Total pages in book: 74
Estimated words: 70320 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 352(@200wpm)___ 281(@250wpm)___ 234(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 70320 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 352(@200wpm)___ 281(@250wpm)___ 234(@300wpm)
“You don’t know enough to be a problem yet, but you will soon. If we keep going, we won’t be able to turn back. I want to give you the choice I was never given.” He stares at me hard and my pulse races. I understand this is important, but how important I can’t guess. What does it mean to turn back now? What it would mean for myself, for what I want? For the person I want to be?
I look at my hands. Soft hands, gentle hands. “Do you remember what I said last night, about teaching me?”
“I remember.”
“I meant it.” I look up at him and curl my fingers into fists. “No more being a victim.”
“You want to be hard, princess?”
“Don’t call me princess.”
“All right. You want to be tough, little killer?”
“I want to be able to take care of myself. I want to make sure that if someone’s going to try to hurt me, I can make it very, very painful for them.”
“I can teach you that,” he says and doesn’t smile. “But it won’t feel good. I promise, whatever you think you’ll find, it’s not at the long end of a bloody fight. There’s only pain after.”
“That’s for me to find out.”
He grunts. “If that’s what you want.” He turns away. “We’ll leave for Crete in a few hours. Let’s go back to the apartment and pack our things.”
I follow him wordlessly and feel like I’m slipping through a veil from one side of the line to the other with no way to cross back over.
Chapter 9
Adrienne
“Deep breath,” Peter says and stands with his hands on my hips. “Aim down the sights. Good. Now squeeze as you exhale.”
I do what he says. My breath releases from between my lips and I pull the trigger until the gun goes off with a crack. The glass bottle ten feet away remains unmoved. I have no clue where the bullet ended up—I could’ve sworn I had the sights right on the bottle, but I totally missed.
“Shit!” I clench my jaw and adjust my aim. “Motherfucker!”
“Stop tensing,” he says, fingers digging into my hips. “Your elbow and right arm control the recoil. Stop squinting right before it fires. The gun will be loud but it’s only noise. You can handle it.”
I shoot again and again and again until finally, I hit the bottle. It shatters in a spray of glass and I hoot and laugh, waving the gun in the air, but Peter curses and wrenches the weapon from my hand.
“Damn it, Adrienne,” he says, glaring at me. “This is a loaded weapon. I understand that we’re criminals, but that doesn’t mean we have to be fucking stupid and get ourselves killed fucking around. You never, ever aim your weapon at something you don’t plan on shooting, do you understand me? If you draw this gun, it’s because you plan on using it.”
“Right, sorry. Gun safety is important.” I’m still grinning though. I hit that stupid bottle and he can’t take that away from me.
He sighs, hands the weapon back, and we continue the lesson. A couple hours drag past and I manage to get pretty accurate to the point where we run out of bottles and have start using a target he tacks up with a nail. We’re deep in the rural wilds of Crete away from the city but not too far from Peter’s country house by the ocean. I do my best to take in everything he’s telling me, from how to aim to how to draw the gun and where to keep it on my person. There’s a lot of gun lore I need to learn, but I soak it all up, greedy to learn how to protect myself.
This is the sort of stuff I wish my criminal mother had taught me instead of how to braid my hair and count to ten. Well, maybe counting is good, but still.
I remember what it felt like back in that Russian’s house when Kacia and I escaped from the basement. We crawled up to the first-floor landing despite the sound of gunfire going off down the hallway. We didn’t know that was her man, Luca, coming to our rescue at the time—all we knew was we were prisoners and if we didn’t escape, we were going to die. It was pure desperation. When we stepped out of the basement and saw a bunch of Russian gangsters with guns drawn, I had a moment of pure and utter hopelessness, of total weakness, like how could I do anything against those guns? I was a bruised and beaten victim, and yeah, we’d escaped and killed a man with some improvised weapons on the way out, but we’d gotten lucky. And most of that was Kacia’s doing.
Standing there on the landing, I felt so small, so utterly insignificant staring down those guns.