CHAPTER 13
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 spacethat 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, anticlimacticthwackthat 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 couldprocessit, 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 theoperation.
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.
