“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.
Chapter9
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.
And now, holding a gun of my own, I realize something.
It doesn’t matter if you’re big and strong. Anyone can pull a trigger and everyone will die if you shoot them in the right spot.
It’s an intoxicating feeling. I want to be like those men standing on the other side of the door with the guns, not the feeble little girl crawling up and praying for safety. I never want to be that pathetic girl again in my life.
And if that means I have to let Peter boss me around, yell at me, grab my hips and arms and whatever, I’ll do it. I’ll do whatever I have to if it means learning how to fight and how to survive.
When we’re finished, we lounge in the shade of a tree and drink water and eat lunch. “You did good today,” he says, looking at me from the corner of his eye. Sweat’s rolling down my brow and he’s practically glistening. “But guns are easy.”
“Point and shoot. Bang, bang.”
“Exactly. That’s why you’re learning them first. It’s a lot easier to squeeze a trigger than it is to punch someone.”
“But you’ll teach me that too?”