Cold Blooded Killer
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 1
The Park family didn’t come to the Olympic Training Center to find a destiny. It was a Sunday in late September, the kind of Colorado morning that couldn’t decide between summer and fall, and her father had read about the facility in a magazine and thought it might be interesting. Something to do with the girls. Her mother had packed a cooler. Her older sister Jenny had complained about the drive from the moment they left the driveway until the moment the complex came into view and even she went quiet.
It was enormous. Buildings and fields and tracks spreading across the base of Pikes Peak like something that had grown there deliberately, purposefully, the way her father’s medical practice had grown — one careful decision at a time. He steered them along the main path with the enthusiasm of a man who’d spent his first decade in America learning to love its scale. Her mother walked beside him reading a brochure aloud in the mixture of Korean and English that was the family’s private language. Jenny wanted to find the swimmers.
Min-Ji was five years old and the world was still mostly something that happened to her.
Then she heard the shots.
Not loud — contained, rhythmic, coming from a low building set back from the main path. A sound like punctuation. Like something being decided, one careful interval at a time. She stopped walking. Her father made it three steps before he noticed she wasn’t beside him.
“Min-Ji-ya.”
She pointed at the building.
He looked at her face. Then at the building. Then back at her face. Her father was a diagnostician by training and temperament — he read presenting symptoms before he read anything else — and whatever he saw in his youngest daughter’s expression in that moment made him change direction without another word.
The building was a shooting range. Through the observation window they could see a line of young women in the standing position, pistols raised, the stillness of people doing something that required everything they had. Min-Ji pressed her face against the glass.
“Appa.” Her voice was very quiet. “I really want to do that.”
“Sweetie.” He crouched beside her. “You can’t fire a real gun at five.”
“I know.” She didn’t look away from the window. “But I really want to.”
He straightened up. Looked at his wife over the top of Min-Ji’s head. Her mother had the expression she wore when she was deciding whether something was worth the energy of an argument and had concluded it wasn’t.
A girl was coming out of the range door, a pistol case under her arm, her hair pulled back under a USA Shooting cap. Her father stepped toward her with the careful courtesy he brought to every stranger.
“Excuse me. My daughter is interested in shooting. Could I ask — how did you get started?”
The girl looked down at Min-Ji. She had a patient face, the unhurried quality of someone who spent a lot of time being still.
“I grew up with guns,” she said. “Hunting family. But my dad didn’t start me on a real rifle — he bought me a CO2 pellet gun and set up targets in the backyard. That’s actually how you learn. The fundamentals are the same. Breath, trigger, follow-through.” She looked at Min-Ji again with something that might have been recognition. “How old are you?”
“Five,” Min-Ji said.
“Perfect age to start with a pellet gun.”
Her father nodded slowly. Looked at his daughter one more time with the diagnostic expression. Then he thanked the girl and steered his family back toward the main path where Jenny was already agitating for the aquatic center.
He bought the CO2 pellet gun the following Saturday.
Her mother set one condition — homework first, always — and her father set up the targets against the back fence of their yard in a neighborhood where the houses were large and the yards larger and nobody complained about the quiet pop of a pellet gun on weekend afternoons. He stood behind her the first time and showed her the grip and she adjusted it immediately to something that felt more natural and he didn’t correct her because it turned out she was right.
She shot every day that he’d let her.
Within a month she was hitting the center of the target more often than not. Within six months she was hitting it almost every time and had started to notice something she had no language for yet — a feeling that began in her chest when she picked up the gun and built as she raised it and crested just before the trigger broke and released with the shot in a way that left her quiet and satisfied and already wanting to do it again.
She didn’t know what to call it. She just knew she loved it more than anything.
Coach Han found her at seven. Not dramatically — her father had enrolled her in a youth shooting program at a local range and Han Sung-Jin was the instructor, a compact Korean-American man in his forties who had shot competitively in his twenties and now taught with the precise patience of someone who understood that talent was common and discipline was not. He watched Min-Ji shoot for twenty minutes during her first session and then he watched her for twenty more and then he called her father aside.
“How long has she been shooting?”
“Two years.”
Han looked back at the seven year old on the firing line, making her adjustments, finding her stillness with an ease that most adult shooters never achieved.
“She needs better coaching than I can give her,” he said. “I know people at the Training Center.”
The Training Center was everything the observation window had promised.
She was eight when she started going twice a week, ten when it became five days, twelve when it became the organizing fact of her life around which everything else — school, family dinners, the social architecture of middle school that she navigated with polite indifference — arranged itself. Her parents drove her without complaint. Her mother packed her meals in containers labeled in Korean. Her father came to every competition he could and stood in the back and said nothing until it was over.
Jenny went to debate tournaments and student council meetings and regarded her sister’s obsession with the serene incomprehension of someone who had never wanted one thing so completely it rearranged everything around it.
Min-Ji didn’t mind. She had the range.
She had the feeling.
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