Cold Blooded Killer
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 20
Mountain Springs Recovery, Colorado Springs, Colorado, May 2015
The EMDR started on a Tuesday.
Walters explained it the way he explained everything — without clinical distance, just plain language. She would hold two small handheld devices that pulsed alternately, left and right, while she held a memory in her mind. The bilateral stimulation — the alternating pulses — changed the way the brain processed the memory while she was actively holding it. Not talking through it. Not narrating it. Just holding it while the pulses did something to the mechanism underneath.
She looked at the devices in his hands.
“That’s it,” she said.
“That’s it.”
“It looks like nothing.”
“Most things that work look like nothing,” he said. “You want to try it or you want to keep looking at it.”
She took the devices.
The first memory they worked was not the worst one.
Walters had been clear about that going in — you don’t start with the worst one. You start somewhere that has weight but not maximum weight. Build the process. Learn what it feels like when a memory shifts. Then move deeper.
She chose Ramadi. The first kill. The shape in the third-floor window, the weapon coming up, the trigger breaking. The entry that had started the filing system.
She held it in her mind and the devices pulsed and Walters said nothing and she sat with the memory the way she’d never sat with it before — not filing it, not managing it, just holding it while something worked on it from underneath.
Nothing happened for the first ten minutes.
Then something did.
She couldn’t describe it precisely and that bothered her — she could describe everything precisely, that was the whole architecture of who she was — but the closest she could get was that the memory moved. Not the content. The weight of it. Like something that had been embedded in a fixed position shifted slightly and she could feel the shift even though nothing visible changed.
She opened her eyes.
Walters looked at her.
“Something moved,” she said.
“Yes,” he said. “That’s what it does.”
She looked at the devices in her hands.
“The entry is still there,” she said. “Ramadi. Third floor window. All of it.”
“It will always be there,” he said. “That’s not what we’re changing.”
She understood that distinction now in a way she hadn’t when he’d first explained it. The target doesn’t change. The firing solution does.
“Again,” she said.
They went again.
The session after the first EMDR left her wrecked.
Not dramatically — she didn’t collapse, didn’t break down, didn’t do anything visible. She walked out of Walters’ office and down the hallway and into her room and sat on the edge of the bed and felt like something had been moved in a space that hadn’t been opened in years and the air coming out of it was old and had nowhere to go.
She sat with it for two hours.
Then she went to the garden.
The bench facing east was empty and she sat on it and looked at the dark and let the air from the opened space go wherever it needed to go and didn’t try to file it or manage it or perform anything about it.
Just sat.
At some point she became aware that someone else was in the garden.
Walters. Sitting on the other bench ten feet away with his hands on his knees looking at the same dark she was looking at.
She didn’t ask how he knew she was there. He just knew. The way operators knew things — not through explanation but through attention paid over time.
They sat in the garden and didn’t speak for a long time.
“The first EMDR session,” she said finally. “After mine. What did you do.”
He was quiet for a moment.
“Sat in a parking lot for two hours,” he said. “Couldn’t drive. Couldn’t go back inside. Just sat.” A pause. “My therapist found me there.”
“What did he say.”
“Nothing for a while. Then he said — that’s the work. That feeling is the work. It means something moved.” Walters paused. “I didn’t believe him.”
“Did it help anyway.”
“Yes.”
She looked at the dark.
“Something moved today,” she said.
“I know,” he said. “I could see it.”
They sat in the garden until the sky began to lighten and neither of them said much else and it was enough.
The sessions continued.
Three times a week, fifty minutes, Walters taking her through the entries one at a time with the precision of a man who understood that this work required the same patience as a long range shot — you couldn’t rush the firing solution, you couldn’t force the conditions, you had to wait for the moment when everything aligned and then trust the mechanism.
Some sessions moved things. Some sessions moved nothing and she sat with the devices pulsing and felt only the devices pulsing and walked out no different than she’d walked in.
Walters told her that was normal.
She didn’t like normal when it meant no progress but she was learning to sit with it.
The prazosin continued doing what it did. The loop still came but softer now, more often than not. The Syria nightmare still came but the rifle went down at the reset more nights than it didn’t. Small calibrations. Barely measurable.
She measured them anyway. Of course she did.
The Jenny nightmare came on a Thursday.
Not at night. In a session. She was holding a memory — the compound in the Jazirah desert, the barrel swap, the fourteenth kill — and the EMDR was moving something in it and then without transition without warning she was in the overwatch nightmare instead.
The street. The woman with the shell. The slow deliberate movement.
The face turning.
Jenny.
“You always do this,” Jenny said. “You wait until it’s too late.”
She dropped the devices.
Walters didn’t react. Just waited.
She was breathing too fast and she knew she was breathing too fast and she applied the same discipline she applied to everything — counted the breath, slowed it, brought the rate down by force of will the way she brought her heartbeat down to forty-three beats per minute before a trigger press.
It took longer than usual.
When she came back Walters was still there. Same position. Same patience.
“Jenny,” she said.
“Your sister.”
“She’s in one of the loops. She’s the target.” She stopped. “She’s against the war. She’s been against it since the beginning. And I dream her with a shell and I—” She stopped again.
“You take the shot,” Walters said.
“Every time.”
He was quiet for a moment.
“What does Jenny know about the dream.”
Min-Ji looked at him.
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