I do not want flowers …

I do not want cards…

I do not want sweet nothings…

I do not want companionship…

I want pistols…

I want rifles…

I want silencers…

And, I want targets…

Preferably human, contracted, and with skeletons falling out of their closets. My thirst for blood began as a young girl. Dollhouses and little toy families didn’t appeal to me. It was my father’s arsenal. The sound of gunfire. The cold steel of a barrel. And, the idea that one shot could end life as quickly as it had begun.

My father had cursed me before I left the womb. Ruger–after his favorite gun, he’d tried naming me. But, my mother had other plans. He foresaw a future for me drawn with gunpowder, interchangeable like custom grips, self-sufficient like automatics, and lethal like switches.

I’d given my heart and soul to the soil before I stepped off the porch and conquered my first kill. I didn’t need them and wouldn’t return for them as long as I was above ground. They were in the graveyard, where everything went to decompose after their death… never to be seen again.

Until him.

Winning the heart of a heartless girl was deemed an impossible task. But, unbeknownst to me, Psalms ‘Sonnie’ Santoro was willing to visit the depths of the soil to retrieve that particular piece of me that I’d left to rot.

He was boundless.

He was relentless.

He was brutal.

He was cold.

A hunter by nature.

And I was, in fact, being hunted.