Bound

7:

Everything usually fell silent before she pulled the trigger. A muffled explosion from the barrel followed. She adjusted her stance, and narrowed her aim. Another small, contained explosion. She got frustrated, and snatched her safety ear muffs down to her neck.

"A little off your game?" Severine didn't turn around. It was Ace, watching her hit the faceless silhouette in the shoulder, and then the third rib on the right side. If the target had been a person, the bullet would have lodged itself into their scapula.

She glanced back at Ace, and placed her ear muffs back on. She aimed again. Another explosion echoed into the shooting range. Headshot.

"I guess not," he chuckled, marveling at the bullet hole left behind between where the target's eyes would be.

"Never off my game," she muttered as she brushed past him, and he took her place at the training station.

***

Severine's morning meditation didn't involve any inversions or mantras. It was more simplistic. She envisioned her demons, and then shot at them.

She was shrugging her black blazer back on next to her locker when Jules walked in. He was unwinding his elastic wraps from his hands, his skin slick with perspiration. A beat was blasting from his headphones. Public Enemy. It reminded her of her brother.
Jules reached into his locker, and she scowled. He didn't acknowledge her, and she read it as nothing less than deliberate. He looked preoccupied to anyone else, but she knew better. He was avoiding her.

The music died as he ripped his headphones off, and Severine slammed her locker shut harder than she meant to.

"What's the status on Reyes? Are they granting him immunity?" she asked. He finally looked at her, and he shook his head like he was bringing himself back into the room.

"Yeah. Yeah, I got all the paperwork filed," he tossed a towel over his shoulder.

Severine looked around before issuing her question. "What's up with you?"

"I'm good, Deleon." His response was curt, and so unlike him.

She had known it was coming; the change in him that would materialize without warning. The unavoidable byproduct of him knowing what she looked like naked.

"Got it," she pressed her tongue into her cheek, and then walked away.

Jules exhaled a lungful of tension when the door swung shut behind her. All he could think about was Lincoln Pearce. He had pulled himself out of bed in the middle of the night to scrutinize as many case files as his strained eyes could handle, only to arrive at a dead end.

On his lunch break, he wasn't where he was supposed to be. He was following bread crumbs again as he stood at the edge of the sidewalk on 111 Kent Street. He looked at the screenshot from the surveillance footage on his phone, and then looked up at the daylight version of what the camera captured. He drew an invisible line from the alley to the intersection, and then spotted the security camera at the side of the building. He crossed the narrow street, and stopped in front of the alley that had been the backdrop to a short scene he had seen play out hundreds of times, and at differing speeds. He placed his feet where Lincoln had stood moments before collapsing to the ground. He squinted against the glare of the sun, and scanned the next building. He took a few steps back, and watched the alley come into view as he retraced Lincoln's short journey. He snapped a photograph on his phone, and then crouched to the ground. He stared at the concrete, until he saw the faint line of demarkation where a pool of blood once bloomed into a deformed circle.