The seventh visit ended not with a lesson in firepower, but with the slow, deliberate act of putting a weapon to sleep. Piece by piece. Until the table was clean and the only thing left between us was the echo of a girl who once played in the sun.
For a long moment, she was silent. Then she reached into her jacket and pulled out a faded photograph—a child with a plastic toy rifle, grinning in a field of sunflowers.
She picked up the bolt carrier, her fingers moving with the ease of someone who'd held one since she was tall enough to see over a trench. The first six visits had been about survival, about tactics, about the geometry of ambushes and the mathematics of ballistics. But today, she set the parts aside.
