Page 50 of Taming Seraphine

He bows his head.

“Any problems?” I ask.

“We always go fishing after a big job.”

I suppress a sigh. “This one has come with an unexpected complication.”

He hesitates for several heartbeats, looking like he’s trying to muster up the courage to speak. “That girl you saved…”

“What about Seraphine?”

“Are you going to move her into an apartment like you did with me?”

“Eventually,” I say with a smile. “But she’s going to need a little extra help.”

He nods.

“Is there anything else?”

“I want to learn how to use a gun.”

“Why?”

“I’m tired of being behind the scenes. I want to help you out in the field.”

Pressure builds up behind my eyes, feeling like the beginnings of a headache. Letting him sift through those files was probably a mistake. Miko doesn’t have what it takes to look into a man’s eyes and pull the trigger.

“I brought you here because I wanted you to have a better life. Not to train you to become a killer.”

His gaze drops to the floor. “But I want to help.”

“You do. You’re the best hacker in the business, and you can put together explosives better than any demolition expert. Without your technical know-how, I would never have been able to complete the Capello job.”

“But I want to kill people,” he says. “Up close, like you.”

“Murder isn’t something to aspire to.”

He stares up at me, his blue eyes hardening. “You were doing it when you were younger than me.”

“I had no choice.”

Miko looks away, his jaw twitching. “Maybe if I killed my stepfather like you did, I’d be a hitman like you.”

My head pounds. Miko already knows my story. It’s not so different from his. We both had reckless mothers and abusive stepfathers, but I had a younger sister to protect. When I found that bastard on top of her, I grabbed his gun and shot him in the temple.

He didn’t die immediately. I left him to spend hours lying in a pool of his blood, gasping for air. When my mother finally sobered up, she called her cousin Anton and screamed at him to take me away.

Anton taught me never to miss. We practiced with paint pellets at first, and one day, without telling me, he switched the blanks to bullets.

That’s how I became Anton’s protégé and then his successor.

“You’re right,” I say. “Shooting my stepfather was my first step to becoming a murderer. But I don’t want the same life for you.”

“Isn’t that my decision?” he asks.

“Something happens to a person once they’ve made their first kill,” I say. “I don’t regret what I did to save my sister, but murdering strangers for money changes you, and not for the better.”

His posture slumps, and he stares straight ahead at the computer. “I just want to be useful.”

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