Page 32 of Scorpion

“You just aim and shoot.”

“Amateur,” I tease. I had that exact thought before I started training. I said it to TJ once as a joke, and he almost hit me over the head for it. So I told him that he was just jealous I was a better shot. “A bullet doesn’t fly through the air; it falls in a specific direction. For a shot at this distance, you need to consider the Coriolis effect.”

I hear Mathijs move beside me—to give me a blank stare, I assume. “I believe that piece of knowledge is above my pay grade.”

“It’s the pattern of deflection taken by objects not firmly connected to the ground that are moving a long distance.”

“That’s even further away from my pay grade. But keep going, seeing you nerd out turns me on.”

I drop the spotting scope and hiss, “Mathijs.” I point at his shoulders. “Focus—and watch your form.”

“I’ll be honest, I can barely line up the target,” he says nonchalantly before resuming his position. “I swear it’s moving, and you getting all smart and bossy is doing things to me.”

“Aim for something closer then,” I suggest, moving around to find something else for him to shoot. “How about the—”

A shot rings out, and my first instinct is to drag him behind me, but I stop when he says, “Sorry. I got bored.” He rolls to the side and hands me the sniper. “I believe I’m better suited to an observer role.”

“What did you hit?”

“Nothing alive, one would hope.” He shuts his eyes like he’s concentrating. When he reopens them, there’s a disappointed look on his face. “Fortunately, I don’t hear any screaming, which means I am still on track to winning boss of the year—you, on the other hand, do not have any Christmas bonuses on your horizon.”

“Give me four working days to cry about it.” We swap gadgets. I set up the sniper by fixing the height of the stand and leveraging the ground to my advantage to stabilize the kickback.

“Make that two—I’m on a tight deadline.”

I shake my head and take a deep breath, saying a silent prayer up to TJ and Gaya before looking down the scope, making all the necessary adjustments to see the dummy better.

“You make it look so easy,” Mathijs says after a moment of silence.

Scoffing quietly, I say, “I haven’t pulled the trigger yet.” It’s been a long time since I’ve tried aiming at anything more than eight-hundred meters away, and I’ve almost forgotten how difficult it is. “I have to calculate the bullet drop due to gravity, spin drift, wind, light, elevation, barometric pressure, and the final kinetic energy upon arrival,” I explain.

“Who would have guessed AP physics would come in handy.”

I huff out a half-hearted chuckle, calculating the range to the target and the estimated descent, but the world is working against me regardless of how much compensation I try to make for the angle and the amount of light on the target.

“Approximately forty-five-degree winds coming from the southwest. There’s an incline. Plus, the humidity is too high, so the impact will be lower.”

“So what does that all mean?”

I pull the trigger between heartbeats, then narrow my eyes at the target.

“It means I’ll miss the shot.”

Chapter 9

MATHIJS

Goldchild sent me a gift.

Another one of my men. Dead.

A severed fucking head in a pretty white box wrapped in a blue bow.

“Where did you find it?” I growl, staring at the bloody and blue face.

The kid’s only twenty years old. I recruited Tommy myself. All he had to do was move nonvaluable stock from one place to another. He had a sick sister he wanted to take care of, and I was covering her treatment.

“The box appeared this afternoon at the West Point warehouse,” Sergei says with a scowl. “We’ve got nothing on who dropped it or what time. The footage was wiped.”

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