Cold Blooded Killer
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 19
Mountain Springs Recovery, Colorado Springs, Colorado, April 2015
The room was small and clean with a window facing the trees.
She stood in the doorway for a moment before she went in. Noted the bed against the left wall. The single chair by the window. The bathroom door, open, interior visible. The window latch — the kind that opened six inches and stopped. The distance from the bed to the door.
Old habits.
She set her duffel on the bed and sat beside it and looked at the room.
No generators. No distant traffic she had to map. No comms. Just the sound of the facility running its quiet routines around her and the trees moving outside the window in the Colorado afternoon.
Her nervous system didn’t believe quiet.
It cataloged it anyway. Filed it under unconfirmed and kept running.
The orientation took an hour.
A woman named Carol who had the unhurried competence of someone who had done this long enough that nothing surprised her anymore walked her through the facility. Common areas. Meal times. The therapy wing. The garden at the back of the building where residents could sit during daylight hours. The rules — straightforward, non-negotiable, explained without apology.
Min-Ji listened and noted everything and asked two questions.
“What are the quiet hours.”
“Ten PM to seven AM,” Carol said. “The common areas close. Residents stay in their rooms or the garden if they need air.”
“Is the garden accessible at night.”
“Yes. Always. The side door stays unlocked.” Carol looked at her with the expression of someone who had heard that question before and understood exactly why it got asked. “There’s a bench facing east. Good sightlines.”
She filed both answers and followed Carol down the hallway.
The other residents she clocked without meaning to. Three men in the common area when they passed through. She assessed each of them in the time it took to cross the room — posture, movement, threat probability — and had filed all three before Carol finished her sentence about meal schedules.
Not threats.
Just people carrying things.
She recognized that. Filed it under something that didn’t have a label yet.
The psychiatrist was a compact man named Dr. Reyes who had kind eyes and direct language and explained the medication the way her father would have explained it — without condescension, without softening the side effects into something they weren’t.
Prazosin for the nightmares. Alpha blocker. It interrupted the neurological process that generated the loop — not by suppressing dreams entirely but by reducing the hyperarousal that powered them. Some patients found the transition disorienting. The edges of things softened. Reflexes slowed slightly.
She didn’t like the sound of that.
“Your edges have been running at combat pitch for seven years,” Reyes said. “Some softening is the point.”
She looked at him.
“How long before it works.”
“The nightmares often respond within the first week. Sometimes sooner.” He paused. “We’ll also look at sertraline for the underlying depression and anxiety. Not today — one thing at a time. Let’s see how you respond to the prazosin first.”
She nodded.
He handed her the first dose with a small cup of water and she looked at it for a moment.
A pill. Something that would reach into her nervous system and change what it did without her permission.
She’d spent her entire life managing her nervous system with absolute precision. The dam. The breath. The trigger press between heartbeats.
Now she was going to take a pill and let it do something she couldn’t control.
She swallowed it.
The first night she lay on the bed with her back against the headboard and the chair wedged under the door handle — not because she’d been told to, just because her hands did it before she’d consciously decided — and waited.
Waited for the loop.
At 0300 something came.
Not the loop. Something softer. A version of the Syria nightmare that arrived without the precision it usually carried — the crosshairs less defined, the mole less distinct, the child’s face turned away so she couldn’t see it. The loop tried to start and something in the mechanism was different. Quieter. Like someone had turned a dial without asking her.
She woke at 0300 the way she always woke.
But the screaming didn’t come.
She lay in the dark of the small clean room with the trees outside the window and her heart rate elevated but not racing and the dream already fading at the edges the way dreams were supposed to fade and didn’t usually.
She didn’t know what to do with that.
She lay there for a long time figuring out what softer felt like.
It felt like something she didn’t have a word for yet.
Jonathan Walters had an office at the end of the therapy wing that looked like him without trying to.
Two chairs. A small table. A window. No desk between them. No diplomas on the wall — one photograph, small, a landscape she didn’t recognize. The office of a man who had decided what was necessary and removed everything else.
She walked in and he stood up and they looked at each other across the room.
He was in his mid-fifties. Lean, weathered, the kind of still that wasn’t practiced — just what happened to a person after enough years of moving through environments where stillness was survival. A face that had been rearranged by time and experience and sun into something that didn’t give much away unless you knew how to look.
She knew how to look.
She read him in the first fifteen seconds the way she read terrain. The way he’d positioned his chair. The angle he’d chosen relative to the door. The economy of his movement when he stood. The quality of his attention — not clinical, not detached. The attention of someone who had learned that attention was the most useful thing you could offer another person.
She sat down.
He sat down.
He didn’t introduce himself with credentials. Didn’t open a folder. Just looked at her with the steady unhurried patience of someone who had done this long enough to know that the first session wasn’t about information. It was about whether the room was going to work.
“Park,” he said.
“Walters.”
Something moved between them. Not warmth exactly. Recognition.
She read the rest of him in the silence that followed. The way he carried himself. The stillness. The hands — the left one with a scar across the palm she recognized as the kind that came from working with specific tools in specific places.
“Delta,” she said.
He looked at her.
“Demolitions,” she said.
He was quiet for a moment.
“Marine scout sniper,” he said. “SEAL attachment.” A pause. “How long did it take you.”
“Fifteen seconds.”
Something moved at the corner of his mouth. Not quite a smile.
“Manning said you were good.”
“Manning was Army.”
“She was.” He leaned back in his chair. “I was Delta for fourteen years. Three theaters. The work I did doesn’t have a clinical name but you know what it looks like.” He paused. “I’m telling you that because I want you to know that whatever comes out of your mouth in this room I’m not going to need it explained. And I’m not going to flinch.”
She looked at him.
“Manning said that too.”
“Manning was right.” He paused. “The difference is I’ve sat in your chair. Not the same chair exactly. Close enough that I know what the view looks like from it.”
She was quiet for a moment.
“You buried them,” she said.
He looked at her steadily.
“How do you know.”
“Because you’re still here,” she said. “And you’re not carrying what I’m carrying. I can see the difference.”
He was quiet for a moment longer than she expected.
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