Read Fire Hawk for Free Online

is . . . important to my people.”
    “You were to use it, I presume?”
    Jenna blinked. “Use it? For what?”
    Kane shrugged. “To kill me, of course.”

Chapter 3
    “KILL YOU?”
    Her startled exclamation seemed genuine.
    Or perhaps, Kane thought, she was simply very good at playing her part. She certainly wouldn’t be the first woman to be very good at such things. Nor the last. He’d met a few, in his other life. And he doubted that much had changed since he’d last dealt with women.
    “That is why you’re here, is it not?”
    She sat down at last, on the log beside the stones ringing the outer fire. He saw her tremble, whether from fear or weakness from her injuries, he didn’t know. She stared up at him.
    “By the heavens, why would you think that?”
    He shrugged negligently. “ ’Tis the usual reason people look for me.”
    “I’m surprised anyone would have the courage to even try to kill Kane the Warrior.”
    “No one has, since I’ve been here.” He eyed her coldly. “No one has made it this far.”
    Her effort to divert him from that subject was immediate. “Have you made so very many enemies, then?”
    He felt the old weariness begin to steal over him, the lassitude that had so often tempted him to offer himself up for the killing, just to be done with it. A simple walk out of these mountains, a calling in of the promise that should he leave them, he would cease to be, had never seemed more tempting than at this moment. He resisted the urge to do it right now, to turn and walk away, and never come back to this place that had become his only haven.
    “ ’Tis all I have made in my life,” he murmured.
    He shook his head, trying to fend off the ugly feeling. He found the woman called Jenna watching him, her eyes so wide and vividly blue it put him in mind of the mountain sky in summer just before dusk, when it darkened to a blue never seen in any other place. Until now.
    There was something in those eyes that made him uneasy, some trace of something soft and warm, something that was somehow threatening to him. More threatening perhaps, than even the razor-sharp blade she had carried.
    “I have no wish to kill you,” she said quietly. “Quite the opposite.”
    He went still, every warning instinct he possessed clamoring to life. He’d learned long ago that people who approached him voluntarily, if they did not have his death in mind, had only one other reason.
    They wanted him to bring death to someone else.
    As swiftly as a hawk’s strike, he felt the coldness sweep through him. The icy calm, the assessing aloofness that he’d thought himself done with forever. It was so very strange, he thought, this being able to look at himself as if from a distance, to analyze, to poke at what should be painful and feel nothing.
    He’d been here in this place for years, trying to rid himself of this, of this coldness that separated him from others, that enabled him to look at them with such dispassionate calculation. Were they to be asset or hindrance? Would they help him achieve his goal, and thus deserve to live, or would they be in his way, to be killed and tossed aside without a second thought? For a lifetime that had been his credo, the principle by which he’d lived, driven into his very soul by the man who had perfected it.
    For years now he’d hidden out here in these mountains, searching for a healing. And now this red-haired, wide-eyed woman had, in the space of a moment, shown him there was no healing for the likes of him. With a single utterance she had reduced his hopes, his conviction that he had, indeed, come a long way from that vicious, brutal man, into dust.
    He was Kane, and so would he ever be.
    He turned his back on her and walked into the woods, knowing even the warmth of the morning sun was not enough to save him from this chill.
    JENNA SAT ON the log, shivering. It wasn’t cold, here in the sunlight, yet she shook as if she sat atop Snowcap.
    There was a coarse