Chapter 13 Stray Bullets #4
“Yeah.” He takes another drag, lets the smoke settle in his lungs for a beat longer than necessary, then releases it in a slow stream aimed at the ceiling. “I decided to do a check on y’all’s bounties. On my Precious’s request.”
He whistles. The sound is long, low, carrying the particular note of someone who has encountered data that exceeds their expectations in a direction they find both alarming and entertaining.
“Damn. Y’all’s pack brother really hates y’all, huh.
” He tilts his head, the cigarette between his lips, and the question that follows carries genuine curiosity beneath the casual delivery.
“Did you mix him up at birth? Was he gay and couldn’t come out of the closet?
Why the hell did he set you guys up like that? ”
He takes the cigarette from his lips and points it at us—the ember glowing like a small, accusatory star.
“Cause I’m guaranteeing y’all aren’t going to last by sunrise tomorrow with how high the stakes are.”
The guarantee lands in the fluorescent silence with the weight of a verdict.
I meet his amber-gold eyes with my aged-whiskey ones and find no deception there—no manipulation, no strategic deployment of fear.
Just the unvarnished assessment of a man who has looked at the numbers and doesn’t like what they add up to.
“And how are you going to help us with that?” I ask.
My voice comes out steadier than I expect—the Prime register reasserting itself, the authority recalibrating after the disruption. The question is genuine. Not confrontational. The genuine inquiry of a man who has just been saved by someone whose motivation for saving him is unclear.
Hawk shrugs.
The gesture is full-bodied, unhurried—the rolling lift and drop of shoulders that communicates the particular brand of flexible commitment that I’m beginning to understand is his operational philosophy.
“Well.” He takes another drag. Considers the smoke. Considers us. “I can either continue bodyguarding y’all, or I can just focus on Victoria and let y’all die.”
The options are presented with the casual equivalence of a waiter describing specials.
“But I think that would upset her. A tad.” The understatement is delivered with a smirk that suggests he knows exactly how much it would upset her and the answer is significantly more than a tad. “Since this masquerade would get her out of this hellhole. And frankly—”
His voice shifts. The casual register drops by a degree, replaced by something that sounds dangerously close to sincerity.
“After all her sacrifices. Matched with her sheer talent. She deserves to dance on a stage and be appreciated by the world.” He looks at the cigarette as though it contains the relevant data. “Not this luxury cage of rich fuckers.”
We share a look.
The three of us—Prime and twins, the remaining pack, the men whose collective survival has just been added to the operational responsibilities of a feral Alpha who would clearly prefer to be elsewhere doing things I’d rather not visualize—exchange a microsecond assessment that produces a consensus without requiring verbal negotiation.
He means it.
The vulgar, cigarette-smoking, romance-novel-reading feral means every word.
He’s not protecting us for our sake.
He’s protecting us because we’re the mechanism that gets her out.
And that—paradoxically—makes him the most trustworthy person we’ve encountered since Damien left.
Lucien speaks first. As always.
“Well then. What are we going to do now? Stick together?”
The question is lighter than its content—Lucien’s particular gift for making consequential inquiries sound like casual suggestions.
“We could,” Hawk begins, and I detect the beginning of a logistical proposition forming behind his amber eyes—a plan, or the framework of one, the operational thinking of a man who has apparently been doing reconnaissance while we were shooting at walls and smoking cigarettes and walking through the cold discussing an Omega’s physical attributes. “But I have to go check on—”
His phone goes off.
The sound cuts through the shooting range’s concrete acoustics like a blade—high-pitched, urgent, a tone that doesn’t resemble any standard notification I’ve heard.
Not a ring. Not a chime. A beep—sharp, repetitive, the sonic profile of an alert system designed to communicate emergency rather than convenience.
Hawk’s demeanor changes.
Instantly. Completely. The transformation is so total that for a fraction of a second I’m watching a different person—the casual, cigarette-smoking bodyguard replaced by something harder, faster, more dangerous.
The amusement drains from his face. The smirk vanishes.
His amber-gold eyes narrow with a focus so intense it makes the marksmanship he demonstrated moments ago look recreational by comparison.
He pulls out his phone and looks at the screen.
I can’t help but look.
The screen displays a map—a schematic that I recognize as a layout of Savage Knot’s sector, rendered in dark tones with navigational markers overlaid in color.
A purple dot pulses at the center of the display—not a standard location marker but a symbol: a crown with a rose beneath it, rendered in violet that blinks with the rhythmic urgency of a heartbeat.
The symbol is moving. Slowly. And converging on its position from multiple directions are ten red dots, each one advancing with the deliberate pace of objects that know where their target is and are closing in.
The crown.
The rose.
Victoria.
Hawk curses.
The word is short, sharp, and carries none of the casual profanity he deployed during our conversation. This is the real thing—the involuntary vocalization of a man whose worst-case scenario has just appeared on a screen and is blinking at him with the patient urgency of a countdown.
“How fast can y’all run?”
The twins are opening their mouths to answer—
But Hawk is already gone.
The cigarette hits the concrete floor. His weapon clears the holster in a motion so fast it registers as a blur.
The magazine change happens mid-stride—the spent clip ejecting, the fresh one slamming home, the slide racking with a metallic finality that punctuates his first step toward the range’s exit like a starting gun.
He moves with a speed that doesn’t belong to a man his size—six-three of scarred muscle and feral Alpha neurology accelerating through the concrete corridor with the particular urgency of a person who has been separated from the thing that keeps him alive and has just been told that the distance is being filled with threats.
We don’t need to know where he’s going.
A feral Alpha running like his life depends on it means one thing.
His precious maiden is in trouble.