused and annoyed about it in equal measure: “I don’t even like hawks.”
I chuckle—low, rough, the sound vibrating through my chest and into hers through the points of contact between us. The lie is so transparent it’s almost endearing, and the fact that she delivers it with a straight face only makes it better.
“Oh.” I lean in, my lips brushing the heated skin of her cheek, tracking a path toward her ear. “So you like eagles.”
She doesn’t answer.
Doesn’t need to. The way her breath catches—a sharp, involuntary hitch that she’ll deny until the day she dies—tells me everything her silence is working very hard to withhold.
I press my lips to the spot just below her ear, where her pulse is hammering with an urgency that makes my own blood run hotter, and I let my voice drop to the register that I know—from extensive, meticulous experimentation—bypasses her defenses entirely.
“You say you hate hawks.” My breath ghosts across her skin, and I feel the shiver that runs through her like a current through water—full-body, involuntary, devastating. “But you’d be moaning that very word when I hit the right spots, hmm?”
Her cheeks ignite.
The blush escalates from rose to crimson with a rapidity that would be comical if it weren’t so viscerally satisfying.
She tries to act like it’s not a big deal—arranges her expression into something approaching indifference, schools her breathing back toward normal, deploys every tool in her emotional suppression arsenal—but the color in her skin is beyond her control, and we both know it.
I chuckle again, softer this time, and press a kiss to the hinge of her jaw that’s gentler than either of us probably expects.
Enough taunting.
She had a rough night.
A knife between her ribs, blood on the floor, unconscious at 3 a.m.
She deserves to feel something other than pain today.
I scoop her up.