Page 3 of My Forbidden Commander

My mouth goes dry.

That’s a problem. I file it under later and lean my weight onto one hip, because the one thing I know how to do when I’m off balance is look like I’ve never been on balance a day in my life.

“Specialist Reyes.” His voice is low. He doesn’t raise it. He doesn’t need to.

“Sir.” I give him most of a salute.

“You’re late.”

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

Somebody down the table chokes. The sergeant—big guy, Okafor according to his name tape—looks at me like he’s already measuring my grave. And the Colonel? He says nothing. Just lets the silence build. I bet that silence makes young soldiers sweat through their uniforms.

I hold it. I’ve held worse. I held six hours of silence in a collapsed cellar with a jammed radio and four dead friends above me, so a colonel’s disappointed quiet doesn’t even rank. But something else happens while I’m holding it. He watches me hold it, and his eyes shift, just barely, the gray going darker, and I get the strangest feeling that he’s not cataloging my insubordination.

He’s cataloging me.

“There’s a chair.” He nods at the empty seat at the end of the table.

A chair. A tiny little order, the kind you give a dog. Sit. I’ve been handed this test a hundred times by a hundred officers, and the game never changes: refuse and get hammered, or obey like a whipped recruit and get filed under broken, manageable.

Except there’s a third option, and it happens to be my specialty.

I cross the room, sit, and drape my arm over the chair back like it’s a regular Saturday.

“Yes, sir.”

For half a second, something moves behind that granite face, some flicker in the storm-cloud eyes, and I can’t tell if he wants to court-martial me or bend me over the briefing table. My pulse kicks up either way.

Cut it out, Reyes.

He turns to the board, and I make myself look at the map instead of the way his shoulders fill out the uniform.

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

The briefing is good. Which is annoying. I’ve sat through a dozen of these where some officer reads slides he didn’t write and answers questions with the tactical depth of a fortune cookie, and I’ve learned to spot the difference in about ninety seconds. Wolfe wrote every word of this. He talks about the ridge like he’s bled on it, walks us through patrol routes and dead zones and the three places the Dravosians like to stack ambushes, and he doesn’t dress any of it up. No glory, no speeches. Just here’s the ground, here’s the enemy, here’s how you stay alive on my watch.

I catch myself leaning forward.

Then I catch him watching me. Twice. The first time, his eyes flick to the end of the table mid-sentence and hold a beat longer than a head count requires, and heat crawls up the back of my neck like I’m the one who got caught.

The second time, I’m ready for it, and I don’t look away, and neither does he, and the room gets very small for about a second and a half before he taps the map and moves on like nothing happened.

Nothing did happen. That’s what I tell myself while he dismisses us into the rain.

The barracks hut smells like mildew and gun oil and somebody’s contraband coffee. Six bunks, a wood stove that looks older than the war, and a window with a crack running through it that someone patched with duct tape and a prayer. I claim the bunk in the corner, the one with a clear view of the door, and nobody fights me for it.

Hayes, the comms guy, drops onto the bunk across from mine and sticks out a hand. Blond, blue-eyed, a poster-ready All-American soldier.

“Hayes. And for the record, that was the ballsiest thing I’ve seen since Delgado ate an MRE from 2009.”

“It was fine,” Delgado rumbles from two bunks down, not looking up from his boot laces. He’s a bit older and three shades darker than me.

“You went blind for an hour,” Hayes drawls.

“Partially.”

I shake Hayes’s hand.