Cold Blooded Killer
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 17
Colorado Springs, Colorado, April 2015
She was on the edge of the couch when he came downstairs.
Spine rigid. Hands braced on her knees. Knuckles white. She’d been sitting that way for twenty minutes and she wasn’t seeing the floor she was staring at — she was somewhere else, somewhere with a man reaching for coffee and a waiter who kept looking and a sister who smiled and said that’s the point.
He didn’t say anything. Just crossed the room and sat on the other end of the couch. Close enough that she could feel him there. Not close enough to crowd what she was carrying.
She didn’t look at him.
“I’m not a sniper anymore,” she said. Her voice was brittle in a way he hadn’t heard before. Not flat. Brittle. Something that could crack.
“Then what are you?”
She looked up. Her eyes were hollow in the way eyes get when they’ve been open too long seeing things that don’t stop.
“A government sanctioned cold blooded assassin,” she said. “Without honor.”
He didn’t flinch. Didn’t argue. Didn’t try to fix it. Just let it exist in the room the way it needed to exist.
“I know,” he said. “I know that’s what it feels like.”
“It’s what it is.”
“It’s what they made it,” he said. “It’s not what you are.”
She looked away. Jaw tight.
He leaned forward with his elbows on his knees and looked at the same floor she was staring at.
“What you’re carrying,” he said. “The loop. The faces. The screaming at 0300. That’s not your soul rotting, Min. That’s a brain and a body that survived something they were never designed to survive alone. It has a name. It has treatment. People come back from it.”
“Not from this.”
“From exactly this.” He said it quietly. “I’ve seen it. I’ve been closer to it than you know.”
She looked at him then. A question she didn’t ask out loud.
“I’m not where you are,” he said. “But I’ve stood close enough to the edge to know what it looks like from the inside.” He paused. “And I know what brings people back.”
She was quiet.
“There’s a private residential program here in Colorado Springs,” he said. “Mountain Springs. Not the VA. Not a ward. Private, confidential, small. They work with people who’ve been where you’ve been — not civilians with civilian wounds. People who’ve done what we’ve done.” He paused. “They use EMDR — you don’t have to talk through every kill in detail, the therapy works differently, it processes without requiring you to narrate. And they have specific treatment for the nightmares. Imagery rehearsal — they teach you to rewrite the loop while you’re awake. Change the ending. Take back the script.”
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