Cold Blooded Killer
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 18
Mountain Springs Recovery. Colorado Springs, Colorado, April 2015
The building didn’t look like what she’d expected.
She’d expected something institutional. A facility. Clean lines and controlled lighting and the smell of places where people went to be managed. She’d spent enough time in those places — FOBs, processing stations, bare concrete rooms — to know what managed looked like.
Mountain Springs looked like a house.
Large, set back from the road with trees around it and a front porch and windows that let in actual light. The kind of place built by someone who understood that the nervous system responds to environment before it responds to anything else. She noted the trees. The sightlines. The single entrance road and the parking area and the distance from the front door to the tree line.
Old habits.
Paterson pulled into the parking area and cut the engine and they sat for a moment in the Colorado morning with Pikes Peak visible above the roofline.
“You don’t have to decide anything today,” he said. “Just the intake.”
“I know.”
“I’ll be right here.”
She looked at the building. The front porch. The windows with their actual light.
“Okay.”
She got out of the car.
The waiting area had chairs that were comfortable without being soft and a window that looked out at the trees and a woman at the front desk who smiled at her without performing the smile. Min-Ji noted all of it. The other chairs — empty, no one else waiting, they’d timed it that way or Manning had requested it. The door at the end of the short hallway. The distance.
Paterson sat in one of the chairs with his jacket across his knees and looked at her.
She looked back at him.
Then she turned and walked down the hallway.
The office had two chairs angled toward each other rather than a desk between them. No clipboard visible. No forms on the table yet. Just two chairs and a window and a woman who stood up when Min-Ji came through the door.
Sarah Manning was in her mid-forties. Medium height, compact, the economy of someone who had spent years moving through spaces where economy wasn’t optional. Brown hair going gray at the temples. A face that had started out one thing and been rearranged by time and experience into something harder to read.
She looked at Min-Ji the way Min-Ji looked at terrain.
“Park.”
“Manning.”
They shook hands. The handshake of two people assessing grip and finding the result satisfactory.
“Sit down.”
They sat.
Manning looked at her for a moment without speaking. Not the therapeutic silence designed to make a patient fill the space. Just a woman taking in the full picture before she said anything.
“Before we start.” Manning leaned back in her chair. “I was Army. Staff Sergeant. 68X — behavioral health specialist. Iraq twice, Afghanistan once. Second Iraq deployment was Fallujah, 2006.” She paused. “I’m telling you that because I want you to know that whatever comes out of your mouth in this room I’ve probably been in a room adjacent to it. Not the same room. Close enough.” Another pause. “And because I know what performed normal looks like and I’m not interested in it.”
Min-Ji looked at her.
Really looked at her. For the first time since she’d walked through the door.
“Okay.”
“Okay,” Manning said. “Let’s start.”
She began with the standard questions and Min-Ji answered them the way she answered everything — accurately, economically, the minimum required to be technically truthful.
“How long since you slept through the night.”
“Months.”
“How often are you having nightmares.”
“Every night.”
“Intrusive thoughts during waking hours.”
“Yes.”
“Difficulty in public spaces.”
“Yes.”
Do you have access to weapons at home.”
“No.”
Manning noted it and moved on.
Min-Ji sat with the answer for a moment. Seven years of never being without a weapon. The Sig turned in at Kandahar with everything else. Her duffel and her DD-214 and nothing else on the flight home.
She couldn’t tell if no felt like safety or exposure.
She wasn’t sure those were different things anymore.
Manning wrote nothing down. Just listened and looked and let the answers exist in the room without rushing past them.
“Tell me about the nightmares.”
Min-Ji looked at the window.
“They’re loops,” she said. “The same events repeating. With variations. The variations get worse each time.”
“What kind of events.”
“Kills.”
Manning didn’t react. Didn’t adjust her expression or her posture or the quality of her attention.
“How many confirmed kills do you have.”
“One hundred and twelve. Confirmed.”
Manning absorbed this.
“And unconfirmed.”
“Some missions don’t have official records.”
Manning nodded slowly. Filing information rather than reacting to it.
“The loops,” she said. “Are they always kills or are there other elements.”
Min-Ji thought about the waiter. About Jenny smiling with the shell. About her own face in the scope.
“Other elements. Witnesses. People who weren’t the target.”
“Tell me about one.”
Min-Ji looked at her.
Manning looked back. Steady. Not pushing. Waiting with the patience of someone who had learned that patience was the only tool that worked in this territory.
“There was a mission,” Min-Ji said. “Close range. A man waiting for coffee outside a café.” She paused. “There was a waiter. He brought the coffee out just as—” She stopped. Started again. “In the dream the waiter sees me. Every time. He looks directly at me and he says something.”
“What does he say.”
“You did this.”
Manning didn’t say anything for a moment.
“Every time,” she said.
“Every time. And each time he sees me sooner. Before it happens. Like he’s learning the loop the same way I am.”
Manning wrote something down for the first time. Min-Ji didn’t try to read it.
“What does it feel like,” Manning said. “When he looks at you.”
Min-Ji looked at the window again.
“Like being seen,” she said. “Not identified. Not targeted.” She paused. “Seen. Like he knows what I am.”
“What are you.”
The question landed without warning. No preamble. No softening.
Min-Ji looked at her.
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