I heard him in his own unfiltered words, saying the thing I’ve been afraid to say to myself, and the gap between his private honesty and my private fear is smaller than I thought.
I set the glass on the railing and look at the water. What I’m willing to risk just changed, and the part that scares me most isn’t the risk itself but that I want to take it.
12
ADRIAN
Aurora fires six rounds at the center-mass target and hits five. The sixth clips the shoulder, which is still better than most people manage on their third day of training. She ejects the magazine, checks the chamber, and sets the Glock on the bench with the muzzle pointed downrange, exactly as I taught her forty-eight hours ago.
“Better.” I pick up the target sheet and examine the grouping. “You’re pulling left on the sixth round. That means you’re anticipating the recoil instead of letting the follow-through happen naturally.”
“I know what I’m doing wrong.” She pulls off her ear protection and hangs it on the hook beside the lane divider. “My grip loosens after five because my hand gets tired. I need to build endurance, not correct my aim.”
She’s diagnosed the problem herself before I finished identifying it. She doesn’t fumble with fear or pretend competence she doesn’t have. She asks sharp questions about mechanics,practices the answer until she owns it, and then moves to the next problem.
The training facility is a private range owned through one of my holding companies, ten minutes inland from the coastal property. Viktor cleared it for our use this week, and we’ve been here three days running. The first day was safety fundamentals, trigger discipline, sight alignment, and clearing malfunctions. The second day was marksmanship. Today is situational awareness, which means I’m teaching her to recognize threats before they become emergencies.
“If someone approaches you from behind in a confined space, what do you do?”
She thinks. “I move toward the nearest exit and put distance between us. I don’t engage unless I have no other option.”
“Good. What if the exit is blocked?”
“I use whatever’s available as a barrier and make noise. Attention is a weapon when you’re outmatched physically.” She pauses. “That’s what I did at Echelon every time a client got too aggressive. I never confronted them directly. I redirected, created space, and used the room to manage the situation.”
“You were already doing this. You just didn’t have a firearm.”
She laughs. “Not that it wasn’t tempting from time to time, but I didn’t need one at the club. I had a radio and six security staff.”
“You don’t have six security staff anymore. You have me and Viktor.” I hand her a fresh magazine. “Load and fire six more. Focus on the grip after the fourth round.”
She loads the magazine, chambers a round, and settles into her stance. I stand behind her and correct her elbow anglewith a light touch on her arm. The contact is professional, and necessary but sends a current through me that I suppress immediately because the training range isn’t the place for this, and the Glock in her hands is loaded.
She fires six more rounds. All six hit center mass. She sets down the weapon and turns to look at me with an expression that says she knows exactly what the touch on her arm did to both of us, and she’s choosing not to acknowledge it because of our task and location.
“We should go riding.” I say it to change the subject and because I made the mistake of telling Aurora they existed.
Aurora rolls her shoulders and winces. “Rain check. I’ve been using muscles I didn’t know I had for three days, and my arms feel like they belong to someone else.”
I want to offer her a massage but quell the urge. “Tomorrow?”
“If I can lift a fork by dinner, maybe.” She picks up her ear protection and walks toward the exit. “The day after tomorrow is more realistic.”
We go backto the range the next two days. Her groupings tighten each session, and by the fifth day, she’s firing controlled pairs at seven yards with a consistency that would pass a basic qualification. She doesn’t love the weapon. She respects it, which is better.
On the sixth day, we drive to the stable instead of the range.
I’ve never actually been on a horse. This is a fact I’ve managed to avoid disclosing to Aurora, Viktor, and my mother, who grew up riding in the Russian countryside and assumes her son inherited the skill through genetics. The stable owner leads out two horses, both described as gentle, and Aurora swings into the saddle with an ease that tells me she’s done this before.
“You ride?” I ask while trying to mount without looking like I’m solving a geometry problem.
She watches me struggle with the stirrup and doesn’t bother hiding her amusement. “I took lessons when I was twelve. My mother’s boyfriend number four had a friend with a ranch in Ocala.” She adjusts her reins and turns the horse with a subtle shift of her weight. “You don’t ride.”
“I ride.” I get my foot in the stirrup on the second attempt and pull myself into the saddle, which feels approximately three feet higher than it looked from the ground.
“You sit on horses. That’s different from riding them.” She brings her horse alongside mine and reaches over to adjust my grip on the reins. “Relax your hands. You’re holding them like you’re strangling someone.”
I shrug a shoulder. “Professional habit.”
