Page 173 of Cold-Blooded Creatures

“It’s all about your reaction speed. Not so much how fast you can reload and get the safety off, but how to instantly differentiate between friendly and enemy forces that forced you to pick up the gun in the first place. If you are not careful enough, you could shoot someone you’d wish you had not.” I handed her the gun.

“Have you?” she asked, repeating the steps I had just demonstrated.

“Killed? No. Hurt? Yes. We both have.” I fixed her stance and pointed out a dummy about thirty yards away. “Try to hit it.”

“Both?” She stuck her tongue out in concentration and pulled the trigger five times, not a single bullet reaching its goal. “Damn it.”

“Oh, come on. We were teenagers. And they barely got grazed,” Zion muttered, his hands hooked behind his head and his legs propped up on a stool as he sat in the corner of our booth. “Don’t scare her away from shooting your head off.”

I rummaged in the crate underneath the table for another crate of bullets. Making the deal with her to teach her how to use another firearm in exchange for taking a day off from training had been the only convincing enough option for her.

“What did you do?” Kali reloaded the handgun with the new magazine.

“One night, we stupidly decided to practice in the street instead of the dedicated areas,” I confessed. “People heard the shots and ran out to see what was going on. Three of them leaped out of the street corner right as we pulled the triggers. Thankfully, their reactions were quicker than ours.”

After another failed attempt to hit the target, she clicked the safety back on and slammed the gun on the table. Her shoulders rose as she took a deep breath. “When are we taking over Ilasall?”

“Not right now. You know we are not ready.” And she herself was far away from it.

She turned away from the table, our lesson forgotten. “I can’t just sit and wait.”

I stepped into her space and gripped her nape. Firm, but not quite compressing. My thumb brushed where the bruises had been on her neck, and she flinched.

“How do you plan to fight if you don’t know how to deal with your own experiences, your memories?” My words and tone were harsh, but so were battles. There was no beauty in seeing your friends die, your loved ones tortured in front of you. Held hostage. Stolen. Murdered.

“The same way you do.” She brought my palm to fully encompass her throat. “By pushing through it.”

“Do you really want to end up like me?” I tightened my hold. “Because I’m not a good person, Kali. Or is that something you find admirable?”

“I’ve never been good. You know what I’ve done. I’ve survived much worse than this.” She tipped her head back—an offering—but her smile didn’t reach her eyes. “You can’t break what’s already broken.”

“You’re not broken. Not yet.” I moved her dark hair to frame her face, leaving part of it flowing down her back, and retreated. “But war will do it for you.” The sunset behind her back painted the sky and feather clouds in streaks of blue and purple. The colors of bruises. “Destroy what is left.”

“But it’smychoice. You can’t take it away from me.” She leveled her gaze on me, clutching the edges of the battered table littered with firearms. “Time won’t change my mind, Gedeon. I’m going to war one way or another. With or without you.” Pushing off, she paused at the edge of the booth, her sigh full of resignation. “I just wish I wouldn’t have to do it alone.” She stormed off to the alley leading to the center of our compound and vanished behind a brick building.

Alone. Those five letters crushed my ribs and ground the bones into dust, precisely how a corpse disintegrated into nothing over time.

For twelve years, I’d done things by myself. I knew how it felt to be by yourself. To work, to smile, to laugh, to live with no one at your side. It was like playing a game of pretend happiness.

Hearing her say she would enter a match in such a game because we couldn’t agree on the timeline of war, it made my fingers tingle with the need to empty a magazine after a magazine into the targets, imagining they were Ilasall’s government and military and not dummies sculpted out of wood. I wanted her to feel free, not unseen and unheard.

Zion gracefully leaped off from his seat in the corner. “You know my stance on this,” he said, and strode after her, leaving me…alone.

55

GEDEON

Kali came out of the bathroom dressed in the black uniform t-shirt with Vice embroidered in white thread above her chest, hugged Jayla and Tarri, and strolled to the closest customer table, her greeting to them overpowered by the heavy beat of Jayla’s choice of music.

“I don’t like having her exposed,” Zion muttered from beside me in the corner booth.

“Me neither. But it was either this, or her tearing her muscles.”

We had made an agreement, or adeal, as she viewed them. We relented in having her return to work—an uncontrolled environment—but for each night she worked at the bar, she would take a rest day between the training sessions. Because if she did not slow down, her stubbornness was going to lead her to burn out. It was inevitable.

I placed my empty glass on the ragged table, the wooden surface bearing three stains of questionable origins and impossible-to-wipe-off condensation rings. “Do we know anything about who the rat could be?”

The messenger who had attacked Kali knew things the city should not have been aware of. Someone had filled them in onher history with Alora and her fertility status, the way she had tricked the system. And the only people who knew about that were our own.