Fine Make

~~THREE MONTHS LATER~~

"Again!" Jade yells. He's standing beside me with his hands in his pockets, earmuffs on, and safety glasses pushed up just enough to see my face. "Don't stop until the clip's empty."

I nod without saying anything because what is there to say?

The first shot goes off, jerking my shoulder with the recoil. I keep going.

Bang.

Bang. Bang.

The sound is everything, louder than the voice in my head that keeps whispering, 'You killed someone, you killed someone, you killed someone.' The indoor range smells like gunpowder and industrial bleach, a smell that makes my eyes water. My ears are muffled by the protective gear, but I can still feel each shot rattling through my chest.

Bang.

Bang.

I didn't want to be here. Didn't want to be standing in the firing range beneath Knox's club, listening to Jade bark instructions at me. But after months of therapy sessions where I've danced around the warehouse incident-unable to voice my actual problem without risking jail time-Knox decided I needed to face my demons head-on.

And apparently, my demon is holding a gun again.

The weird thing is, when Jade first handed me the Glock, I didn't flinch. Didn't freeze up or have a panic attack or any of the dramatic reactions I'd been expecting. My hands just closed around it like muscle memory. Guess the problem isn't the weapon itself. It's what I did with one just like it.

It's the act of killing someone that's eating me alive.

Knox is getting therapy too. He'd shot down my suggestion initially, stubborn as always, but when the night terrors came back worse than before and he started refusing pain medication as some kind of twisted form of trauma treatment, I put my foot down. You either go to them, or I bring them to you. The therapist I found for him costs more per hour than most people make in a week, but it's working. He's not constantly scanning every room for threats anymore. He's not having panic attacks when I'm out of his sight or at least, he's getting better about hiding them.

Right now, he's watching from behind a one-way glass partition while lying on his stomach getting tattooed, a piece he's been working on for two days. The doctor said it's too early to be getting ink over his scars, but Knox has never been one to listen to medical advice. He won't tell me what the design is and keeps it covered every time I try to peek. All I know is he can see us through that one-way mirror, watching Jade teach me how to shoot.

It's like having a golden retriever boyfriend, if golden retrievers weighed two hundred pounds and had separation anxiety issues the size of Texas. When it comes down to it, he's more of a clingy Rottweiler.

The last shot echoes longer than the others. When I finally lower the gun, my hands are shaking, not from fear, but from the sheer physical effort of keeping that thing steady.

Jade steps forward and hits the button on the control panel that brings our paper silhouette toward us.

When the target stops in front of us, it's unmarked. Not a single hole. Not one.

"Wow," Jade says. "This is actually impressive. How do you miss seventeen shots? I mean, mathematically speaking, shouldn't you have hit it at least once by mistake?"

"Fuck you, Jade," I reply.

He laughs. "You're spectacularly terrible at this. I'm charging Knox extra for these lessons."

Before I can respond, he's plucking the gun from my hands. He proceeds to check the chamber, eject the empty magazine, and reload, doing it all with ease.

"How's my mom?" I ask, needing to fill the silence.

Jade doesn't look up from the gun. "You know Margot. Back to her usual routine. She misses you terribly, though. You should really think about letting bygones be bygones."

"I'm just not ready."

"You can't keep avoiding your family, Sloane."

"I've got priorities right now," I say, and I can feel my shoulders tensing up. "Besides, you see how Knox hangs around me constantly. Until they give me their word that they're not going to start drama about us being together, they can stay in limbo."

He hands the gun back to me. "That's it? Your family accepting your boyfriend? You should have just said that months ago. Your mother's moved way past caring about that. She forgave me, remember?"

"Right," I say, but the word tastes like sawdust.

Because what I'm not telling Jade is that Knox isn't the actual problem. He's the excuse. My family has turned into a complete circus, and I've been trying not to let the entire thing swallow me whole.

Somehow, Jade and my mother have made peace with each other. Serena's pregnant-by Jade, which is its own kind of mess. And now my mother is only forgiving her on the condition that she gives the baby up... to her. She means to adopt it. Like it's a swap deal. One child for the redemption of another.

The thought alone makes my stomach turn. I don't know how Jade isn't freaking out about it. But I guess he'll do anything for his wife.

And then there's Serena and Finn. I walked in on them about a month ago while picking up the last of my things and returning the key, and I certainly can't unsee what I saw. They weren't just naked together under the sheets but comfortable in it. Familiar.

That's an image I had to bring up in therapy.

Serena's reply when I asked if she

didn't think it was weird to be

Petnoveldrama

screwing Finn was simply that he makes her laugh and doesn't care that she's pregnant. I get it. Loneliness can be a bitch. But Finn? And when I mentioned the fact that he's probably just using her as a substitute for me, she didn't deny it. Just said, "Guess we're using each other. The sex is great too." She then had the nerve to suggest there might be an actual connection between them. Apparently, they'd had "one stupid drunken night" back when Finn was still my best friend, so whatever's happening now might

not just be him chasing some leftover craving for me.

That was it. The last straw. I took time off from all of them. Mom. Serena. Dad.

The only person I still talk to is Grandma, who keeps inviting me to wild house parties at my dad's place while he's out trying to win Daphne back. Partying with grandmas? How does that work?

I have other things keeping me busy

anyway. Like dealing with the team of stubborn men who work under me in Knox's club tech security. department. They're stuck in their outdated ways of doing things, and honestly, they're making my life hell with their resistance to every modern improvement I try to implement.

But that frustration keeps me sane. Keeps me busy. I've started renaming system scripts after

pioneering women in tech-Ada net

Grace Hedy, Katherine. Color-coded the entire user interface in soft pinks and purples just to irritate them. Added an Al voice name “Cassie" that refers to everyone as "sweetheart" unless they override it. Even switched the default system font to something called "Feminine Sans" that I may or may not have created myself. Passive-aggressive empowerment is my brand now.

They grumble about it constantly, but they'll adapt. I'm here to stay, and I'm a modern woman in a modern world. They can deal with it or find another job.

I know what goes on in the floors above mine. I'm not naive about Knox's business operations. But I've made a conscious choice to stay in my lane and let him handle whatever needs handling. Plausible deniability is a beautiful thing when you want to sleep peacefully at night.

"Okay," Jade says, moving to stand behind me. "Where do I even start with this disaster?"