Page 19 of My Forbidden Commander

“Sir.” Hayes again, because it’s always Hayes again. “Question about the new arrivals. Are any of them wom⁠—”

I don’t let him finish. “Bunks and floors, Hayes.”

“Bunks and floors. Yes, sir.” He turns for the door and gets exactly one pace before the commentary resumes at a volume he believes is private. “Eight new people. You know what that means. Eight new people who haven’t heard any of my material.”

“They’ll leave,” Delgado says.

“They’ll stay, Rafael. They’ll stay for the mouse. It’s a whole saga now, there’s lore⁠—”

Okafor follows them out to supervise, which is to say, to stand nearby radiating consequences. Spencer and Petrillo peel off toward supply.

Reyes is last through the door. He pauses with one hand on the frame and glances back at me over his shoulder.

“The fourth hut, sir,” he says. “The small one. Any particular reason I get it to myself?”

There are a dozen safe answers. It’s a one-man job. You work faster alone. Dismissed.

“So you don’t need to run off to get some alone time,” I say before I can stop myself, acknowledging what we both already know.

That I know. That he knows that I know.

First, he blinks at me in surprise. Then his eyes light up with something that could be wicked delight.

Fucking fuck.

“Yes, sir,” he whispers, and goes.

The door swings shut. The hut is quiet except for the generator and the rain starting up again on the roof, and I stand there with Callahan’s file open in my hands, reading nothing and getting harder than a brick.

10

NOAH

The shower hut at Kestrel has six heads, four of which work, and water pressure that comes in two settings: mist and punishment. I stand under the punishment setting and watch a full day of mouse hut roll off me in gray ribbons.

“I want to talk about what I saw in there,” Hayes announces from the next head over, scrubbing his arms like he’s prepping for surgery. “I need to talk about it. For my health.”

“Don’t,” Delgado says.

“There was a nest, Rafael. A nest. Built out of insulation and what I’m ninety percent sure was a sock from the previous administration. And when I moved the bunk frame, something ran across my boot, and I want everyone to know that the sound I made was tactical.”

“It was a scream,” Delgado counters.

“It was a tactical alert.”

“You alerted the whole base.”

“You’re welcome, the whole base.”

Petrillo turns his face up into the spray. “The stove pipes were worse. One of them had a bird skeleton in it. Whole thing. Wings out, like it died mid-takeoff.”

“See, and Petrillo says that calmly.” Hayes flings soap off his hands in Petrillo’s direction. “That’s the disturbing part. What did they do to you in medic school?”

Petrillo shakes his head. “Anatomy lab.”

“Wiring was fine,” Spencer says, and that’s Spencer’s entire after-action report.

I let it wash over me with the water. I’ve got my forearms braced against the plywood wall and my head down, and I am, technically, listening. Twenty percent of me is listening. The other eighty is back in the command hut, standing in that doorway with my hand on the frame.