Nix. (Den of Mercenaries Book 3)(37)

“Are you ready?” he asked her, taking her down the stairs, around the pool and across the way from the room they had been in the night before.

This one, too, had a heavy metal door, the inside padded to keep the sound from echoing. There was a table that spanned the width of the room, and on the other end were five paper targets hanging against the wall.

On the table spread out before them was a dismantled handgun, along with an M16 on the other side.

“I was going to ask what the first lesson of the day would be,” Luna murmured as her gaze darted around the table.

“Practice, remember,” he said, “you’re still learning how they work. Sit”

At the table, her eyes roamed over all the parts waiting, almost eagerly, for what came next.

First, he showed her the recoil spring and its guide, then where it was placed on the barrel, and where the slide was positioned on that. Once those pieces were together, he attached it to the bottom half of the gun with a firm click and inserted the magazine.

Once he had it together, he dismantled it once more, thoroughly explaining each step before he placed the last piece on the table.

“Your turn,” he said with a gesture of his hand down at the table.

Stumbling through her first attempt, there were very few errors, and by the time she was on her fifth, she had it assembled with very little help from him.

She showed progress yet. “Very good.”

“What’s next?”

Kit slipped a blindfold from his pocket, holding it up for her to see. “Put this on and repeat what you just did.”

He expected apprehension, but instead he got determination as she held her hand out for the cloth.

There was promise for her yet.



Fang was, by far, the easiest to like, not that he really seemed to give people much of a choice. He had a rather sunny, albeit morbid, disposition that took a bit of getting used to, but Luna liked him all the same.

Thanatos and Invictus were both friendly—in their own way. The two were often together, and seemed the closest of the four, but Luna hadn’t understood why until she spent an afternoon with the two of them. They were ying and yang,

T?cut on the other hand … he only seemed to be tolerating her existence.

At first, Luna had thought that it was because of their lack of communication. She knew he could understand her just fine, but because he couldn’t speak, she could only go off of his body language, which might have been easier had he not always had his arms folded across his chest and a permanent scowl on his face.

It had only been made worse when she had stumbled into the lot of them one evening and found that T?cut knew sign language. The other three understood what he was saying well enough—Thanatos even laughing at something that he gestured.

It wasn’t until then that Luna thought maybe he wasn’t interested in talking to her at all.

She wondered if she had done something to inadvertently offend him, but after drawing a blank—there were very few interactions between them to even review—she just chalked it up to him just not being interested in her.

Now, she made it a point to give him his space.

It was also for that reason that Luna had disappeared down into the training room, giving the Wild Bunch their freedom upstairs.

Despite her progress with Kit, she still wasn’t satisfied with where she was. Breaking out of his hold had become easier, though she had yet to be able to do it on the first try. Assembling and shooting a gun was by far the one thing she had almost mastered.

But knives?

She sucked.

Kit made it look so easy when he had his blades by the handles, showing her how best to hold it before he launched it across the room, embedding the metal in its target.

Whenever she did it, either she would hit the target with the handle and her weapon clattered to the ground.—and if she was able to hit her target, the blade only stuck for a second before it too was hitting the floor.

But practice made perfect, so here she was.

Dragging the case from its resting place against the wall, she lifted it onto the table, flipped the locks and pulled it open, revealing the gleaming set of throwing knives inside.

Picking up the first, she eyed her target, counting each ring as she centered her thoughts. She could do this.

After watching Kit do it more than a hundred times, she was sure she could manage at least one.

On her next inhalation, she turned the blade round in her hands. As she exhaled, she cast her arm forward, sending the knife flying end over end. She was almost sure she would make it … until the handle slammed into the target and the knife dropped like dead weight.

Luna was about to pick up another when a notepad slammed down onto the table beside her, the hand it had been thrown out of scarred and tan, belonging to the last person she was expecting to see.

T?cut.

She was sure he didn’t mean to look as annoyed as he did, at least that was what she hoped.

Unlike the other three members of the Wild Bunch, T?cut’s head was shaved close to the scalp which only seemed to emphasize the cut of his jaw and cheekbones.

And since his expression always remained somewhere between annoyed and disinterested, it only served to make him look more fearsome.

With a sharpie, he scrawled one word on the paper before pointing from it to her.

“Wrong,” Luna said aloud. “Are you saying I’m doing it wrong? This is the way Ki—Nix showed me.”