Kira took the first shot.
Nico kept his eyes on her this time. The way she handled the gun looked effortless, almost lazy... but her hands knew exactly what they were doing. She racked the charging handle like someone who’d done it a thousand times before.
When she fired, she didn’t blink. Her stare followed an invisible line through the scope, tracking the bullet’s path across the range like she could see the air bend around it.
She groaned before the score reader even reached the board.
A yellow flag went up. One point under blue.
Nico caught the flag, then looked back at her.
"I must admit, I almost thought you were lucky the first time."
"You’d be surprised." Kira replied while reloading her gun. "My father, he had me and my sisters enrol in these training classes. Sword lessons, shooting. Pretty much of everything that could teach us to kill."
"Or defend."
"My father is not a defensive man."
She looked at him in the eyes as she said it.
"Whenever an enemy attacked, he always went for their head first. Zero resistance." She looked out to the field. "When we were younger, he’d mostly gather me and my sisters together and tell us to always be predators. Never prey."
A small smile tugged at Nico’s mouth.
"The man knows his catchphrase."
"He does. It was the very same catchphrase that resulted to the death of our mother."
Silence dropped over the range like a curtain.
Nico didn’t say anything. He didn’t need to. Everyone in their world knew the shape of that story, even if the details stayed locked behind family doors. James Fenris had killed Ella Fenris not long after she gave the triplets life.
Nobody outside the family knew the real reason. What Nico understood, pieced together from scraps and whispers, was that Ella had tried to run. She’d chosen her daughters’ future over her husband’s, and she’d tried to disappear with all three of them.
Somewhere in that escape, things had gone wrong in a way nobody walked back from. Ella died from poison, and Nico had heard enough to know exactly who’d handed her that final meal.
’Mafias and psychopathic family arrangements.’
"Are you gonna take your shot?"
Kira’s voice snapped him out of it.
Nico lifted his gun, drew a breath, then another, letting his focus settle before he fired.
The reader checked the board and raised a yellow flag.
"If it does make you feel better, you should know that we both have lost loved ones to this whole, mafia structure." Nico turned to her. "I lost my mom when I was 9, to some organisation I didn’t even know existed until I was 12."
Kira nodded. "Let me guess, mafia academy?"
"Yeah."
The academy wasn’t a school so much as a machine built to grind children into something usable. Its existence stayed buried, hidden even from most of the underworld, reserved only for the sons and daughters of mafia bloodlines who had no idea what they were being groomed into.
The lessons were bad. The practicals were worse — real blood, real stakes, dressed up as training. And above it all sat a hierarchy that rewarded cruelty and punished weakness on sight.
New students arrived broken down already, which made them easy prey for the ones above them. Resistance wasn’t tolerated. The older kids made the rules and enforced them with whatever force they wanted, and nobody stepped in.
Nico remembered the ones who didn’t make it. He remembered pulling a girl back from the edge of the rooftop after her own roommates had done something to her that no kid should have to survive.
Looking at Kira now, gun steady in her hands, something about her jaw reminded him of that girl. Except the girl standing in front of him wasn’t the one who got hurt. She was the one doing the hurting.
’Wait.’
The thought didn’t get far. Kira’s next shot cracked out before he could chase it down, and whatever he’d been circling in his head slipped away.
Another yellow flag rose.
Kira grunted.
"I’m guessing you’re the lucky one, because I’m sure I had that shot planned out."
"Restate shiny head, it’s not luck. You’re just not good."
Nico felt a stupid amount of satisfaction handing her own words back to her. He raised his gun again, angled it just slightly off the mark, and pulled the trigger.
The bullet sailed clean off the edge of the board.
’What the hell—’
He hadn’t meant for it to go that far wide.
The reader didn’t bother walking over. He just lifted a red flag from where he stood, and Kira laughed.
"You were saying?"
"That one wasn’t calculated."
"Sure, sure."
Kira loaded her next round and took her time lining it up, longer than before, like she was weighing every decision that had led her to this exact shot. Her stance locked in. Her eyes went flat and still.
She fired.
The reader crossed toward the board this time, actually bothering to look close. Then he raised a green flag and waved it overhead.
’Holy. She actually did it.’
Kira turned to him, grinning like she’d just won something bigger than a shooting match.
"You lost your own game." She said it in mockery. "Guess who’s licking my feet now."
Nico ran the math on his own bad decisions. He’d rigged the terms of this bet without thinking either outcome through, and now both paths led somewhere he didn’t want to go.
He’d thrown his second shot on purpose, planning to throw the third too, just to dodge the humiliation of Kira kneeling at his feet. What he hadn’t planned for was her actually landing a green flag before he got the chance.
Now the idea of kissing her feet sounded a hundred times worse than it had five minutes ago.
He stood there, caught between regret and the sinking realization that there was no version of this where he walked away looking good. That was when Lucas came through the door.
"Boss. It’s your father."
’Ah, thank god.’
Nico turned toward him, grateful for literally any interruption.
"Wait. What do you mean?"
"Your father." Lucas had a slightly worried look on his face. "He’s here."