Golden Heart

(28) Just for one night

Warning: Mature Content for themes around self-harm, violence, strong language, drugs, alcohol and sex will be mentioned in the story.

Golden Heart

Five days had past. 

Five days since they had arrived at this place. Five days filled with training, training and more training. Starting at 10AM they would train until 9PM, leaving short breaks for lunch and dinner. Most of the days were spent downstairs in Gwynn's and Kylo's basement that had been turned into a small gym. There were no windows in the room, the treadmills and punching bags had been pushed against the walls to make room for their daily training sessions with the nice self-defence trainer Cassandra De Luca, a young Italian woman that had moved to Canada in 2008. To Alice she seemed a little bit intimidating, with her cat-like eyes that always looked and her deep red lipstick that never seemed to smudge. But she was actually a nice woman. 

They would train downstairs in the basement from 10AM until 5PM and then go outside to practice shooting. They had gotten lucky with the weather, it only rained one evening, shortly after they had already started brining everything inside. Miles taught them how to shoot, placing old cans or glass bottles on a log of wood. Gwynn and Kylo were the first ones to get the hang of it after the second day of training and they managed to shoot at glass bottles from a great distance. It seemed as though they had used guns before but Alice didn't really think about it too much. She followed the day after, she wasn't as good as Gwynn or Kylo and especially not as good as Miles but she still managed to hit the bottles or cans most of the time. Liam got better the day after but even on the fifth day he still couldn't shoot as good, he'd still sometimes shake a little when he pulled the trigger and usually miss the target. Miles was a little hard on him at first but then softened. 

Just Ella couldn't seem to ever hit the bottles. And it worried Alice. 

Ella usually didn't even want to touch the guns. She'd been good at the self-defence training, Cassandra even praising her. But every time it came to shooting she would back away, always finding an excuse why she could not use the gun. Alice didn't blame her. The things were scary, deadly murder weapons. But she wouldn't make Ella do this if it wasn't absolutely necessary. She had managed to convince Ella a few times, but seeing how she never managed to hit the target made her realize that five days wasn't enough to make her learn how to shoot. And it worried her more than anything else.

It was late now. The sun had disappeared a while ago, it had gotten colder but Alice was bathed in sweat since Cassandra had made them train an extra hour after shooting with Miles. She had gotten good enough to defend herself at least a little but she knew that five days weren't enough to really get her ready for what was to come. They couldn't stay with Gwynn and Kylo forever, eventually they'd have to leave, face Brooks and his men. But how could six people win a fight against at least 15 men? There was no hope, and Alice was getting ready to lose. 

Two more days of training and then they would go. They had all decided that two more days was enough, two more days was the limit. Gwynn and Kylo had tried to convince them to stay longer but even they knew that this fight wasn't going to end well. They just wanted to keep everyone inside their house but that wasn't going to work out anymore. They had to leave. They had to face Brooks and his men and they had to fight, even if it meant losing. There was no other way.  

Earlier that day, when they had been training outside and listening to some music on the radio, there had been a news report about a man escaping from the prison a few minutes out of town. The man had taken a hostage with him and search teams were wandering through the forests to find him. They were getting dangerously close to Alice and Miles and they knew if they stayed here any longer the search teams would find them here. So two days it was, not more, not less.