His Bullet Bound Me

Chapter 2 - The Red Dot

Marcus Cross had worked enough high-risk events to know when a room was lying to him.

Aurelia University’s commencement ceremony was doing a very good job of pretending everything was fine.

Sunlight.

Music.

Graduation gowns like a sea of black waves.

And Aurora Lane—the golden girl—standing center stage, all white dress and bright smile, every camera in the amphitheater pointed straight at her.

“…we’re not here just to inherit someone else’s blueprint,” she was saying, voice warm and sharp at the same time. “We’re here to redraw the lines.”

The crowd ate it up. Students whooped. Donors nodded, pretending they understood. The press leaned forward, smelling a headline.

Marcus didn’t look at any of them for more than a heartbeat.

He scanned.

The upper balconies. The lighting rigs strung across steel scaffolding. The edges of the crowd where security got lazy. The roofline of the administration building beyond the amphitheater.

“Cross, report,” a voice crackled quietly in his ear. Dispatch. Calm. Efficient.

“Visual on principal,” Marcus murmured, keeping his lips barely moving. “Center stage. Line of sight clear from all standard angles. Crowd density medium-heavy. No unusual movement yet.”

He didn’t say what he was thinking.

Yet is doing a lot of work.

He shifted his weight, moving a half-step sideways to get a better triangulation on the stage. From here, he could see Aurora framed by banners and university insignia, the wind tugging at a loose strand of her hair.

She looked… younger than he’d expected.

Younger, and at the same time, exactly like the campaign posters—chin up, eyes bright, that defiant tilt to her mouth that said she knew she was being watched and refused to flinch.

Too exposed, he thought. Too bright. Too easy.

“This is Cross,” another voice in his comm said. Caldwell, TITAN’s on-site coordinator. “Reminder: threat profile is still elevated. We have chatter about disruption attempts, nothing confirmed. Stay sharp on the Lane girl.”

“I am sharp,” Marcus replied. “You’ll know when I’m not.”

Caldwell snorted softly in his ear. “Copy that. Still adjusting to you playing babysitter.”

“So am I,” Marcus said.

He wasn’t supposed to be here. Not originally. Two days ago, he’d been scheduled for a corporate exec’s overseas trip. Then the Aurelia intel had hit the system—threat discussions on encrypted boards, anonymous money moving in the wrong places, the words “candidate’s daughter” and “soft target” showing up too often in the same strings.

TITAN Shield moved fast when the math stopped adding up.

And now he was here, in a suit he hated, at a ceremony he would’ve skipped on principle, babysitting another rich kid who didn’t understand how quickly all of this could go bad.

Onstage, Aurora smiled, head tilting just enough to catch the light. “We’re told to sit still. To be grateful. To not make trouble. But—”

She paused.

The crowd leaned in.

“But trouble is how anything ever changes, isn’t it?”

Laughter, scattered and delighted.

Marcus’s jaw flexed.

Stop poking the hornet nest, he thought.

Hornets bite back.

He let his gaze run the perimeter again. Security at the main entrances. Metal detectors. Bag checks. Good enough to catch knives, maybe a careless handgun.

Not good enough for what he was worried about.

“You seeing this, Cross?” Caldwell’s voice again. “PR is already pushing clips of her speech live. #GoldenLane is trending.”

“I’m seeing a bullseye,” Marcus said, eyes narrowing. “And we’re painting it brighter by the second.”

“Relax. No confirmed hostiles on site. Our scanners are clean.”

Scanners. Great for amateurs.

Professionals played a different game.

Marcus tuned Caldwell out and focused on the building beyond the amphitheater.

Administration. Four stories. Flat roof. Direct line to the stage if you knew what you were doing.

“Cross?” Caldwell prompted. “You got quiet.”

“Checking high surfaces,” Marcus said.

He lifted a hand as if shading his eyes from the sun, angling his head just enough to line up the roofline with the sight of the stage.

And then he saw it.

A glint.

Small. Precise. Wrong.

Not the lazy flash of a phone screen or a watch. Something steadier. Something that didn’t move with the rhythm of the crowd, because it wasn’t in the crowd at all.

His pupils narrowed.

“Caldwell,” he said. “We have a potential optic on the admin roof. Upper northeast corner. Confirm camera or glass.”

There was a beat of silence on the line.

“Copy, Cross,” Caldwell said. “Routing Eye in the Sky.”

Marcus didn’t wait.

He shifted again, taking three slow steps toward the side of the aisle, as if trying to get a better angle on the stage. People murmured, annoyed; he ignored them.

Aurora kept talking.

“And if there’s one thing Aurelia has taught us,” she said, her voice carrying cleanly over the speakers, “it’s that silence has never protected anyone who needed it most.”

She was good. He’d give her that. Words like that made people feel brave just for listening.

Brave people did stupid things all the time.

“Eye in the Sky to Cross,” a new voice said in his ear. “We have visual. Admin roof, northeast corner. One figure prone. Long object in front. Could be media.”

“Media doesn’t lie down to shoot,” Marcus said, already moving, already doing the math. “What’s my angle?”

“Thirty degrees from your position. If it’s a lens, it’s long-range. If it’s—”

The word caught in the air.

Scope.

Marcus didn’t need to hear it. He was already there.

His focus tunneled. Not in the way rookies did, panicking, losing peripheral awareness. His sharpened. Every line, every angle, every path between that roof and the girl on the stage lit up in his head.

Wind speed. Distance. Elevation.

“Cross?” Caldwell again. “Talk to me.”

“Likely sniper,” Marcus said, voice flat. “He’s got elevation, concealment, and a direct line. We’re in the open with a static target.”

“The target is not static,” Caldwell snapped. “She’s moving, talking—”

“She’s under a spotlight on a fixed X,” Marcus said. “That’s as static as it gets.”

Onstage, Aurora shifted her weight, laughter sparking in her eyes as she leaned lightly on the podium.

“I know I’m supposed to stand here and say how grateful I am,” she said, teasing the crowd. “And I am. But I’m also tired of being told to be ‘grateful’ for rules that were designed to keep some people comfortable and everyone else quiet.”

The students roared.

The donors smiled tightly.

The figure on the roof adjusted by an inch.

Marcus saw it. Felt it.