Luna walked over and sank onto it.
“Have you ever heard of lingchi?” he asked as he pulled a blade from a rack of them, spinning the blade round in his hands. “It translates to ‘death by a thousand cuts.’ He’ll suffer for the next seven hours,” Kit said, turning his gaze down onto his captive, trailing the tip of his knife across the man’s shoulder. “If that appeases you?”
Her idea of suffering had been merely to shoot him somewhere other than his head so he could bleed out. Kit’s method of suffering …
“That’s … yes.”
“Right then. Don’t worry,” Kit said, this time to Benjamin who had grown deathly silent as he stared up at Kit in horror. “I’ll start with your penis and work my way out.”
The first cut drew a sharp cry from Arnold’s mouth, the second one just as loud. Luna didn’t think she had ever heard screams quite like those—gut-wrenching sounds that made her stomach feel like it was dropping.
But she never moved, nor did she look away as Kit applied each cut with expert precision. He was a killer, she reminded herself, a master at his trade, and she was seeing the full extent of that.
She didn’t know how much time passed as she sat there watching him work before she noticed a peculiar thing about him.
He wasn’t sweating.
His hands weren’t shaking.
Nor were his pupils blown out the way Lawrence’s had whenever he did violence.
Kit seemed entirely unaffected.
Even as the blood began dripping from the table onto the floor, nearly covering his arms up to his elbows, he didn’t seem bothered at all.
Luna should have been horrified at the violence before her, but as she watched Kit work, she might have fallen a little in love.
Chapter Nine
Movies, Luna realized, only ever showed bits and pieces, fragments of what it really meant to learn a trade.
And she was learning this the hard way.
Once Benjamin had finally stopped breathing, Luna’s training had officially begun.
With none other than Kit.
It almost felt as though she had been hung in suspense until he could be the one that was actually training her, and once it was time to start, she knew almost immediately that it wouldn’t be anything like what she had done with the Wild Bunch.
Originally, she had thought she would spend a few days on different tasks—a week for guns, two for knives, and more for everything else that she would possibly have to learn, but those days quickly added up to weeks, and weeks turned into months.
She wasn’t just learning how to shoot a gun, he’d explained during one of the many nights she spent in his weapons room.
Anyone could shoot a gun.
He gave her manuals inches thick that taught her the intricate details of the various weaponry he had stored in his home.
There were days when she wasn’t actually handling a weapon, but reciting facts when he quizzed her until she could remember it all with ease.
From guns, they moved on to knives, and even that was an in depth lesson, but she found herself rather fascinated by the knives than wielding a gun.
She couldn’t help but recall the precision he used when he cut Benjamin to pieces, wanting to be able to do that.
The first time he set a throwing knife into her hand, she familiarized herself with the weight of it. If it was possible to love something before she even knew what to do with it—she loved that knife.
“They’re harder to kill with,” Kit had told her that day, seeing the way she looked at it.
“Then I’ll learn to make it easy.”
No matter how she nicked her hand, or how the blade clattered to the floor when it missed its target, she never gave up.
Not her first attempt, or the 105th.
She practiced, and practiced more, until the moment when she let that blade fly out of her hand, shooting like an arrow through the air, and watched it sink into the very center of her target.
But she soon found that the weapons were easy—it was learning hand-to-hand combat that was hard.
She had thought that it, too, would be easy to learn, but it took work—and a hell of a lot of pain.
It wasn’t Kit that worked with her on this, but Aidra. Luna wasn’t sure where Kit had disappeared to, but she wasn’t given much time to think about it when Aidra stepped foot in that gym.
She was relentless, and whereas Kit seemed a bit more patient when it came to the mistakes she made, Aidra was no-nonsense.
“Your own body is your biggest weapon,” Aidra had said from day one. “Your gun can jam, a blade can be struck from your hand, so your last line of defense comes down to you, understand?”
Luna couldn’t count the number of times her back had hit the mat over the weeks she trained with Aidra, but each time she got back up, it was harder to get her back down again.