Page 13 of My Forbidden Commander

“What Spencer said,” Delgado adds. “But longer, and with feeling.”

Hayes flops back onto his bunk. “Fine. Yes. Good spot, hero. But I maintain that if the Colonel starts personally supervising your dental hygiene, I get to say I called it.”

“What I don’t love,” Delgado says, quieter now, “is the card itself. Two weeks of pattern-mapping. Three units logged. That’s not some conscript with binoculars getting bored on a ridge. Border Wolves don’t do homework unless there’s a test coming.”

“The interpreters at my last posting wouldn’t say the name out loud,” Petrillo offers. “One of them crossed himself. And he was the atheist.”

“They tie red thread around their wrists,” Delgado adds. “Their operators. Old protection thing. Guy in the Dustlands told me if you find the thread, you found where a Wolf slept, and you should be somewhere else already.”

Hayes pulls his blanket up. “Great. Love that. Going to sleep so well now.”

Okafor kills the lights at 2200 on his way through, pausing just long enough to say: “Random windows means random wake-ups, gentlemen. Sleep while you can.”

I don’t sleep.

I lie in the corner bunk with my hands behind my head and stare at the water stain on the ceiling as my brain runs the day on a loop.

I came to Kestrel because after Orsha Valley, the only place I could stand to be was the place most likely to finish the job. I don’t even admit that to myself most nights.

The rain drums on the roof. Hayes mumbles something in his sleep about natural causes.

I didn’t come here to be smart. I came here to run at the thing most likely to end me, and for the first time since the cellar, the thing most likely to end me isn’t across the border.

It’s in a hut a hundred meters away, maybe lying awake right now like I am. Maybe even thinking about how close we were behind that deadfall earlier.

And me? I want to see if I can get even closer.

7

GABRIEL

The clock on the footlocker reads 2314, and I’ve been lying in the dark for over an hour, losing a war on my own mattress.

I ran through the day twice. Cleaned my sidearm even though it didn’t need it. Wrote tomorrow’s tasking in my head, drafted the follow-up report to command on the range card, listed every man’s ammunition count from memory. All the tricks, but none of them work, because the second I stop giving my brain a mission, it goes back to a deadfall on the Velin approach and a specialist pressed shoulder to shoulder against me in the wet needles.

I could feel his body warmth. I could smell him.

I roll onto my side. The bunk creaks, the generator hums, and rain taps against the roof, and I am forty-five years old and hard as a rail spike over a twenty-three-year-old under my own command.

Three nights of this, three nights of pretending it’s insomnia, or the mission, or the coffee, and lying here rigid in every sense while a voice with a hook in it says yes, sir on a loop in my skull.

I press the heel of my hand against my cock through the blanket. It was meant to relieve the pressure, but instead, every nerve ending in my body lights up like a flare.

“Christ,” I breathe into the dark.

I have a rule. It’s the oldest rule I have, older than the Army, laid down somewhere in a boyhood I don’t examine, poured like a foundation. Men don’t want this. Real men, soldiers, colonels, men who lead other men into gunfire and carry them out again—they do not lie in the dark thinking about a young man’s mouth.

Except I found cracks in that foundation years ago. Twice, maybe three times in twenty years, alone in some hotel room between postings with a laptop and enough bourbon I could blame it on… I looked. Men with men. I watched with my jaw locked and my pulse hammering, and afterward I sat in the shower until the water went cold and swore it off like a man swearing off a drug. It never happened. It doesn’t count if it never happened. And, of course, I’d never do it again.

Reyes killed that in just three days.

My hand is already moving. My breathing goes deep, and I tell myself to stop, but my body won’t listen to the order.

Fine.

Fine. One tactical retreat. Burn the fuel out of the fire so I can function tomorrow. That’s all this is. Pressure management.

I shove the blanket down and take myself in hand, and the first full stroke punches the air out of my lungs. Skin on skin, too dry, too rough, and better than anything has felt in years, because the second my eyes close, he’s there.