Cold Blooded Killer
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 15
Colorado Springs, Colorado, March 2015
The house was the same.
That was the first thing she noticed coming up the front walk — the same shutters, the same porch light her father left on when anyone was expected, the same Japanese maple in the yard that had been a sapling when she was twelve and was now taller than the roofline. Her mother opened the door before she reached it.
“Min-Ji-ya.”
“Eomma.”
Her mother held her in the doorway and Min-Ji stood inside it and made her arms move and by the time they did it was almost over. Her father appeared behind her mother with the diagnostician’s eye and whatever he saw made something move across his face that he put away before she could read it.
“Come inside,” he said. “You must be hungry.”
She wasn’t. She came inside anyway.
She expected the quiet to help.
That was the lie they didn’t bother correcting.
Home was smaller than she remembered. Not physically. Just contained. The walls felt closer, as if distance itself had been reduced, like everything was within range whether she wanted it to be or not.
She set her bag down by the door and stood there longer than necessary, listening.
No generators. No distant traffic patterns she had to map. No comms.
Just the hum of the refrigerator.
A pipe ticking somewhere in the walls.
Soft, harmless sounds.
Her body didn’t believe that.
It cataloged them anyway. Assigned direction. Distance. Relevance.
Nothing was neutral anymore.
The first night she didn’t sleep in the bed. Too exposed. Too centered. She took the couch, back to the wall, sightlines to the door and windows mapped automatically.
Old habits. Useful once. Now just there.
She closed her eyes.
The breath caught halfway in.
She opened them immediately.
“No,” she said out loud.
The word sounded strange in the room, like it didn’t belong to the space.
She didn’t try again.
Days passed. Or something like days.
Time didn’t hold shape well.
Her mother made food and she ate it. Her father came home from the hospital and sat with her in the evenings and talked about small things — a patient who had surprised him, a new restaurant on Tejon Street, the Japanese maple that needed trimming. He didn’t ask questions she couldn’t answer. He was a diagnostician and he was reading her and she could feel him reading her and neither of them acknowledged it.
Jenny came twice that first week. She talked the way she always talked — easily, filling space — and Min-Ji watched her sister’s face and nodded and said the right things at the right intervals.
She was very good at performing normal.
She’d been performing normal for years.
She moved through routines she didn’t remember deciding to start. Checking locks. Adjusting blinds. Noting reflections in dark glass. Every surface became a kind of scope. Every shadow a potential alignment.
At the grocery store four days after she came home she caught herself tracking a man’s temple as he turned down an aisle.
She froze.
Her hand tightened around nothing.
There was no weapon. There was no mission. There was just a man buying something ordinary.
He glanced at her. Just a glance. Polite. Passing.
It hit like recognition. Like he knew.
She left the cart where it was and walked out.
Her parents heard her the first night the dreams came.
She knew they heard her because in the morning her mother’s eyes were different — careful in a way they hadn’t been the day before, carrying something she was managing. Her father made coffee and set a cup in front of her and sat across the table and looked at her with the full weight of everything he’d spent forty years learning to see.
He didn’t say anything.
She didn’t say anything.
They drank their coffee in the quiet of a house where something had happened in the night that nobody had language for.
Sleep came anyway.
It always did.
And when it did it took everything with it.
She was in her room.
Her real room.
Not a rooftop. Not a street.
Her room. The bed. The dresser. The window exactly where it should be.
For a moment she thought she was awake.
Then she saw the rifle.
Leaning in the corner. Assembled. Waiting.
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