Page 12 of Hawk's Secret
He went quiet. The worst kind of quiet. The kind that comes from a man who is holding an explosion inside his chest with both hands and won't let it detonate because if he does he doesn't know what he'll destroy.
He sat up. Swung his legs off the bed. Pulled on his jeans, his shirt, his boots. Every movement slow, deliberate, mechanical, the movements of a man who has left his body and is operating on muscle memory because whatever is happening inside him is too big to process.
He stood. Walked to the door. Put his hand on the handle.
He didn't look back, not once.
The door closed behind him. Quiet. The click of the latch, soft, final, the loudest sound I'd ever heard.
I lay there. In his bed. The sheets still warm where his body had been. The room still smelled of him, of us, of sex and sweat and everything we'd just given each other. I could still feel him inside me, the ghost of him, the ache of his absence already filling the space where his warmth had been.
I pulled the sheet up to my chin. Pressed my face into his pillow.
I'd just done the bravest thing I'd ever done. The most destructive and the only right thing I'd done in months.
And it was going to cost me everything.
SIX
HAWK
The compound was dark. I was pacing but the rage was so big I couldn't see around it.
She lied. She used Lena to get in. I vouched for her, brought her inside the walls. I’d helped put her behind the bar, given her access to the men I'd kill for, the men I'd die for, and the brotherhood I’d bled with. I brought her inside and she was feeding our enemies the whole time. Every smile. Every drink she poured. Every night she lay in my bed with her head on my chest and her fingers tracing patterns on my skin, she was taking what I gave her and handing it to a Jackals prospect in a car park.
I wanted to break something. I wanted to ride until the engine gave out. I wanted to go back to that room and shake her until she took it back, until she told me it wasn't true, until the last twenty minutes rewound themselves, and I was still lying in bed with the woman I loved and the world still made sense.
I walked. Boots on gravel, on dirt, on the hard-packed earth between the lodge and the workshop. My hands were shaking. My jaw was clenched so tight my teeth ached. The night air was cold against my skin, and I couldn't feel it.
But underneath the fury, the enforcer was already working. The part of me that processed, that replayed, that took information apart and looked at what was underneath.
The sex tape. Filmed without her consent. Tyler, who'd filmed them while she was too drunk to notice, who'd shared the footage with other men for laughs. Colt, his friend, a Jackals prospect, who'd recognised Bree and seen an opportunity. Both of them climbing the ladder on the back of her humiliation. Not a club operation. Two pieces of shit freelancing on a woman's body.
The bruises. The long sleeves.
The bruises I'd seen and not realised they were anything I should be worried about.
I stopped walking. Stood in the dark behind the workshop with my hands braced on the wall and my head down and let the fury shift. It didn't go away. The betrayal was still there, still burning, a wound I could feel in every part of my body. But it redirected. Because underneath the lie, underneath all of it, was a woman who'd been filmed at her most vulnerable without her consent, and had the footage weaponised by two men who saw her as currency. Who had then been physically brutalised into compliance.
And I'd missed it. The enforcer. The man whose job it was to see threats. I was sleeping next to her, and I didn't see it.
I didn't sleep. Instead, I sat in the workshop until the sky turned grey behind the mountains, my hands still, my brain running through everything she'd told me, pulling it apart, putting it back together. By the time the light came through the windows I knew exactly what needed to happen.
I went to Angel at first light. He was in the kitchen, coffee in hand, Callie still upstairs. One look at my face and he put the mug down.
I told him. All of it. His expression didn't change while I talked, which meant it was bad, because Angel's face only went that still when the rage was too big for the muscles to hold. When I finished, the silence sat between us for a long time.
"Church," he said. "This morning. I'll get them in."
By nine the brothers were at the table. I stood at my spot, at Angel's left, and laid it out. The tape, the prospect, the hang-around, the blackmail, the bruises.
The reactions were what I expected. Duke's fist hit the table. Doc went quiet in a way that was worse than shouting. Rook was already thinking, already planning, his eyes moving while the rest of him stayed still. Razor's jaw tightened. Priest closed his eyes.
Ghost looked at me. Just looked, those pale eyes seeing everything I wasn't saying. The guilt, the fury, the fact that I was in love with the woman who'd betrayed us and that didn't change anything about what needed to happen next.
"Two things," Angel said. "The prospect and the hang-around pay. And the Jackals' leadership gets brought into this." He looked at me. "Hawk. This is yours."
I foundColt at a bar outside Billings. A Jackals hangout, low-end, a place that smelled like piss and stale beer. He was at the pool table with Tyler, the two of them laughing about something, drinks in hand, not a care in the world. Two men who'd built their ambitions on a woman's body and thought they'd gotten away with it.
