Cold Blooded Killer
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 2
She gave it three weeks.
Three weeks of being Olympic gold medalist Park Min-Ji — the interviews she’d avoided in Beijing catching up with her in Colorado Springs, the local news cameras outside the Training Center, the Korean-American community dinners where she sat at the head table and smiled and said the right things about hard work and family and representing two countries at once. Her mother accepted every invitation. Her father attended half of them and spent the other half at the hospital where a patient’s consciousness didn’t care about gold medals.
Coach Park said nothing about what came next. She was too good a coach for that.
Min-Ji trained anyway because she didn’t know what else to do with her mornings. She showed up at the Training Center and shot and the feeling was there — it was always there — but something had shifted in the architecture of it. The dam was the same. The release was the same. But the thing she was building toward was gone and without it the feeling had nowhere to land.
She sat with that for three weeks.
Then she drove to the recruiting office on Garden of the Gods Road on a Tuesday morning without telling anyone and walked through the door and a staff sergeant looked up from his desk at a young Korean-American woman in Training Center sweats and said, “Help you?”
“I want to enlist.”
He looked at her for a moment. “Any reason you chose the Marines?”
She’d thought about this. “I want the hardest thing.”
He held her gaze. Then he reached for a folder.
She told her parents that evening at dinner.
The table went silent in the way that precedes something structural giving way.
Her mother set down her chopsticks. Then she picked them up. Then she set them down again.
“I’m sorry.” Her English went precise and clipped the way it did when she was controlling something large. “You did what?”
“I enlisted. I report to Parris Island in six weeks.”
“Parris—” Her mother stopped. Switched to Korean, which meant the controls were coming off. The Korean that followed was rapid and surgical and Min-Ji caught most of it and the parts she missed she understood from tone. Eighteen years of sacrifice. Two countries. Everything they had built. For this.
Her father said nothing. He was the more dangerous of the two when he went quiet.
“Eomma—”
“Don’t.” Her mother’s hand came up. “Don’t Eomma me. You have endorsement meetings next month. You have sponsors waiting. Do you understand what that gold medal is worth? Do you have any idea what we—” She stopped again. Reorganized. “What about medical school?”
There it was.
Min-Ji had known it was coming and had prepared for it and it landed harder than she’d prepared for anyway.
“I’m not going to medical school.”
“You were accepted at Colorado and at Johns Hopkins. Johns Hopkins, Min-Ji. Your father pulled no strings for that — you earned it on your own and you’re going to throw it away to go play soldier?”
“I’m not playing anything.”
“You’re eighteen years old!”
“I was eighteen when I won the gold medal. Nobody called that playing.”
Her mother’s eyes went bright with something that wasn’t quite tears and wasn’t quite fury but lived in the territory between them. “That’s different.”
“How.”
Silence.
Jenny had stopped eating entirely. She sat with her bowl held in both hands the way their mother had taught them, watching the table with the careful stillness of someone who understood that the wrong movement would draw fire.
Her father spoke.
“The endorsements.” His voice was quiet and even and everyone at the table paid attention to it. “The appearance fees. The sponsorship contracts.” He looked at her across the table. “You understand what you’re walking away from.”
“Yes.”
“And you’re walking away anyway.”
“Yes, Appa.”
He was silent for a moment. The anesthesiologist’s silence — measuring, calculating, finding the precise dose of what came next.
“Then we put it in trust,” he said. “Everything. The endorsement money, whatever comes in while you’re gone. It goes into a trust and it waits for you.”
Her mother turned to look at him.
“Yeobo—”
“She’s going.” He said it without heat. A diagnosis, not a verdict. “We can see that. So the money waits.” He looked back at Min-Ji. “You’ll have something to come back to. Whatever that means when the time comes.”
“I don’t need—”
“It’s not for you to need right now,” he said. “It’s for us. Let us do this.”
She looked at her father across the table. The man who had bought a CO2 pellet gun the Saturday after a five year old pointed at a building and said she really wanted to do that. The man who had stood in the back of every competition she’d ever shot and said nothing until it was over.
“Okay,” she said.
Her mother made a sound and pushed back from the table and went to the kitchen and the sound of water running covered whatever else she was feeling.
Jenny set her bowl down carefully.
“Can I have your room?” she said.
Min-Ji looked at her sister. Jenny’s face was doing something complicated — the thing it did when she was trying not to cry and had decided that a joke was the only available cover.
“No,” Min-Ji said.
“Worth asking.”
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