Page 105 of Sacrifice the Knight (Checkmate 6)

He extends an arm toward the yard around us. It’s cold as hell, and the hat he wears can’t possibly keep him warm, but he still smiles and ignores his red nose. “Kid stuff…like shooting ranges?”

“Exactly.” I pass him the unloaded pistol, then a full magazine on the table. “Show me.”

Nodding, he holds the empty gun in his left hand, then picks the magazine up in his right. He has struggled to get it in before, but he learns fast, because he pushes it up with a smooth slide until it clicks into place. Without prompting, he racks it with a fast click-click, then turns to me with serious eyes. “Ready.”

“First go. You’re getting better at this.”

He shrugs. “No time to fuck it up. Also, my mom is fine. Same as usual, work, stress, stress about stress, then stress about the cheesecake cups she’s eating to battle the stress, which adds stress because she thinks her butt is getting a little jiggly.”

Katrina’s ass is exactly right the way it is, though, of course, I can’t tell her kid about that. “Does she smile?”

His dimples pop when he smiles. “Sometimes. Sometimes not. Mostly she’s just quiet. I’ve had a couple extra PT sessions the last couple weeks.”

I look down. “Your leg bothering you?”

“It’s not anything bad. I’m just juggling a lot with school, the gym, running here most days, then work.”

“You doing good there?” I snatch up two pairs of safety glasses from the box on the end of the table, pass him one pair, then slide the other to the top of my head.

“Yeah. Franky and Mom won’t let me put in too many hours, but I have an official job now, and my tips are sorta starting to fill that jar on our fridge. It makes her happy to see me busy and outta trouble, so I do what I have to, and squeeze everything around that.”

I look to my watch. “What time do you have to be outta here?”

“I have an hour, if I’m running back to town. Or ninety minutes if you wanna give me a ride.”

“I’ll give you a ride to the garage, not to the diner.”

He shrugs. “Suits me. That gives me longer on this, and Mom will never have to know I was here.”

Suits me.

I let him hold his gun, nodding with approval when he points it toward the ground. With my hand on his shoulder, I steer him toward the yard we’re going to be practicing on today. “This is your first time out here, so don’t worry about speed. Worry about hitting your targets. Accuracy is the most important thing we need to learn, because a man with a gun is dangerous, and shooting off rounds in any direction is straight up fucking homicidal. Get the accuracy, and next time, we’ll work on speed.”

He holds the S&W with two hands and reminds me of a fighter the way his shoulders come up to guard his chin. It’s strange how he can be both, a fighter and a shooter. Fists and guns. Both painful. Both deadly. And he’ll be been trained as well as any of the men inside the building behind us. “Don’t waste your rounds. If you don’t hit your target with every shot, we pack it up and go back inside. I don’t want a single rogue shot.”

He nods. “I got it.” He accepts the ear plugs I pull from my pockets, shoves them in until the pink foam pokes out of his ears, then slides his glasses on. “My mom told me something last night. Something kinda important.”

“Yeah?” We’re definitely focusing on accuracy over speed as we walk the track. Normally we’d run it; we’d have moments of sprinting, of jumping, rolling, diving. But all we do right now is walk, stop at a checkpoint, then once Mac fires off his perfect shot, we keep moving. “What about?”

“About a little girl named Callie.” His eyes come to mine. They hold sympathy, fear, a little confusion. He’s just a boy, pretending to be a man. “Why didn’t you tell me you had a kid? She’s my age, but you didn’t think it was something you could have mentioned?”

Instead of answering, I counter with my own question. “Why’d your mom tell you? The whole point is to keep you safe, not give you nightmares.”

He shrugs, slows at the next target, and makes his shot. “I caught her in a weak moment, I guess. She wasn’t crying or anything, not like actual tears, but she was sad. I heard her come home after work, so I got up to take a piss, and when I came out, she was sitting on the couch just kinda staring at the wall. I asked her what was up.”

We stop at our third target; he makes his shot and makes it look easy, then we continue on. It could almost be a Sunday stroll, if you ignore the shitty weather and the gun.

“She didn’t wanna tell me, but I think she needed to offload. I try to make it easy to think of me as grown, because there’s no way in hell she’s going to offload to a kid. So I sat down, held her hand, and gave her space to speak. She told me she can’t stop thinking about a little girl named Callie. She has pretty green eyes and light brown hair that curls at the ends.”

“She said that?”

“Uh-huh. She said how she can’t let it go; she can’t stop thinking about her, so I asked who she is.”

“How do you feel about that?” I wait for him to make his next shot, hiding the pride that grows in my chest at his perfect accuracy. “Are you mad I didn’t tell you?”

“Not mad.” He shrugs. “I mean, it’s not really my business, right? I don’t think I’d have changed my mind about you if I’d known. I might have slowed down on suggesting you date my mom, if only so I could make sure you didn’t bring trouble to town with you, but I still like you for her. I still think you’re her match.”

I scoff. I haven’t been into the diner in months. I didn’t follow Katrina when she left my apartment last time, but I got reports back from Angelo, who walked her back, and Jay and Soph, who watched her arrive back at the diner. I know she’s safe. I know she’s alive. But that’s all I get. I have to wait for her now, because whatever we have, whatever we might have been, it’s all in her hands now.

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