"Spiral later. Learn this now." I push the Glock toward her. "Could save your life tomorrow."
"Tomorrow." She laughs, sharp and bitter. "You mean when Matthew sends more people to kill me? That tomorrow?"
"That's the one."
She closes the laptop with more force than necessary. "Fine. Teach me to take apart a gun. Why the hell not? It's been that kind of week."
Twenty minutes later,she's got the Glock in pieces across the table—slide, barrel, recoil spring, frame—and she's learning the rhythm. Remove magazine. Check chamber. Lock slide back. Push takedown lever.
Her hands are steadier than they were with the spreadsheets. Steadier than they were when she came home from confronting her mother this afternoon, shaking and pale and trying to pretend she wasn't on the verge of breaking.
I'd pulled her against my chest. Let her shake. Didn't make her talk about it until she was ready.
When she finally told me—Mother's evasions, the guilt written across her face, the non-confession that confirmed everything—I'd wanted to drive to that townhouse and make Catherine Davenport tell me the truth.
Izzy had stopped me with one sentence: "She's mine. When the time comes, I handle her."
And I'd let it go. Because she was right. Catherine Davenport chose her lover over her daughter. That's Izzy's vengeance to take. I'm just here to make sure she survives long enough to collect it.
"Like this?" Izzy holds up the reassembled Glock, checking her work.
"Pull the slide. Check the action."
She does. Smooth. No catching.
"Good. Now do it again. Faster."
She groans but starts over. Muscle memory building. The same way I taught her to shoot, to fight, to survive.
The same way I'm teaching her to be dangerous.
"Why do you do this?" she asks, hands moving through the disassembly rhythm. "Train me, I mean. You could just... protect me. Keep me in the house, hire more security, handle everything yourself."
"I could." I watch her fingers work. Confident now. "But I've seen what happens to people who depend entirely on someone else for their survival. They don't survive long once that person's gone."
Her hands still. "You're planning to be gone?"
"I'm planning for every contingency, including the one when I take a bullet and you're alone." I meet her eyes across the table. "If that happens, you need to be able to protect yourself. Protect Mila. Get somewhere safe. Not fall apart because The Wolf isn't there to do it for you."
She's quiet for a beat. Then: "That's the most depressing pep talk I've ever heard."
"It's realistic."
"It's fatalistic."
"It's what keeps people alive." I lean back, studying her. Dark hair falling out of the knot she'd twisted it into hours ago. My shirt hanging off one shoulder. Bare feet tucked under her on the chair. She looks young. Vulnerable. Nothing like the woman who confronted her potentially murderous mother this afternoon without flinching.
But she is that woman.
Both versions. Simultaneously.
And somewhere between teaching her to shoot and watching her help me hide a body, I stopped seeing her as a problem to solve and started seeing her as?—
What?
My partner. My equal. My?—
The thought cuts off when I hear footsteps on the stairs.
