Cold Blooded Killer
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 16
Colorado Springs, Colorado. March 2015
Her father answered the door.
He looked at Paterson the way he looked at everything — taking in the full presentation before forming a conclusion. A lean man in civilian clothes with a military bearing he hadn’t quite shed and eyes that had seen things. Her father was a diagnostician and he read presenting symptoms before he read anything else and what he read in Paterson’s face in the first three seconds told him this man knew where his daughter was.
“You’re Paterson,” he said.
“Yes, sir.”
Her father stepped back from the door.
“Come in.”
Her mother came from the kitchen when she heard voices. She stood in the doorway and looked at Paterson and didn’t waste time.
“She’s been gone three days,” she said. “The police said she hadn’t been gone long enough. We don’t know where she is.”
“I do,” Paterson said.
Her mother looked at him steadily. “How do you know my daughter?”
“I commanded the SEAL team she provided overwatch for. In Afghanistan.”
“For how long.”
“Four years.”
Her mother absorbed this. Her father appeared beside her and the two of them looked at Paterson together the way they’d looked at difficult things together for thirty years — as a unit, each covering what the other missed.
“Where is she?” her father said.
“The Training Center. The indoor range.” He paused. “It’s where she goes to be still.”
Her mother reached for her keys.
“Let me go first,” Paterson said. “Please. If too many people come through that door at once she’ll close down completely.” He held her mother’s gaze. “I know how she responds to things.”
Her mother stood with her keys in her hand for a long moment.
The urologist’s assessment. Reading him. Filing the result.
Then she set the keys down.
“Bring her home,” she said.
The range was empty except for her.
She was at the far end in the prone position behind a pistol she wasn’t firing. Just holding it. Just still. The same stillness she’d had at twelve years old on this same floor in this same building and every floor and every building since then all the way to the end of it.
Paterson walked the length of the range without hurrying and crouched beside her.
She didn’t look at him.
“I knew you’d come here,” he said.
“I knew you’d find me.”
He lowered himself to the floor beside her and sat with his back against the partition and his legs stretched out and looked at the target fifty meters away.
“How long?”
“Yesterday morning.”
“You eat?”
“No.”
He put a protein bar on the mat beside her hand. She picked it up and ate it without tasting it.
They sat in the silence of the range for a while. The silence she’d grown up in. Gun oil and chalk and compressed air and the memory of every shot she’d ever taken in this building going back to the first one at eight years old when Coach Han had watched her for twenty minutes and called her father aside.
“I thought coming back here would help,” she said finally.
“Did it?”
“No.”
He nodded slowly.
“Min.” Her name the way he said it when rank wouldn’t carry what needed to be said. “Talk to me.”
She was quiet for a long moment.
“I’m broken,” she said. Flat. Certain. The most accurate assessment she could make of her current condition delivered with the same precision she’d applied to everything her entire life. “Completely and totally broken.” A pause. “If you leave me I’ll slip into the abyss.”
He turned and looked at her directly.
“I’ve got you,” he said. “I’m not going anywhere.”
Something moved in her face. Not relief yet. The suggestion of something that could become relief given enough time and enough of what he was offering.
“Okay,” she said.
The smallest word she’d ever said. It cost her more than anything except the truth that preceded it.
She set the pistol down. Pushed up from the prone. Sat back on her heels and looked at the range one last time — the target, the lanes, the wall where the junior shooters’ scores were posted going back decades, names she recognized from her own training years — and then she turned her back on it.
He stood beside her.
They walked out together.
Her parents were in the living room when they got back.
Jenny was on the couch. Someone had called her or she’d felt it the way she always felt things and she’d come. She stood up when Min-Ji came through the door and they looked at each other across the room and Jenny crossed to her and put her arms around her and this time Min-Ji’s arms moved immediately.
They held each other in the hallway while their parents watched from the doorway and Paterson stood back and gave it the space it needed.
When they separated Jenny looked at her sister’s face with something complicated in her own — layered and unresolved and full of a love that didn’t require understanding everything to stay intact.
“Hey,” Jenny said.
“Hey.”
“Don’t do that again.”
“Okay.”
Jenny nodded. Stepped back. Let her sister move toward the table.
Her father had arranged the chairs. Min-Ji at the head. Paterson to her left. Jenny to her right. Her parents across from her.
Her mother poured tea and set a cup in front of each of them and sat down and folded her hands on the table.
Nobody spoke.
Then her father said, “Tell us.”
Min-Ji looked at her hands around the cup.
“How much do you want to know?”
“Everything,” her mother said. The Korean precision in her English that meant the controls were at their highest setting because what was underneath them was too large to let out. “We want to know everything.”
Min-Ji looked at Paterson once.
He gave her nothing back except steadiness.
This was hers to tell.
She started in Iraq.
She told them about Ramadi. The first kill. The shape in the third floor window, the weapon coming up, the trigger breaking. The way it felt and then the way it stopped feeling. The filing system — what it was, how it worked, how long it worked before it didn’t.
Her father’s hands were still on the table.
She told them about the SEAL transfer. About Paterson and what he’d told her on the tarmac at Camp Schwedler — that some missions wouldn’t exist on paper, that if she went down in certain places there would be no record of her being there, that he would fight for her when he could and wouldn’t always win.
Her mother looked at Paterson when she said that.
He looked back at her steadily.
She told them about Afghanistan. The compound in the Jazirah desert. Fourteen confirmed in fourteen minutes. The barrel swap mid-engagement because the barrel got too hot and she wasn’t finished.
Her father made a sound that wasn’t a word.
She told them about the valley. The funnel. The ambush. Brad Simmons and the single shot through his temple. The night she went out alone with no comms and no support and took a shot at 1,411 meters in quarter moonlight because it was the only way to bring the team home.
Jenny looked up from the table.
“Alone?” Jenny asked.
“Yes.”
“In the dark?”
“Quarter moon.”
Jenny looked at Paterson. Something moved across her face.
She told them about the ghost missions. Not the specifics — some of it would never exist out loud anywhere — but the shape of it. Countries that didn’t appear in her record. Targets with no names until she was already in country. Transports with no manifests. Bare concrete rooms and unremarkable men who handed her folders and told her what she needed to know and nothing else.
Her mother’s cup had stopped moving.
Her father’s hands had come apart on the table and were now in his lap.
She told them about Syria. About Palmyra. About a fourth floor window and a mole on a left temple that became her aim point and a yellow dress.
Her mother said something in Korean that lived below language.
“He was holding his daughter,” Min-Ji said. “Four years old. The round went exactly where I sent it. The child was not harmed.” She paused. “There was blood on her dress.”
The kitchen held the silence.
Her father looked at the wall. Then back at his daughter.
“How many,” hesasked. “Total.”
She looked at him.
“One hundred and twelve confirmed.”
The number sat in the room like a physical object.
Her mother made a sound that had no language attached to it. Not Korean or English or anything in between. Just a sound from somewhere below language and above grief that had no name in any tongue either of them had ever spoken.
Her father looked at his hands.
Jenny was absolutely still.
“Confirmed,” Paterson said quietly. “That’s the documented count.”
Her father looked at him. A doctor understanding immediately what confirmed implied about the ones that didn’t make the chart.
“There are others?” her father asked.
“Some missions don’t have official records.”
Her father nodded slowly. The nod of a man receiving a diagnosis he’d already half-formed.
The silence stretched.
Then her mother said, “The pistol.”
Min-Ji looked at her.
“They used your pistol training,” her mother said. Not a question. Her voice perfectly controlled and her eyes doing something her voice wasn’t.
“Yes.”
“How close?”
Min-Ji looked at her hands.
“Fifty feet,” she said.
The silence that followed was different from all the others.
Her father looked at her. Then at the wall behind her. At the Beijing photograph. The podium. The gold medal. The girl with the dry eyes.
“Fifty feet,” he said.
“The length of this house,” her mother said. Barely above a whisper.
Her father stood up from the table.
He walked to the window and stood with his back to the room looking out at the yard. The Japanese maple. The street. The ordinary geography of the life he’d built in this country that his daughter had left and come back from as something none of them had a framework for.
His shoulders moved once.
“I bought you a pellet gun,” he said. To the window. To the maple. To the mountain invisible behind the neighborhood rooflines. “The Saturday after we visited the Training Center. You were five years old and you pressed your face against the glass and said you really wanted to do that.” He stopped. “I drove you here every weekend for ten years. I stood in the back of every competition. I watched you win bronze in Athens and gold in Beijing and I was so proud.” Another stop. Longer. Harder. “I built this. Whatever they made you into — I handed them the materials.”
“That’s not true,” Paterson said. His voice quiet but certain. “What you built was extraordinary. What the institution did with it is something else entirely. Those aren’t the same thing.”
Her father turned from the window.
He looked at Paterson for a long moment with the full diagnostic weight of thirty years of reading people.
“Why are you here?” he asked.
Not hostile. Not suspicious. Just a father who had been holding the question since the front door and had decided the moment had come.
Paterson looked at Min-Ji.
She was looking at her hands. She knew he was looking at her and she let him look and didn’t look back.
He looked at her father.
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