Pregnant With Alpha’s Genius Twins

#Chapter 126 – Brother Against Brother

The forest is dark, but Victor moves through it like a predator, scenting the air, his eyes attuned to the

night. Every one of his instincts is alive, awake to every breath of wind that stirs a leaf, every animal

tread that echoes through the night.

He has been training for years for a night like this, a claim he knows Rafe cannot make.

Victor lays down in a patch of brush, his body flat against the cold snow on the forest floor. Slowly, he

props up his rifle so that he can peer through the scope. His forces are all in position, ready to take

care of Rafe’s when they come looking for him.

At this point in the game, Victor is choosing to play defense, to sit and wait for Rafe to come for him. He

knows his brother – Rafe will not have the patience to sit and wait. He will the boundaries as soon as

he gets bored.

Growing up, Victor and Rafe were very different children. Their other brother, Christopher, had been in

many ways like a father to both of them. Several years older, he had trained them, teased them,

learned how to push their buttons so that he could rile both Victor and Rafe to a temper with just a few

words.

Victor had been headstrong as a kid, quick to temper and violent in his reaction’s to Christopher’s

teasing. Rafe, had, in some ways been the opposite. He’d taken the teasing very much to heart, had

cried often, and run to their parents to tattle on Christopher for his treatment.

As the third son, Henry had dismissed Rafe’s tears and his pleas for help and attention, telling him to

toughen up and be more like his older brothers. Victor, oddly enough, had frequently come forward as

Rafe’s champion, then, defending him against Christopher’s taunts and his father’s neglect.

“That’s good,” Christopher had said to him once, when Victor lost his temper at his older brother for

pushing Rafe to tears. “You should stand up for him – that’s what I’m trying to teach you. You two need

to stick together – you’re all each other have.”

It was then that Victor had realized that Christopher wasn’t treating them poorly to be cruel; he was

teaching them to function as a team, to love and support each other beyond everything. Christopher

had known that as the eldest son his dedication had to be to the pack; but as the second and third,

Victor and Rafe had to help each other.

Everything changed when Christopher died.

Victor remembers it now, as he peers through the night scope on his rifle, looking for his baby brother

to come hunting for him in the night. Victor remembered it as the day he not only lost his favorite

brother, who cared for him so deeply, but also as the day when he took Christopher’s place as heir to

the pack.

Rafe had been horribly jealous. While he and Victor had always been a team against the world, Victor

now had to stand apart from him. His father took new interest in Victor’s future and Rafe, in many ways,

was left by the wayside.

Victor and Rafe were set to go to Harvard together, Victor one year ahead. They had made plans – big

ones – to major in the same subjects, live in the same Boston apartment, to support each other as they

figured out their lives. However, when Christopher died, Henry and Victor agreed that military

preparation would serve the pack better. They forged the paperwork that allowed Victor to join the Navy

and all of his plans with Rafe were shattered.

Rafe reacted poorly to the loss of both his brothers. He stopped attending school regularly, stopped

having any real goals. His father had to pull strings, in the end, for Rafe to attend the University of

Pennsylvania, but even that he had mostly squandered his life, hiring a variety of imposters to take his

courses for him.

All his life, Rafe had been told he was the third, the least important of his sons. When he lost Victor as

a support in his life, he started to believe it.

And he turned on Victor as well.

Victor wrote to Rafe – the only thing he was allowed to do in Navy bootcamp, as he couldn’t access the

phone – and never received any letters back. He called him, once he graduated and received his

placements, but Rafe never picked up the phone.

He got updates from their mother, of course, but as far as Rafe was concerned, Victor had abandoned

him.

In some ways, Victor considers, looking through the scope at the dark forest, he supposed he did

abandon Rafe – but he didn’t really have a choice. As soon as he became heir to the pack, the pack

became his priority, and he had work hard to catch up on lessons Christopher had been learning since

birth.

He was glad, in the end, that he hadn’t listened to Rafe’s urgings to continue with their plan to go to

college straight away, to abandon the military path. Because when their father was injured in his early

twenties, it was only Victor’s precise military training that allowed him to take firm control of the pack.

Not only take control, but to build it, make it stronger.

If he’d just been a kid, straight out of college, obliged to take a pack with nothing but some historical

knowledge at his fingertips? They would have lost everything.

Victor knows this, in his heart, but Rafe…Rafe was bitter.

And this was the result of it all. Rafe had always been the gentler brother, and had indeed indulged in

too much self-pity and profligate, indulgent behavior. But, he wasn’t stupid. It looked like their father

was the one pushing for Rafe to take over in light of Victor’s apparent weakness, but Victor knew that

this plan had Rafe written all over it.

Rafe, even so many years later, wants to prove that he was right: that it doesn’t take military training to

lead a pack, but instead intelligence, cleverness. That’s all this was, Victor knew – Rafe trying to prove

to the world – or perhaps, just to Victor – that he was right.

Victor sighs, wondering if in some way they are still the same teenage kids who found themselves

stepping into their big brothers’ shoes while they still mourned his loss. Neither of them had been ready

for it, but it’s what the universe served up on a platter.

In many ways Rafe’s attempted takeover of the pack is his own personal battle with the past, with his

losses, with his attempt to understand and assert himself.

But Victor doesn’t have time for such things. While Rafe looks to the past, Victor must look to the

present – his care for the pack today – as well as to its future.

And so, after all this, Victor finds himself laying on the forest floor, looking down the barrel of the gun,

waiting for his brother to walk into his field of sight. He grimaces, thinking of where Rafe has lead them,

but he reminds himself that this was what Rafe wanted.

Rafe chose every bit of this, and if that’s what he wants, then Victor is glad to give it to him. Pound it

into his stupid face, if he has to.

For a moment, Victor’s thoughts flick to his own children. They are close now – as close as he and

Rafe had been as children themselves. He can’t imagine a single event that could split them apart the

way that he and Rafe had been split.

Hell, Victor had taken every step he could to ensure that the pack wouldn’t give the twins any reason to

split apart. When Ian and Alvin came to their majority and inherited the pack, that they would inherit it

together, share their power. Of course, one of them was the older son, born minutes before the other.

But Victor didn’t know which one it was – had never asked – did not want to know.

In many ways, his marking of his sons as his dual heirs had been in homage to Rafe. How different the

pack would have been, their relationship would have been, how much stronger, if they had shared the

inheritance after the loss of Christopher.

But no. Instead, their father and the customs of their community had forced them apart. Victor, the

second son, had become the first. And Rafe was still the spare.

But for Alvin and Ian, it wouldn’t be the same. Nothing would tear his boys apart. Victor was determined

to see it that way.

Victor’s reverie was broken, then, by a sudden rustle of leaves several hundred yards ahead of him.

The movement was in contrast to the movement of the other trees and bushes around them, ruffled by

the soft winter breeze.

Victor locks in on the movement, peering through his night-sighted scope to see a dark figure slowly

emerge. A Beta, crouching close to the ground, looking around for signs of Victor’s own forces.

Victor’s headset buzzes. “Sir. Enemy spotted. Do you have eyes on him?”

“Affirmative,” Victor says back, his voice barely a whisper. “Let him approach further, see if he has

anyone on his tail.”

The Beta stalks slowly forward about fifty yards and, seeing nothing, waves behind him. Two more of

Rafe’s Betas follow behind him. They’re moving in a V-pattern.

The same V-pattern Victor had taught Rafe during summers when Rafe would come to train at his Beta

camp. Rafe may have bested him at chess, but in military maneuvers?

Victor taught Rafe everything he knew.

Rafe’s three Betas take a few more hesitant steps forward and Victor’s finger moves to the trigger of

his rifle.

“On my count,” he whispers into his headset.

“One, two…”