Chapter 13 Stray Bullets #2
The thought arrives without authorization from the part of my brain responsible for appropriate cognitive content during target practice in a subterranean shooting range while processing a fraternal betrayal.
Her lips. The shape of them—full, defined, set in that flat line that communicated nothing and made me want to see what they’d communicate if they were set in something else.
Something less controlled. Something that involved my name and sounds that hadn’t been filtered through the void’s emotional embargo.
Fuckable.
I’d dare say it.
How I wanted her on her knees. Those lips wrapped around—
Instead of opening to defy me.
Fuck.
I raise the weapon and fire. The shot goes wide—not just missing the target but missing the lane, the round embedding itself in the concrete wall three feet to the left of the track system with a report that echoes off every surface and returns to me multiplied, mocking, a percussive reminder that my focus is so thoroughly compromised that I’m now a danger to the infrastructure rather than the targets.
“Fuck.”
The curse leaves my mouth with enough force to qualify as its own form of ammunition.
I lower the weapon again, my jaw clenched hard enough to make the muscles in my temples pulse, and I stare at the moving targets that continue their randomized paths with the cheerful indifference of objects that exist to be shot and don’t care whether you’re emotionally equipped to shoot them.
She danced so effortlessly.
The memory is intrusive—rising through the anger and the betrayal and the sexual frustration with the particular persistence of something that has decided it belongs in my conscious awareness and will not be dismissed.
The auditorium. The stage. The thin columns of light turning dust to gold around a body that moved like it had been designed for the specific purpose of translating sound into motion and had never been given any other assignment.
A fragile swan of beauty and grace.
Now how the fuck is she going to dress up and basically be me?
The absurdity of the task lands in my chest with the weight of a joke that isn’t funny.
The file on Violet’s desk. The photograph.
The identity she’s being asked to assume for the duration of the masquerade—my brother’s face, my brother’s presence, the particular performance of being Damien Virelli that Violet’s plan apparently requires and that this woman—this five-foot-nine Omega with the ballet shoes and the brass knuckles and the body that was built for entirely different purposes—is supposed to execute convincingly enough to fool whoever is responsible for verifying identities at a masquerade ball.
A boy.
A man.
Who’s supposed to look like me.
It probably won’t be that simple.
Because masquerades aren’t simply rich people in ball gowns and masks.
I know this the way I know most things about the upper echelons of the world we were born into and ejected from—through education, through observation, through the particular variety of insider knowledge that comes from having lived in the machine before the machine decided to process you as raw material rather than personnel.
There are layers. Hidden layers. Floors beneath floors, rooms behind rooms, challenges and trials that are cued by the music and embedded in the architecture and concealed in the shadows of an environment specifically designed to be beautiful on the surface and lethal underneath.
A masquerade at this level is not an event.
It’s a gauntlet. A curated sequence of tests disguised as entertainment, administered to the attendees by organizers whose investment in the outcome is measured in power rather than profit.
There’s no time to think anything through.
You have to go with the flow.
And hope that fate is on your side.
Or money.
We have neither in reliable supply.
I work on reloading. The mechanical process—magazine release, extraction, fresh magazine insertion, chamber check—operates on muscle memory that doesn’t require the cognitive resources my emotional state has commandeered.
My hands perform the sequence while my mind continues its spiral, each revolution tightening the circumference, each loop bringing me closer to the center of a vortex I can feel but can’t see.
I take a deep breath.
The air fills my lungs with the cold, mineral-tinged atmosphere of the underground range—concrete dust and gun oil and the spent-brass scent of discharged ammunition that has accumulated in the ventilation system and become part of the facility’s permanent olfactory profile.
The breath is supposed to calm my heart.
It doesn’t. My pulse continues its elevated rhythm—a rate that I recognize as the precursor to the specific physiological cascade that my body has been producing with increasing frequency over the past several months.
Anxiety.
Panic attacks.
The mental spiraling that feeds on itself, each revolution generating the fuel for the next.
None of it fits me.
A Prime Alpha does not have panic attacks.
A Virelli does not spiral.
And yet here I am, reloading a weapon in a concrete hole beneath a building I don’t own, trying to breathe past a heart rate that my designation interprets not as anxiety but as proximity to something worse.
The feral state.
I frown at the thought—the expression involuntary, the facial muscles contracting around an idea that I keep at arm’s length the way you keep a loaded weapon pointed at something you’re not prepared to shoot.
The feral state. The final deterioration of Alpha neurology that occurs when the designation’s requirements—pack stability, bonded connection, the particular neurochemical equilibrium that an Omega’s presence maintains—go unmet for too long.
The progressive erosion of rational function.
The simplification of the cognitive architecture from complex to binary, from nuanced to primitive, from the mind of a man who plans and calculates and considers consequences to the mind of something that only wants two things.
Fuck.
And kill.
That’s what the feral state reduces you to.
A creature operating on the two most basic Alpha imperatives, stripped of everything that makes those imperatives manageable.
I’m inching toward the mark.
I can feel it—the way the edges of my rational thought are starting to fray, the way the anger is becoming less about Damien and more about everything, the way the aggression is becoming less targeted and more ambient.
I’ll probably die before reaching that extent.
Put a bullet to my own head.
The thought arrives with the particular, seductive clarity of an idea that has been considering itself in the background for longer than I’d like to acknowledge.
Clean. Simple. A single decision that resolves every equation simultaneously—the bounty, the betrayal, the masquerade, the Omega with the empty eyes, the pack that depends on a Prime whose Prime function is deteriorating in real time.
Inviting.
But—
I’d rather die trying to fight this end than do it by my own hands.
Unless it’s my last resort.
And I’m not there yet.
Not yet.
I raise the weapon. Steady my aim. Engage the target tracking that my training installed and that my current mental state is doing its best to corrupt.
The target slides right. I adjust. Lead the movement.
Calculate the trajectory with the fragment of cognitive function that isn’t consumed by the spiral.
We’re going to have to talk to this girl and her pet Alpha.
The thought intrudes on my aiming with the particular timing of a mind that refuses to compartmentalize when compartmentalization is the only thing that might produce a clean shot.
The feral Alpha. Hawk. The man who stood beside her in Violet’s office and announced his love for her with the casual specificity of someone reading weather conditions—factual, inevitable, not up for discussion.
The idea of him being feral intrigues me.
Especially with how surprisingly tame he was at her side.
A feral-prone Alpha operating at the level of social functionality he demonstrated in that meeting suggests one of two things: either his feral state is less advanced than his designation implies, or the woman beside him is exerting a stabilizing influence so profound that it overrides the neurological deterioration that feral-prone Alphas experience in the absence of a bonded Omega.
Given that they’re unbonded—
The second option is the more interesting one.
And the more concerning.
Because if she can stabilize a feral without a bond, what does that say about what she’d be capable of with one?
A duo deal. Like he’s so precious to her. Like the feral Alpha is the center of her operational universe and everyone else—including the three men whose freedom depends on her willingness to bond with them—are peripheral. Supplementary. Optional.
It irks me.
More than it should.
The Prime in me doesn’t accept secondary status.
If she’s going to be my Omega—our Omega—then I should be the center of her world.
Not second.
Not fucking second to a man whose qualification for the position is that he loves her hard enough to keep his own sanity intact.
I grit my teeth. Align the sights on the next target. The panel slides into position, and I prepare to fire—
A gunshot rings off.
Not mine.
The report is different—sharper, tighter, produced by a weapon with a different barrel length and a different caliber than the handgun currently lowering in my grip.
The round hits the target I was aiming at dead center—a perfect bullseye that punches through the holographic overlay and embeds in the physical panel behind it with a precision so clean it would be beautiful if it weren’t also a demonstration of superiority.
I frown.