Matteo’s eyes drop to my arm. “We can stop.”
“We’re not stopping.” I roll my shoulder, shake it off. “Did I hit it?”
His smirk tells me everything.
“Not even close.”
“Damn.”
“Try again.”
We practice shooting for an hour. I pushed for two, but Matteo held firm. Now my shoulders are staging a mutiny and my wound is pulsing in time with my heartbeat, so fine. He wins this one.
Matteo pulls the paper target off the clip and holds it up. Three neat holes in the silhouette’s chest. Not center mass, not kill shots, buthits. Proof that I can do this.
“Not bad for your first time.”
“Not bad?” I grab the paper from him, running my fingers over the holes. “This is incredible. I’m basically John Wick.”
“You hit a stationary target from twenty feet. Once out of every ten shots.”
“Don’t ruin this for me.” But I’m grinning, and he’s almost-smiling, and for a moment the weight of everything lifts.
I did something. I took back a tiny piece of control. And yeah, maybe it won’t matter when Viktor comes for me again. Maybe I’ll freeze anyway, or miss, or die with a gun in my hand that I never got to fire.
But I think about every bruise he left on my skin. The look in his eyes when he pulled the trigger in my apartment.
Maybe I won’t freeze.
Maybe next time, I’ll be the one pulling the trigger first.
The bathtub in Matteo’s master bathroom is obscene.
I mean that in the best possible way. It’s enormous, sunken into the floor, clearly designed for a man his size, and I sink into the scalding water with a groan that borders on pornographic.
God.Every muscle from my fingertips to my shoulder blades is staging a revolt. The recoil felt manageable in the moment, but now? Now I understand why Matteo insisted on only one hour.
I keep my bandaged arm propped on the edge, out of the water, and let the heat work its magic. Steam rises around me, fogging the mirror, and for the first time in days I feel something close to peace.
It’s not just the hot water. It’s this place. These walls. The certainty that Viktor can’t reach me here.
I didn’t realize how exhausting fear was until I found somewhere it couldn’t follow. For months I’ve been living with a constant hum of anxiety, always watching over my shoulder, always bracing for the next text or appearance or bruise. Here, that hum goes quiet.
Matteo did that. Gave me a safe place to land.
And taught me to shoot, which is arguably more important.
I trace patterns in the bubbles, thinking about the way he looked at me when I finally hit the target. Pride. Actual pride, softening the hard lines of his face for just a moment.
He’s different than I thought he’d be. Than Iexpectedhim to be, when I agreed to this insane arrangement. I thought I was getting a business partner. A convenient protector. Instead I’m getting… something else. Something I don’t have a name for yet.
Something that scares me almost as much as Viktor does.
Except that's not true, is it?
Viktor scared me because his violence had no direction. It could come at any moment, for any reason, aimed at anyone who disappointed him. I spent months trying to predict it, to be good enough to avoid it, and it didn't matter. The cruelty was the point.
Matteo is violent, too. I've seen it. The way he moves, the coldness in his eyes when Viktor's name comes up, the absolute certainty that he's killed people and will kill again.
