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 thelane, 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 beshot 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 havinglived 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.
