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 asterminal.
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 motionthat 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 thatsuggests 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?—
