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 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

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

important of his sons. When he lost

on

do in Navy bootcamp, as he couldn’t access the phone – and

course, but as far

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

straight away, to abandon the military path. Because when their father was injured in his early twenties, it was only Victor’s precise

control, but to

out of college, obliged to take a pack with nothing but some historical knowledge at his fingertips?

in his

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

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

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

attempted takeover of the pack is his own personal battle with the past, with his losses, with his attempt

such things. While Rafe looks to the past, Victor must look to the present – his care

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

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

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

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

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