Craving The Wrong Brother (Sloane and Knox) novel Chapter 146

~~THREE MONTHS LATER~~

“Again!” Jade yells. He's standing beside me with his hands in his pockets, earmuffs on, and safety glasses pushed up just enough to see my face. “Don’t stop until the clip’s empty.”

I nod without saying anything because what is there to say?

The first shot goes off, jerking my shoulder with the recoil. I keep going.

Bang.

Bang.

Bang.

The sound is everything, louder than the voice in my head that keeps whispering, ‘You killed someone, you killed someone, you killed someone.’ The indoor range smells like gunpowder and industrial bleach, a smell that makes my eyes water. My ears are muffled by the protective gear, but I can still feel each shot rattling through my chest.

Bang.

Bang.

I didn’t want to be here. Didn’t want to be standing in the firing range beneath Knox’s club, listening to Jade bark instructions at me. But after months of therapy sessions where I’ve danced around the warehouse incident—unable to voice my actual problem without risking jail time—Knox decided I needed to face my demons head-on.

And apparently, my demon is holding a gun again.

The weird thing is, when Jade first handed me the Glock, I didn’t flinch. Didn’t freeze up or have a panic attack or any of the dramatic reactions I’d been expecting. My hands just closed around it like muscle memory. Guess the problem isn’t the weapon itself. It's what I did with one just like it.

It’s the act of killing someone that’s eating me alive.

Knox is getting therapy too. He’d shot down my suggestion initially, stubborn as always, but when the night terrors came back worse than before and he started refusing pain medication as some kind of twisted form of trauma treatment, I put my foot down. You either go to them, or I bring them to you. The therapist I found for him costs more per hour than most people make in a week, but it’s working. He’s not constantly scanning every room for threats anymore. He’s not having panic attacks when I’m out of his sight—or at least, he’s getting better about hiding them.

Right now, he's watching from behind a one-way glass partition while lying on his stomach getting tattooed, a piece he’s been working on for two days. The doctor said it’s too early to be getting ink over his scars, but Knox has never been one to listen to medical advice. He won’t tell me what the design is and keeps it covered every time I try to peek. All I know is he can see us through that one-way mirror, watching Jade teach me how to shoot.

It’s like having a golden retriever boyfriend, if golden retrievers weighed two hundred pounds and had separation anxiety issues the size of Texas. When it comes down to it, he's more of a clingy Rottweiler.

The last shot echoes longer than the others. When I finally lower the gun, my hands are shaking, not from fear, but from the sheer physical effort of keeping that thing steady.

Jade steps forward and hits the button on the control panel that brings our paper silhouette toward us.

When the target stops in front of us, it's unmarked. Not a single hole. Not one.

“Wow,” Jade says. “This is actually impressive. How do you miss seventeen shots? I mean, mathematically speaking, shouldn’t you have hit it at least once by mistake?”

“Fuck you, Jade,” I reply.