Special Agent | ✓

Thirty-Two

a/n: early update alert 

THIRTY-TWO

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Bang. Bang. Bang.

With each shot, the recoil burst through Quinn's wrist. The gun fired rapidly, shots appearing in quick succession on the target placed a considerable distance away. It was the third picture she'd been intent on littering with holes, and this was the umpteenth round of ammo she'd bought from the proprietor of the shooting range.

Quinn fired another two shots, then felt the gun click. Another one, emptied out. She reached for another round of bullets, scattered on the flat desk beside her. She'd hit the target more times than she could count — the markings for the head of the target silhouette were little more than shreds by now.

Yet Quinn still felt nothing.

When she'd first hung up on Adina, she'd burst out of Kat's apartment in a flurry of anger. She'd harbored that anger, felt it fuel her as she stomped angrily through Prague. Her fingers had itched, wishing for a trigger to pull, to feel the morbid satisfaction of firing at, well, something.

Quinn had tried imagining the target as Cam. Perhaps that was the most infuriating thing of all — that a small part of her still did not want to hurt Cam, the same small part that believed it had all been a lie. That Cam wasn't the one who'd put her in this position, that Cam hadn't broken her trust, betrayed her, and on top of it placed a kill order on her head.

Bang. Bang. Bang.

Her shoulder ached by now, stiff from being in the same position for so long. There were no other shooters here, not anymore. The young man who'd first been here when Quinn arrived had looked skeptically at her cold-hearted shredding of the targets, before he quite literally escaped from the shooting range.

Now it was just Quinn, and the demons haunting her head.

She knew she had to face it. She'd faced a lot of things in her life, and it seemed that whenever she thought she could finally slow down and relax another bloody shitstorm headed her way. Perhaps she wasn't meant to have peace — perhaps she, somehow, always would run headlong into trouble.

It's the business you got yourself into, Quinn reminded herself, felt the gun recoiling as she fired another volley of shots. But another part of her worried that it wasn't the business — it was her, her past, her very self. A magnet for trouble.

Maybe you're better off letting Sarraf do her mission, and put a bullet in you once and for all. Quinn stopped shooting, stunned at her own train of thought. She was a survivor, a fighter, but at this very moment ... Quinn was just tired. Tired of it all.

Tired of the Agency, of Cam, Davidson, the Chiefs, and especially tired of Gavin fucking Locke.

When Quinn felt her phone buzzing in her pocket again, she knew it was about time to face the music. The horrible orchestra of out-of-tone music, that is, which faced her. She'd ignored a number of calls, had let the phone vibrate in her pocket until it ceased, before the buzzing started back up again. It was a spare phone that Kat had had laying around, whose number she'd given only to Adina and Kat, and so she knew precisely who could possibly be calling her.

The only two allies you have left.

She had Hypatia. She knew that — knew that she could contact Ryonne and ask her to whisk her away to a country under a new name, with a new passport. They were good enough friends to do that.