Chapter 13 Stray Bullets #3
My nostrils flare involuntarily—the Prime’s automatic threat assessment engaging the olfactory system before the conscious mind has finished processing the auditory data.
I catch the twins’ scents first—bergamot and sandalwood, bergamot and black pepper—approaching from further to my right, their pheromone signatures registering with the comfortable familiarity of pack members whose presence my neurology catalogues as safe without requiring conscious evaluation.
But there’s a third scent.
Also familiar. Newer—the olfactory equivalent of a word I’ve heard once and am struggling to recall, present in my chemical memory but not yet fully catalogued.
Wild pine. Smoke. A trace of iron that my brain associates with bladed weapons and fresh kills.
The scent carries the particular undertone of Alpha pheromones operating at a frequency that my Prime designation registers as non-standard—off-spectrum, slightly, in the way that feral-prone Alphas present when their neurological baseline has been altered by prolonged instability.
Speak of the devil.
I turn my head.
The twins are approaching from further to the side—Lucien first, Cassian half a step behind, both in their long coats with their hands positioned in the particular non-resting placement that indicates weapons are accessible but not drawn.
They’re scanning the range with the professional attention of men who have entered a space containing gunfire and are evaluating whether the gunfire constitutes threat or catharsis before committing to a behavioral response.
But the culprit of the shot is not the twins.
It’s the hawk fucker.
He stands at the adjacent lane with the casual posture of someone who materialized from empty air—which, given the silent efficiency of his entry, might be approximately what happened.
He’s holding a handgun that I didn’t hear him draw and don’t recognize from any standard manufacturer’s catalog—a golden piece with unique writing on it that appears to be in metallic red, the characters running along the slide in a script I can’t identify from this distance but that carries the aesthetic of something custom, personal, a weapon that was made for this specific hand and no other.
He lowers the gun with the measured deliberation of someone who is very aware of the impression he just made and is in no hurry to diminish it.
“If you don’t clear your mind, you’re gonna keep missing.” His voice is easy, conversational, carrying the particular brand of unsolicited advice that would be condescending from anyone else and from him reads as tactical observation delivered without social filter. “And who likes wasting targets?”
I huff.
The sound is expelled through my nostrils with enough force to communicate contempt, dismissal, and the particular variety of Alpha indignation that arises when a stranger offers marksmanship critique to a man who was hitting center mass before his brother detonated his psychological foundation.
“I don’t give a fuck how many targets I have to pay for.”
Hawk whistles. Low, appreciative, the sound of a man acknowledging wealth he doesn’t share with an amusement that doesn’t contain envy.
“Must be nice to be privileged as such.” He tilts his head, those amber-gold eyes scanning the range with an attention that I realize, belatedly, is not directed at the targets. “But when you have too many targets in the way, it makes it hard to find the enemy hiding in plain sight.”
He raises his gun.
The motion is fluid, unhurried—the weapon coming to eye level with the organic precision of a limb extending rather than a tool being deployed.
He squints. Just slightly—a micro-adjustment of his left eye that narrows his field of vision to a corridor so precise it might as well be a scope mounted on a biological platform.
He fires.
Not at a target.
The round passes the target line entirely and continues into the darkness beyond the range’s designated operational zone—past the backstop, past the mechanical housing for the target tracks, into the shadows of the facility’s service corridor where maintenance access and ventilation ducts create a negative space that I’d assessed as empty when I entered.
A grunt.
Human. Male. The involuntary vocalization of a body receiving a high-velocity impact that its owner didn’t anticipate.
The sound is followed by the heavy, graceless collapse of dead weight hitting concrete—a sound I’ve heard enough times to recognize without seeing the source and to classify immediately as terminal.
Before the body finishes falling, Hawk is already pushing me.
His hand hits my chest—flat-palmed, powerful, the force of a man whose combat reflexes operate on a frequency that doesn’t include the delay between perception and action—and drives me to the ground.
I go down. Not voluntarily—the push doesn’t offer a choice—but with the trained compliance of someone who recognizes the kinetics of a protective takedown and doesn’t resist it because resisting costs time and time is the difference between breathing and not.
Three more shots.
Rapid. Precise. The reports stack on top of each other with a rhythm that is almost musical—three notes in a sequence that Hawk’s trigger finger composes from a prone position above me, his body shielding mine with the automatic prioritization of a man who has been told to keep us alive and has apparently adopted that assignment with immediate and total commitment.
Cries of agony.
Multiple. The sounds of people who have been shot in locations that are painful but not immediately lethal—the particular quality of vocalization that distinguishes a clean kill from a strategic wound, the difference between ending a threat and neutralizing it for interrogation or for the particular brand of mercy that lets a person bleed while considering their choices.
The twins are there in a heartbeat.
Literally a heartbeat—the duration between one pulse and the next, the time it takes for trained reflexes to convert surprise into action.
They arrive at the adjacent lanes with their guns drawn, the weapons appearing in their hands with the synchronized efficiency of men who have been arming themselves in response to threat for decades and have reduced the process to a reflex that requires no more conscious thought than blinking.
They’re better snipers than close-range fighters, the twins—their preferred combat domain is blade work, the intimate, precise violence of edged weapons at conversational distance.
But beggars can’t be choosers, and at this particular moment in our collective history, we are definitively the beggars.
Hawk rises.
The motion is controlled, efficient—his body transitioning from prone to standing with a fluidity that suggests the position change costs him nothing in terms of either energy or tactical readiness.
He changes the magazine with a practiced motion that requires exactly 1.
3 seconds—I count, because counting is what my brain does when it’s processing too many variables simultaneously—and scans the kill zone with the amber-gold focus of a man conducting a damage assessment.
“They’re all dead.” His voice is calm. Not affected calm, not the performed composure that passes for steady in stressful situations.
Genuinely calm, the way a person is calm when the activity they’ve just performed is so deeply embedded in their operational repertoire that it doesn’t activate the stress response.
“Well. One’s still breathing. But he’ll bleed out before he makes it back to base. ”
The twins are at my sides.
“Are you okay?”
Lucien’s voice. Cassian’s echo. Both of them, asking the same question with the same concern, the twin frequency broadcasting alarm on a channel I receive automatically.
I nod.
Rise to my feet with them behind me—Lucien at my left, Cassian at my right, the pack reforming around its Prime with the gravitational inevitability of bodies returning to orbit after a disruption.
My suit is dusty from the concrete floor.
My pulse is elevated for reasons that have nothing to do with the panic attacks I was spiraling toward three minutes ago and everything to do with the fact that people just tried to kill me in a shooting range and the person who prevented it is currently pulling out a cigarette with the demeanor of someone whose evening plans have been mildly inconvenienced.
Hawk lights the cigarette.
The flame from a Zippo I recognize as the same battered silver piece I’ve seen in peripheral intelligence about the feral Alpha—engraved with characters in an unidentified language, dented on one corner, maintained with the kind of care that suggests sentimental value rather than material.
The smoke curls upward in the fluorescent lighting, gray against gray.
“I could be fucking my Precious right now,” he says, and the statement is delivered with the particular combination of vulgarity and tenderness that I’m beginning to recognize as his default register. “Instead I’m here, babysitting.”
He exhales. The smoke disperses against the concrete ceiling.
“The audacity.”
The three of us stare at him.
Lucien. Cassian. Me. Three Alphas who have just been saved from an assassination attempt by a man who is now smoking a cigarette and complaining about missing sex.
The cognitive dissonance is significant enough that my brain requires several additional seconds of processing time before it produces the appropriate response, which turns out to be—
“Babysitting?” we say.
Hawk blows out smoke, and his amber-gold eyes move across the three of us with the particular assessment of a man who is cataloguing what he sees and comparing it against information he’s already gathered.