Page 2 of My Forbidden Commander

“Convoy from the airfield stopped for a mine sweep, sir. I figured showing up alive beat showing up on time.”

Hayes makes a sound like a strangled cough. Okafor’s expression could split granite.

I let the silence do its work. Most soldiers can’t survive four seconds of my silence. Reyes takes it the way he apparently takes everything else—chin up, something bright and dangerous moving behind his eyes—and I have the unwelcome thought that this is a young man who has been stared down by scarier things than colonels and lived to be smug about it.

Should not have survived. The report’s words. He knows it, too. It’s written all over him, in the bruise and the knuckles and the transfer request. According to the paperwork, he already died once, and I get the feeling everything he’s done since has been out of pure spite.

“There’s a chair.” I nod at the empty one at the end of the table, farthest from the map board. A small order. Meaningless. A test with exactly one right answer.

He looks at the chair. He looks at me.

Then he crosses the room and sits, unhurried, draping one arm over the back of it like he’s settling in to watch a movie he’s already seen. Technically, it’s perfect obedience. It’s also a great big question mark aimed straight at me.

“Yes, sir,” he says.

Two words. Regulation words. Every soldier in this war says them fifty times a day, and not one of them says them like that—like the sir is a door he’s holding open just to see if I’ll walk through it.

I turn to the map board. Karsk Ridge in red grease pencil, patrol routes, the border crawling through the mountains like a scar. My hands are steady, my voice is steady, everything about me is exactly what it’s supposed to be.

“Gentlemen. Welcome to Kestrel. Everything east of this line wants you dead.”

I get through the briefing. I only look at the end of the table twice.

The file said reckless. The file said insubordinate. The file said should not have survived.

What it should have said is run.

2

NOAH

The convoy sits on a mud road for forty minutes while two engineers wave a metal detector over a puddle, and I spend the whole time thinking that if I die seven kilometers from my new posting, at least the paperwork will be funny.

“Reyes.” The driver, a corporal with a face like old leather, flicks his cigarette out the window into the rain. “You’re the transfer? Border ops?”

“That’s me.”

“You request this?”

“Yeah.”

He looks at me in the mirror the way people look at car wrecks.

“Something wrong with you, kid?”

Probably. But the engineers wave us through before I have to answer, and Kestrel rises out of the fog like something the mountains coughed up—wet concrete, sagging camo netting, a flagpole leaning three degrees off true. Home sweet home. Eleven klicks from a border where people shoot back, which is exactly eleven klicks closer than anywhere else would put me.

By the time I dump my gear and get pointed at the briefing hut, I’m late. The others went ahead while I signed for a bunk and a rifle locker. I could jog. I don’t. There’s a lesson I learned in a cellar in Orsha Valley that I’ve never managed to unlearn: rushing gets you exactly as dead as walking, so you might as well walk.

I push the door open, and six pairs of eyes swing my way. Five of them don’t matter.

The sixth pair is gray.

I’ve read the name. Everybody’s read the name. Colonel Gabriel Wolfe, the man who pulled an entire company out of Velin Pass after command wrote them off, who runs missions that officially never happened, whose soldiers talk about him the way old women talk about saints. I expected a hard-ass. I expected the stare.

Nobody warned me about the rest of it.

He’s built like the mountains outside, broad and weathered and permanent, silver threading heavy through dark hair at the temples, stubble to match. Mid-forties, and he wears every year of it like armor. He stands at the map board with his arms crossed, the whole room bending around him like iron filings around a magnet, and then those gray eyes land on me and go straight through me.