HOSTAGE (To Love A Killer) by Lexie Ray

towards the forest. Once there, he meandered deeper into the cool woods until he found a fallen tree. Ash took a deck of playing cards from his pocket and wedged them, one by one into the trunk of the fallen tree. He was making little targets.
                  He guided Hunter and Twitch away from the log by about fifty feet.
                  “Hunter, you take the first twenty cards from left to right. Twitch you go from right to left.”
                  “There’s no way I can hit that,” said Hunter. “It’s way too far away.”
                  “You’ll need to,” he said. “We’re going to have to take these guys out from far away. As many as possible. If we have to get up close and personal, then we will, but we aren’t going to go into the farmhouse planning on that. It’s too dangerous. There’s too much risk and room for error. We need to pluck them off, one by one, from afar.”
                  Twitch raised his gun, aiming carefully with one eye pinched shut and fired. A flock of pheasants flew up from the brush into the air, startled by where the bullet struck a tree. It was a good eight feet right of his edge of the log.
                  “I’m a terrible shot,” he said. “Damn, that was embarrassing.”
                  “Don’t worry about it,” said Ash. “That’s why we’re out here.”
                  Hunter raised her gun with one hand. She had never attempted to shoot anything from this far away before. It was almost dizzying how her vision split between the shape of the gun and the small playing card yards ahead in the distance. Depending on which she was focused on, she seemed to have double vision of whatever she wasn’t looking at. Two guns, or multiple playing cards.
                  Twitch resumed firing from his side, but Hunter couldn’t seem to get confident. She didn’t want to pull the trigger unless she was sure she’d hit her mark. But it wasn’t just that, that wasn’t the only reason she couldn’t seem to fire the gun. Hunter realized she couldn’t afford to lose hope. She had so little of it to begin with. If she stood here in the woods and couldn’t even hit the target, then what hope did she have of saving her sister?
                  Suddenly Ash was standing behind her, she discovered when he placed his hands gently around her hips. Soon she felt the length of him behind her, the rise and fall of his chest against her back.
                  “Hold the gun with both hands,” he instructed in a low whisper, his lips grazing her ear.
                  Hunter did as she was told, positioning her left hand as a base to the right, securing the weapon in her firm grip.
                  She felt Ash’s hands slide up her sides then down the length of her arms. He guided her aim higher, but only by a few inches, then retracted his hands away, allowing her to stand on her own.
                  “Now line the target between this plastic curve here,” he said, pointing to the front sight at the gun’s top. 
                  Hunter did, though the double vision dilemma was still evident. “But it makes me see two targets,” she said after a long moment of hesitation.
                  “You need to line up the front sight, the back sight, with the target in-between,” he clarified. “And keep both eyes open. If you close one eye, you’ll see half as well. That goes for you too, Twitch.”
                  Twitch lowered his gun. “You mind schooling me next? All I’m hitting over here are squirrels and that’s on accident.”
                  “Give me a second,” said Ash, returning his attention to Hunter. “When you squeeze the trigger, don’t pull your finger back. You need to squeeze your entire fist as one unit. Go ahead, Hunter. You got