Chapter 13 Stray Bullets
Stray Bullets
~DOMINIC~
Ipull the trigger.
The recoil travels through my wrist and up my forearm with the familiar, concussive greeting of a weapon that has been fired enough times by these hands to know the architecture of my grip—the specific pressure of my index finger against the trigger guard, the tension in my thumb along the frame, the way my palm absorbs the kickback through calluses that are as much a part of my skin as the skin itself.
The shot goes wide.
Not by inches. By a margin so generous it would be embarrassing if anyone were here to witness it and is embarrassing anyway because I am here to witness it, and I have standards, and those standards include putting rounds inside the marked zone of a moving target at twenty meters—a task I have executed with precision since I was sixteen years old and that my body should be able to perform independent of whatever emotional catastrophe my mind is currently processing.
Should.
Apparently not today.
The shooting range occupies a subterranean level beneath the eastern residential compound—a long, narrow space that the Academy constructed from reinforced concrete and soundproofing material and the particular institutional pragmatism that builds firearms practice facilities beneath living quarters because the people who live above them are expected to require both sleep and marksmanship, and the schedule for each is left to individual discretion.
The range is cold. Underground cold—the kind that seeps from concrete walls and concrete floors and the mineral-dense earth beyond both, bypassing the HVAC system’s modest attempts at temperature regulation with the patient determination of a force that was here before the building and will be here after it.
The lighting is industrial—fluorescent tubes mounted in ceiling tracks, their blue-white output converting everything in the range to a palette of gray and shadow that makes the moving targets look like ghosts performing a choreography designed by someone with a sense of humor about mortality.
The targets themselves are advanced—holographic projections overlaid on physical panels that move along ceiling-mounted tracks at randomized intervals, changing speed and direction without pattern or warning.
They’re designed to simulate the unpredictability of live combat, to train the shooter’s neural pathways to process movement and calculate trajectory and execute the shot within the fraction of a second that separates a hit from a miss.
I’m missing.
Consistently. Comprehensively. With a dedication to inaccuracy that would be impressive if it were intentional and is instead the physical manifestation of a mind that has been overloaded with information it can’t process and is expressing the overload through the deterioration of fine motor function.
I can’t focus.
The anger is through the roof. Not simmering.
Not the controlled, low-grade fury that I maintain as my operational baseline—the ambient temperature of a man whose designation runs hot and whose circumstances run hotter.
This is something else. This is a furnace with the damper removed, the heat escalating without regulation, the internal temperature climbing toward a threshold that I can feel approaching the way you feel a storm approaching—through pressure changes and atmospheric shifts and the particular, ominous quiet that precedes something destructive.
Not good.
Not good when the anger feeds the anxiety, and the anxiety feeds the panic attacks, and the panic attacks feed the spiral, and the spiral feeds the thing I don’t name because naming it gives it power.
I fire again. The target slides left at the moment of discharge, and the round punches through empty air and embeds itself in the concrete backstop with a flat, anticlimactic thwack that echoes off the reinforced walls and returns to me as a mocking reverberation of my own failure.
My fucking brother.
The thought detonates behind my eyes with the force of something that has been compressed too long in too small a space.
Damien. The name itself has become a trigger—a linguistic detonator that bypasses my rational mind and activates the fury center directly, producing a neurochemical cascade that my body interprets as an emergency and my training interprets as a threat and my Prime Alpha designation interprets as a challenge to the pack structure that it was biologically engineered to defend.
The betrayer.
Who keeps making things worse.
Who keeps finding new ways to make things worse from a distance that should make his influence negligible but doesn’t, because the damage he did wasn’t a single wound.
It was architecture. It was infrastructure.
It was a system of consequences built to generate new consequences indefinitely, like a machine designed to produce its own fuel from the wreckage of the things it destroys.
What pisses me off isn’t the sale.
I could process the sale. I could file it in the category of survival decisions—the cold, amoral calculus that people perform when their own existence is weighed against someone else’s and the scale tips in favor of self-preservation.
I would despise it. I would burn whatever remained of the fraternal bond it violated.
But I could process it, because selfishness is a human constant and human constants can be accounted for even when they can’t be forgiven.
What pisses me off is the operation.
The betrayal wasn’t impulsive. Wasn’t a desperate, last-minute decision made under pressure by a man who saw no other way out.
It was constructed. Layered. A campaign of deception built over months—possibly longer, if I’m honest with the timeline, which I’m trying to be even though honesty about the timeline means admitting that my twin was plotting my destruction while sitting across from me at dinner, while training beside me in the mornings, while occupying the other half of the bond we shared with the casual intimacy of a man who has nothing to hide.
Connections reached.
Phone calls made.
Emails sent.
Strings pulled with the precision and patience of a man weaving a web so flawless that the flies wouldn’t notice they were trapped until the silk was already around their throats.
And now it’s unraveling. Not his web—ours.
The web of lies he built is intact, functioning, continuing to produce consequences from its position of architectural superiority.
What’s unraveling is us. The pack. The three men who were left inside the structure when Damien locked the doors and walked away.
There’s no way out.
Except one.
A masquerade. Our last resort.
I fire again. Miss again. The target slides right, and the round disappears into the concrete with the particular finality of wasted ammunition and wasted effort.
What pissed me off most—
The thing that sits beneath the anger like a foundation beneath a building, bearing the weight of everything constructed above it—
Is that he lied to my face.
He sat in rooms with me. Looked at me with eyes that share my genetic code—the same aged-whiskey amber, the same bone structure, the same face that I see in mirrors and that I saw in him for thirty-five years of shared existence.
He maintained his emotional chemistry at a frequency that my Prime designation monitors instinctively—the pheromone output, the micro-expressions, the subtle fluctuations in scent and posture that reveal internal state with a reliability that most people can’t consciously control.
He controlled it.
Consciously, deliberately, with a discipline that I would admire if it hadn’t been used to dismantle my life.
He kept his pheromone output neutral. His micro-expressions calibrated.
His scent so perfectly stable that my Prime neurology—the biological surveillance system that evolution installed specifically to detect pack disturbance—registered nothing.
No deception. No stress. No deviation from the baseline that constituted normal Damien.
He fooled me.
His Prime.
His twin.
The person whose entire neurological architecture was designed to detect exactly the kind of threat he was becoming, and he slipped past every sensor without triggering a single alarm.
All for what?
What was the endgame?
Was freedom really worth his pack’s demise?
What did we do to him?
How did we offend him?
What combination of failures and oversights and unintentional wounds accumulated over thirty-five years of shared existence to produce a man who looked at his twin and decided that his twin’s death was an acceptable line item in his personal freedom budget?
I lower the weapon.
My hands are shaking. Not visibly—not the gross motor tremor that would be apparent to an observer—but at the fine motor level, the micro-vibrations in my fingers and wrists that interfere with the precise muscle control required for accurate shooting.
I notice them the way I notice all signs of deterioration in my own performance—clinically, with the detached assessment of someone monitoring a system for failures.
The Omega’s face surfaces in my mind without invitation.
Victoria. Those defiant eyes that held mine for ten minutes without blinking—storm-gray, bordered in cobalt, empty in a way that communicated fullness rather than absence.
The particular architecture of a woman who has made nothingness into a weapon so effective that it defeated a Prime Alpha’s dominance display through the radical act of providing nothing to dominate.
Those eyes.
And those lips.