Chapter 13
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Tyler parks in the back lot of the gym early the next morning, long before sunrise. Gravel crunches beneath the tires as the neon sign above the entrance comes into view and is off.
I can feel the fury festering under my skin, searching for a way out, and this is the one place where I can let it loose.
Tyler already understood the moment he took one look at me and didn’t hesitate in grabbing the keys when I told him where I needed to go.
Many would never guess there’s a fully private gun range hidden underneath the gym.
Or that getting inside takes the kind of access money alone usually can’t buy.
Leonardo keeps the existence of it concealed. No advertisements. No public memberships. Invitation only.
Security contractors. Mercenaries. Elite military. Private clients with blood on their hands and enough money to make questions disappear.
The parking lot sits completely empty.
No members filtering in before work, no staff, witnesses, or distractions.
Leonardo shut the entire gym down for us.
Tyler kills the engine while the building sits mysteriously still around us.
The silence wraps densely around me because the darkness from last night still hasn’t left my system.
We walk through the door and give Leonardo a small wave as we head to the back of the gym, where a metal door guarded by keypad access rests.
I punch in the code, and we head down the stairwell. As soon as the heavy metal door seals shut behind Tyler and me, the sound sends a chill through my body.
The air smells like burnt powder, oil, sweat, and metal. The scent sticks to the back of my throat as Tyler carries two black tactical bags farther into the range.
I flex my fingers once, then again.
Working to suppress the aftermath from last night wrapping around my thoughts.
The man being skinned.
The people being treated like nothing but inventory. The organ harvesting and trafficking.
Revulsion burns through my stomach like acid, and I battle the gags working up my throat.
Replaying jackinthebox149’s screams while the version of me, the weaponized part, stood there shockingly unfazed.
Possibly the worst part wasn’t the screams.
Perhaps it was how calm I felt listening to them.
Tyler glances over at me as the lights drone overhead.
“You’re quiet.” He states bluntly.
“I’m thinking.”
“That’s usually when I start obsessing over where your head is at.”
A faint smile threatens on my mouth but never fully forms.
“I can’t say I blame you for that.”
His eyes narrow as a cautious edge slips into his expression.
There’s apprehension in the way he monitors me lately. I can sense he’s worried I’ll cross a line neither of us can come back from.
We stop near the back. Divider walls are scarred with years of bullet marks and ricochets. Tyler unzips one of the bags and extracts my Glock before checking the chamber.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“No.”
“Cass, don’t shut me out.”
“Can we not do this right now?”
The words come out more hostile than I intended.
But Tyler doesn’t flinch. In fact, he never does.
Instead, he hands me the gun grip first.
His fingers brush mine, heat radiating from them.
Giving me something real to focus on in a way nothing else can anymore.
“You got too close to the edge last night.” His tone even.
I level him with a plain stare and launch into loading a magazine.
“You’ve seen me do worse.”
“Not like that.”
Bullets click into place one after another between my fingers.
If I let myself fall into the repetition, I can drown out the sounds from last night.
Something sour turns in my gut as my mind drifts to the flashbacks.
Tyler reads my face attentively like he knows exactly where my mind just went.
“Cassidy.”
“What?” I snap.
“You went somewhere else in there.”
I slam the mag into place aggressively.
“No. I adapted.”
“That’s not adapting.”
I rack the slide back with practiced accuracy.
“Those people were helping monsters harvest people like fucking livestock.”
“You saw what they were doing,” I don’t let up, “You heard what they admitted to doing.”
“I know.”
For a moment, silence lingers.
Tyler edges closer with caution.
“I know you’re angry.”
“Angry? Angry doesn't even come close.” I roll my shoulders a few times to loosen them.
“I think something inside me is splitting apart, and I’m leaning into the darker side.”
Tyler studies me before angling himself past me and tapping the button that sends the paper target gliding downrange, a human silhouette.
He shortens the space between us until I can feel him everywhere.
“If you lose yourself,” he says under his breath, “I’m coming with you.”
Something inside me cracks at that. I know he means it, every frightening word of it. My body stiffens.
“You shouldn’t.”
A faint smirk touches his mouth.
“It’s a little too late for shouldn’t.”
The second the silhouette locks into place, he nods toward it, challenging me.
We both pop in our electronic shooting earbuds.
“Shoot.”
I exhale once, lift my Glock, and fire.
The recoil rattles into my palms.
One shot. Then another. Then another.
Pop. Pop. Pop. Pop. POP.
Every bullet punctures through the silhouette’s torso.
My heartbeat starts hammering wildly.
I barely hear the range anymore.
All I see is Florida.
Dark rooms.
Masked faces.
Hands mauling at me while laughter carried through the frat house walls and the warehouse, while I begged for them to stop.
I fire again. And again. And again.
The slide locks back empty.
But my finger keeps squeezing the trigger anyway.
Click. Click. Click.
A hand wraps around my wrist. I hear something but it’s muffled.
“Cassidy.”
I jerk hard before realizing it's Tyler.
He doesn’t let go.
I tug an earbud loose and notice one of his is out as well.
“Don’t go somewhere I can’t follow.”
I suck in breath after breath, sweating profusely.
“Cass.”
His voice drops lower this time.
“Eyes on me.”
I face him head-on.
And the expression on his face dismantles every wall I’ve been hiding behind since last night.
His hand travels from my wrist to the side of my neck, caressing it.
“You’re shaking.”
“I’m fine.”
“You emptied an entire mag and didn’t blink.”
“I said I’m fine.”
“You’re a shit liar.” A wolfish grin encompasses his face.
The words hit a nerve I wasn’t prepared for.
I wrench my gaze away from him and stare downrange.
The silhouette is obliterated.
Every fatal target is shredded apart.
The head is barely attached to the paper.
It changes nothing about the chaos brewing inside my head.
The strange part is, I think this is healing me. Hunting these monsters.
Healing for me looks more like destruction now.
It has become bruised knuckles, gunpowder residue, and traffickers dragged screaming into the light.
Turks and Caicos was supposed to be temporary, a hiding place so the Fraternity couldn’t find us.
But somewhere between the missions, the training, and the bodies we’ve left behind, something changed.
Out here, monsters don’t hide behind fraternity houses and fake smiles.
They hide in plain sight.
You pass them on the shipping docks, the shopping plazas, or they could be your next-door neighbors.
Nightclubs packed with tourists, too distracted to notice people being taken through back exits.
And every time Tyler and I destroy one of these operations, something inside my chest loosens, but not for long.
Here I’m not helpless anymore. I’m not enslaved. The pain has a purpose now, and that purpose is the only thing keeping me together.
I’m rebuilding myself molecule by molecule into something they can never touch again.
I stopped being prey a long time ago.
Part of me died in that warehouse. There’s a clear divide between the girl I was before it happened and the version of me that crawled out afterward.
I lean back against the counter behind us while Tyler tracks every shift in my demeanor, he clicks the safety on my gun.
“I think killing them stitches the wounds they left behind, like digging glass out of an infected wound with bloody hands.”
The confession hangs over us like smoke.
Tyler’s molars move back and forth, but he doesn’t deny it since he has seen it first-hand.
He’s been exposed to the way violence settles naturally into my bones now, like I was always meant for this and just spent years pretending otherwise.
At first, every mission wrecked me afterward.
Every scream chased me home for days.
Every dead body stayed branded into the backs of my eyes.
And now I sleep easier after hunting.
Now, when blood hits the floor, I revel in it.
Some dark part of me craves the moment predators finally understand they can bleed too.
That part keeps escalating, and I have this overpowering feeling it needs to be fed.
I think Tyler picks up on it more every day.
This island has changed him too.
The change in him shows in the ruthless focus he carries during missions, in the seamless way he arms me without hesitation. In how synchronized we have become, dismantling traffickers together like we were built for this kind of destruction.
Out here, we’ve become something brutal and necessary. Two emotionally damaged people chasing predators before they can destroy someone else.
Tyler’s hand presses more solidly along my lower back.
“You want to know what scares me?”
I don’t answer.
“It’s not the carnage you leave behind.” He replies, completely composed. “It’s that you stopped feeling guilty about it.”
My airway closes up unexpectedly, he’s right.
That’s the thing I can’t outrun, no matter how exhausted I am.
Not what I’m doing, but how it feels like second nature.
I let my eyes fall shut and wish I hadn’t.
Marie enters my mind first. Then Sofie.
Memories of the last time I saw them replay behind my eyes.
Bile threatens to spill out of me.
We still haven’t found them, but I refuse to leave them buried in the dark.
Every operation we hit in Turks and Caicos starts the same way now, hoping that this will be the one.
Every hidden room, every locked basement, and every survivor we manage to save.
I keep hoping the next door we kick open will lead us to them, and every time it doesn’t, the ache inside me deepens while relief settles in right behind it.
Tyler notices the shift in my face immediately.
His expression darkens.
“But I need to know something.”
I already know what he is about to ask before the words leave his mouth.
We face each other, our eyes locked.
“Are you finally ready to go back to Florida?”
Florida still lives inside my bones like a disease waiting for the right moment to spread, but I’m not ready.
“No. I still have unfinished business here.” I pick my Glock back up, and I clip another magazine in and push the button as another target comes, we both push our earbuds back in.
Then I unload until it’s empty.
We both take an earbud out and Tyler takes my Glock from me and puts the safety on.
“You’re thinking about them again.”
I laugh humorlessly under my breath.
“When am I not?”
He’s greeted by my silence since there is no answer to that.
Marie and Sofie live inside every mission now.
Every trafficker I interrogate.
Every hard drive Tyler hacks into at three in the morning.
Every single body dumped without a second thought.
I pin my gaze on the shredded target again.
A small tremor creeps into my voice, “If they’re still alive somewhere and I stop looking, they could be lost forever, and we could be running out of time.”
Real fear surfaces through my defenses.
Not fear for me but for them. Marie and Sofie, their kindness and friendship.
“They’re still out there,” I whisper. “I can feel it.”
Tyler considers me for a long moment before drawing nearer until his forehead nearly touches mine.
“Then we keep hunting.”
Revenge was never just about me; somewhere between the bloodshed and the rescues, it became something else entirely.
Now it’s about every person who never made it home.
Every person who is trapped waiting for someone to come through the door.
Rage burns through me, scorching every hollow place in my very being. It’s the only thing holding me upright because the second it fades, grief will drag me under.
And maybe that’s the most fucked up part of all, I do feel like the reaper.