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.

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

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

the least important of his sons. When he lost Victor as a support in his life,

turned on Victor

to do in Navy bootcamp, as he couldn’t access the phone – and never received any letters back. He called him, once he

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

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

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

take control, but to

college, obliged to take a pack with nothing but some historical knowledge at his fingertips? They would have

his heart,

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

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

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

Rafe’s attempted takeover of the pack is his own personal battle

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

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

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

Rafe had been as children themselves. He can’t imagine a single event

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

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