Chapter 12
ADRIAN
Aurora fires six rounds at the center-mass target and hits five.
The sixth clips the shoulder, which is still better than most people manage on their third day of training.
She ejects the magazine, checks the chamber, and sets the Glock on the bench with the muzzle pointed downrange, exactly as I taught her forty-eight hours ago.
“Better.” I pick up the target sheet and examine the grouping. “You’re pulling left on the sixth round. That means you’re anticipating the recoil instead of letting the follow-through happen naturally.”
“I know what I’m doing wrong.” She pulls off her ear protection and hangs it on the hook beside the lane divider. “My grip loosens after five because my hand gets tired. I need to build endurance, not correct my aim.”
She’s diagnosed the problem herself before I finished identifying it. She doesn’t fumble with fear or pretend competence she doesn’t have. She asks sharp questions about mechanics, practices the answer until she owns it, and then moves to the next problem.
The training facility is a private range owned through one of my holding companies, ten minutes inland from the coastal property.
Viktor cleared it for our use this week, and we’ve been here three days running.
The first day was safety fundamentals, trigger discipline, sight alignment, and clearing malfunctions.
The second day was marksmanship. Today is situational awareness, which means I’m teaching her to recognize threats before they become emergencies.
“If someone approaches you from behind in a confined space, what do you do?”
She thinks. “I move toward the nearest exit and put distance between us. I don’t engage unless I have no other option.”
“Good. What if the exit is blocked?”
“I use whatever’s available as a barrier and make noise.
Attention is a weapon when you’re outmatched physically.
” She pauses. “That’s what I did at Echelon every time a client got too aggressive.
I never confronted them directly. I redirected, created space, and used the room to manage the situation. ”
“You were already doing this. You just didn’t have a firearm.”
She laughs. “Not that it wasn’t tempting from time to time, but I didn’t need one at the club. I had a radio and six security staff.”
“You don’t have six security staff anymore. You have me and Viktor.” I hand her a fresh magazine. “Load and fire six more. Focus on the grip after the fourth round.”
She loads the magazine, chambers a round, and settles into her stance.
I stand behind her and correct her elbow angle with a light touch on her arm.
The contact is professional, and necessary but sends a current through me that I suppress immediately because the training range isn’t the place for this, and the Glock in her hands is loaded.
She fires six more rounds. All six hit center mass. She sets down the weapon and turns to look at me with an expression that says she knows exactly what the touch on her arm did to both of us, and she’s choosing not to acknowledge it because of our task and location.
“We should go riding.” I say it to change the subject and because I made the mistake of telling Aurora they existed.
Aurora rolls her shoulders and winces. “Rain check. I’ve been using muscles I didn’t know I had for three days, and my arms feel like they belong to someone else.”
I want to offer her a massage but quell the urge. “Tomorrow?”
“If I can lift a fork by dinner, maybe.” She picks up her ear protection and walks toward the exit. “The day after tomorrow is more realistic.”
We go back to the range the next two days. Her groupings tighten each session, and by the fifth day, she’s firing controlled pairs at seven yards with a consistency that would pass a basic qualification. She doesn’t love the weapon. She respects it, which is better.
On the sixth day, we drive to the stable instead of the range.
I’ve never actually been on a horse. This is a fact I’ve managed to avoid disclosing to Aurora, Viktor, and my mother, who grew up riding in the Russian countryside and assumes her son inherited the skill through genetics.
The stable owner leads out two horses, both described as gentle, and Aurora swings into the saddle with an ease that tells me she’s done this before.
“You ride?” I ask while trying to mount without looking like I’m solving a geometry problem.
She watches me struggle with the stirrup and doesn’t bother hiding her amusement. “I took lessons when I was twelve. My mother’s boyfriend number four had a friend with a ranch in Ocala.” She adjusts her reins and turns the horse with a subtle shift of her weight. “You don’t ride.”
“I ride.” I get my foot in the stirrup on the second attempt and pull myself into the saddle, which feels approximately three feet higher than it looked from the ground.
“You sit on horses. That’s different from riding them.” She brings her horse alongside mine and reaches over to adjust my grip on the reins. “Relax your hands. You’re holding them like you’re strangling someone.”
I shrug a shoulder. “Professional habit.”
She laughs, and the sound carries across the open field between the stable and the shoreline. “It’s okay not to be good at everything, Adrian. You can add it to the list of things I’m better at.”
“The list is short.”
“It’s growing.” She nudges her horse forward at a walk, I follow, and within thirty seconds, I’ve accepted the horse is in charge of this relationship and I’m a passenger.
We walk the horses along the shoreline, making slow progress on wet sand while the tide creeps in around the horses’ hooves. The pace is slower than walking would be, and the salt air is warm and heavy, but I can’t remember the last time anything was this absurd or this good.
I killed a man almost three weeks ago, and the murder is being investigated by a possibly corrupt homicide detective.
I’m being hunted by a rival syndicate, but that doesn’t matter because Aurora is laughing at me when I can’t hold reins, and I haven’t been this settled in years.
The contrast should disturb me but doesn’t.
“You look like you’re solving a math problem,” she says, glancing at me from her saddle.
I look down at the black stallion for a moment. “In a way. I’m trying to understand how the horse knows where to go when I’m not steering.”
She chuckles. “You’re not driving a car, Adrian. You’re riding an animal. The horse can feel what you want through your seat and your legs. Relax, and she’ll follow the shoreline on her own.”
I mentally correct myself to mare, not stallion. I loosen my grip on the reins and let the horse do what she wants, which turns out to be walking at exactly the same pace beside Aurora’s horse. The animal apparently has better instincts than I do about who to follow.
“This is what normal people do on vacation,” she says after a few minutes of comfortable silence. “They go to beaches, ride horses, and eat grouper sandwiches at plastic tables. They don’t carry guns or travel by private jet or worry about rival syndicates finding their address.”
“I’ve never been normal.”
“No.” She looks at me, looking younger than she usually does. “I’m starting to think that’s a choice, not a condition.”
“Touche.” The legitimate businesses could sustain themselves. The numbers work. I’ve run them before. I could be the man on the horse instead of the man behind the desk, and Aurora could be the woman beside me instead of the woman I’m protecting from my own consequences.
The fantasy is seductive, and it collapses the moment I remember Karpov would read withdrawal as weakness, and weakness is an invitation I can’t afford to extend.
Aurora is leaning forward to pat her horse’s neck and murmuring something I can’t hear. She looks like she belongs here, in the sun, on a horse, with no heels, no VIP list, and no performance.
“You should come back here after all this,” I say. “When it’s safe.”
She looks at me. “Back to Key Largo?”
“Back to this.” I gesture at the water, the horses, and the open space. “You told me you want stability and honesty. This is what that looks like.”
She doesn’t answer, but she smiles, and the smile isn’t guarded or strategic.
It’s real. We ride back to the stable in silence, returning the horses and thanking the owner, and the normality of the entire afternoon stays with me alongside the image of me being the man beside her in a way I’m not equipped to process.
My mother calls at four. She’s sick with some cold or virus she picked up at a fundraiser last week, and she needs me to represent her at the Bayside Investors Gala tonight.
The event is hosted by three of my legitimate business partners, and my mother has been their liaison for years.
Missing it would raise questions I don’t want answered.
Viktor advises against attending. I overrule him because the gala provides cover for my presence in the Keys, and because refusing my mother’s request while she’s ill would generate maternal guilt powerful enough to make Karpov’s threats seem manageable by comparison.
Aurora looks at me when I ask if she wants to come with me. “I have nothing to wear to a gala.”
I frown. “You said Marisol packed three dresses.”
“Marisol packed three brunch dresses. None of them are gala appropriate.” She crosses her arms. “If you wanted me to attend black-tie events, you should have included that in the logistics brief.”
“You’re right. I’ll send Fedor to…”
“I saw something at the store in Islamorada.” She picks up her phone. “Give me thirty minutes and your prepaid card.”
I smile because she’s not protesting using my money this time. I like buying her things, not because it gives me leverage over her, but just because I like pampering her.