Broken Wings (Dark Legacy #1)(72)
The fact that he already knew I needed more than one coffee to function in the morning showed a level of understanding I wasn’t ready to acknowledge. So I just sipped my drink and followed him through the rabbit warren house, wondering what in the hell the range was.
“Oh,” I blurted as Beck led me into a literal gun range. In the basement of his house. What the fuck...? “Right, this makes total sense.”
He flicked a quick look at me, then gestured for me to come closer. From a small table he picked up a highly polished wooden box and held it out to me.
“What’s this?” I asked, curious and excited. My parents had done their best, but money was seriously tight in our household. I barely even got gifts on my birthday, let alone for no good reason.
Beck gave a half shrug. “Just figured you needed something more girly than the guns we use.” He said it casually. Too casually.
Suspicious, I opened the box. Inside was a delicate handgun, its handle a pearly cream enamel with a blue butterfly painted on it. The engraved plate in the box said it was a Smith & Wesson M&P9 Compact 2.0. I knew nothing about guns, maybe less than nothing, but this one was prettier than most I’d seen.
“Sebastian,” I breathed out. “It’s beautiful.”
“It’s just a weapon,” he muttered, turning to a locked door and scrolling the combination to open it. Inside was a collection of guns that would put a private security company to shame. It wasn’t just a cupboard, like I’d thought. It was a full walk-in supply room with every variety of gun imaginable mounted on the walls. Or ... that was what it looked like to me, anyway.
“Holy shit,” I whispered, staring at the collection with a slack jaw.
Beck threw a cocky grin over his shoulder at me, but selected a normal looking handgun and several boxes of ammo. I kept peering into the storage room, and he coughed a short laugh.
“You can play with the big guns after you learn some basics,” he told me. With his hand on my lower back, he guided me away from the arsenal and over to the little cubicles set up in front of a long room. Running down the ceiling, tracks were set up to mechanically place targets and return them with a click of a button. Only the best when you’re that stupid rich, I supposed. For the next while, Beck taught me “the basics” as he called them. It was difficult with my fractured arm to hold the gun completely steady, but if I used that hand just as a guide, I managed to figure out a way.
After our discussion in the cinema last night, the training session was strangely ... enjoyable. No trace of the prickish asshole surfaced. He was calm, patient and understanding to the point that I started watching him from the corner of my eye with fears he’d been body snatched.
Dylan arrived early—around the same time Beck actually let me fire real bullets from my very own gun. The look on his face as he entered the gun range in the Beckett basement was one of pure confusion. No doubt he’d expected to find us tearing shreds from each other, blood splashed all over the walls and curses being screamed. Instead, what he walked in on was me jumping up and down with excitement as my target returned to show I’d actually hit the paper. Turning to Beck, almost on instinct, I high fived his waiting palm—awkwardly with my casted hand seeing as I still held a gun in the other one—then beamed at Dylan.
“Hey!” I greeted him. “Did you see? I hit the paper!”
I proudly waved my hand at the target which hung in front of my station. Admittedly, the little hole from my bullet was still a long way off the colored rings, it was barely even on the page. But fuck it, that still counted in my book!
Dylan gave Beck a cryptic glare over my head, then turned back to me with a smile. “You sure did, Riles. Good work.”
“Keep practicing, Butterfly,” Beck instructed me, brushing his hand across my bare back and sending an instinctual shiver of arousal racing through me. “Dylan and I need to discuss you.”
“Excuse me?” I demanded, whipping around to scowl at him.
“Your training,” he clarified, cocking one brow at me. “What did you think I meant?”
My face heated, and I turned back to my target to hide the embarrassment. “Uh, nothing.”
“Mm hmm,” Beck murmured with a small chuckle. He and Dylan stepped outside
Fighting the urge to follow and listen in, I instead examined my beautiful gun. Trying to decipher the hidden message there. Why did Beck buy me something so … personal?
Okay, yeah, I was clearly fucked up enough that this was akin to jewelry for me. My very own, pretty gun. It had to mean something. He’d said as much last night, but there had been so little good in my life lately that a very large part of me was screaming not to trust Beck. To not trust his words, which were so perfect. Too perfect.
But I was so fucking invested at this point, I couldn’t walk away, even if I wanted to.
Even if they would let me.
The guys returned a moment later, and there was no tension between them. If anything, Dylan looked amused while Beck was mostly expressionless.
“Come on, killer,” Dylan said, indicating I should put my gun down. “It’s time to learn how to defend yourself.
Checking the safety on my gun, because that was the first thing Beck drilled into me, I placed it gently on the bench and followed the guys from the room. Dylan was first while Beck slid in behind me. The two of them towered over me and it was like I had my own personal bodyguards as we moved into the room beside the range.