“Do you know if Tamryn is here? Or will be here?” I asked. “Or could be?”
“She could be,” Milli said. “She’s on Giovanni’s approved list of visitors. Would you like me to arrange for her to visit?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m hoping she can help me be … less useless. I’m hoping you can help me too.”
A smile curved across his face. “I’d love the opportunity.”
“Do you think Gio will let me?” I said.
Milli stood up, shrugging as he moved. “I’m not sure, but…” He looked down at me. “What happened to the woman who didn’t need to ask his permission?”
Something about that bubbled confidence into me. He was right. I was my own woman. Even if I was still hurt, it didn’t mean I couldn’t start learning about ways to protect and defend myself better. I’d told Gio before I got shot that I intended to stay and work off my father’s debt. I was never going to be able to do that if I was just some houseguest that Gio fooled around with from time to time. I wanted to be useful to him.
I wanted him to have a legitimate reason to keep me around.
Exactly as he said he would, Milli called Tamryn to come and visit me and she showed up bright and early the next day. She immediately accepted my request to train and learn how to officially take control. In a very mom fashion, she was being sure not to do anything that would exacerbate my wound, but she was also being very tough. In my mind, I’d developed an idea that I was going to be firing a white Baretta at targets that magically appeared because we needed them there.
Instead, Tamryn had me throwing rocks at soda cans in the beautiful courtyard outside. I knew that it wasn’t how people learned how to use guns, but she said she wasn’t teaching me how to use guns, she was teaching me how to aim.
“Aiming is more universally applicable, Avion. A woman who can shoot a gun, can only shoot a gun. A woman who can aim can shoot anything.”
She was the master to my pupil, so I was beholden to what she had in mind for my training. Maybe it was just to lay me over until I wasn’t so injured, but in a couple days time I was at least marginally better at hitting cans with rocks.
And I could toss trash into my garbage can from just about anywhere too.
Milli, a man who could smell an unsatisfied person from a mile away, sensed that my training was going slow with Tamryn and offered to supplement. To my surprise, he was actually being as careful with my injury as Tamryn was, but he was letting me have a little more fun. Though I didn’t know it, the thing that Milli was best at was stealth. Not just being stealthy, but uncovering others who are being stealthy themselves.
“Everyone thinks that being stealthy is about knowing how to sneak from place to place, or being able to identify where you can best hide yourself, and sometimes that’s it, but the things it’s most about.” Milli pushed aside his dreadlocks and tapped his ear gently. “Is listening.”
The new grounds were built near the woods so Milli took me out to a safe place that had been carved out for new grunts to be trained. It wasn’t just about hearinganythingbecause there were a lot of sounds out in the forest, it was about hearing the thing I needed to hear. Milli and I took turns hiding and seeking, relying solely on what we could hear to seek the other out.
At first, it was one of the most difficult things I’d ever done. I considered myself an observant person--chasing a political deviant around half a thousand parties over the course of a couple of years makes you attune your ability to see the unseen--but trying to find Milli in a thickened forest while he was deliberately trying to be quiet, that was a whole new ballpark. He could remain totally silent for a half-hour or more, all while moving around from tree to tree without issue. I could be staring right at the tree he was supposed to be standing behind, not see him go in any direction, not hear a single thing apart from critters scampering through the brush, and then suddenly he’d be sneaking up behind me.
The whole first two days we did it, I had no success, but on the third day, I had a breakthrough. It was faint, and I nearly wrote it off as a squirrel, but I heard something skitter past me, though it was moving too slow to be a creature and too fast to be a human moving casually. It was a human moving with purpose--like someone trying to get away.
I lifted a rock from the ground, channeling what Tamryn had taught me and I chucked it between a couple of trees. There wasn’t anything there when I threw it, but Milli stepped out just as the rock reached the space between the trees, and he just barely managed to pull his head backwards away from the projectile before it hit him. He looked over at me with a lifted eyebrow and smiled.
I was finally getting it.
The last of my teachers took a frustrating amount of convincing.
“No, Avion,” Gio said. “It’s fine. You don’t need to exert yourself. You’re supposed to be healing, not training.”
“I don’t want to be useless,” I retorted. “Between training with Tamryn and Milli, I’ve been taking it easy.” I lifted my shirt and turned my back towards Gio. “See, look. My wound is healing really well.”
“That doesn’t mean we can get lazy. I’ve been shot before. The second you stop paying attention to it and assume it’s healed, you get sloppy, and it can open up again. We just have to make sure we’re being diligent. It doesn’t take a whole lot to strain it. They only heal on the outside this fast. You could end up with internal bleeding. Just because you can’t see it doesn’t mean it’s not there.”
“I’m very aware of that, Dr. Giovanni,” I joked. “Tamryn and Milli have both been training me in ways that are safe. We could do the same thing.”
Gio was sitting at his desk pouring over papers as I spoke. “I don’t think I do anything particularly safe.”
I stood up and walked around to lean against his desk right near where he was sitting. “I don’t know. You’ve always been pretty safe with me.” The sting of Gio rejecting me when we first moved from the hospital home was still fresh. It might have just been my pessimistic mind, but it felt like he began avoiding me after that and I wasn’t sure why--or I thought I had a pretty good idea of why but I didn’t want to acknowledge it. “We have a safe word.”
That made Gio turn and look up at me, and I saw the desire behind his eyes, but he quickly looked away, even sliding a little further from me. “This is different.”
“Is it?” I asked.
“Yes. This is about making sure you’re fully healed. We can’t be reckless. The last time I got reckless, your brothers got the upper hand on me and snatched you through a window. We can’t let those sorts of mistakes happen again.”
