Page 4 of My Forbidden Commander

“Reyes.”

“Oh, we know.” Hayes grins like Christmas came early. “Okafor’s been muttering your name since we got here. So what’s the story? Nobody volunteers for border ops. You lose a bet? Kill a general’s dog?”

“Wanted the scenery,” I say dryly.

Hayes raises both eyebrows. “The scenery is mud.”

I grin at him. “I love mud.”

He laughs, and I unpack, and it’s the same ritual it always is. Rifle in the locker. Boots under the bunk. The photo of my mother I don’t look at anymore folded inside the sock I never wear, shoved to the bottom of the duffel where it can’t ambush me. My hands do it all on autopilot while my brain replays the briefing hut on a loop.

Gray eyes. That flicker.

Wolfe looked at me like I’ve been looked at before—by men in bars three towns over from any base. Careful men. Men with everything to lose. I know that look. I’ve spent years learning to spot it and years pretending I can’t.

And I could be wrong. I’m probably wrong. He’s a full colonel with a stare that could strip paint, and I’m a twenty-three-year-old specialist with a file that reads like a warning label, and the smart money says that flicker was him deciding which cliff to throw me off.

Okafor sticks his head through the door, rain dripping off the brim of his cap.

“Reyes. Colonel wants your weapons quals verified at the range, oh-six-hundred. He’s overseeing it personally.”

Hayes whistles. “Personally. He didn’t personally anything for the rest of us.”

“That’s because the rest of us didn’t audition for a firing squad on day one,” Delgado offers.

Okafor’s dark eyes stay on me, flat and unimpressed.

“Word of advice, Specialist. Whatever act got you shipped out of your last unit, the Colonel’s seen it before. He’s buried it before. Don’t make him do it again.”

The door bangs shut behind him. Hayes makes a face like a man watching a prank unfold and finding it delicious.

I lie back on the bunk, lace my fingers behind my head, and stare at the water stain on the ceiling. I should be worried. Oh-six-hundred, personal supervision, a colonel who’s already got my number, and a sergeant who wants my head on the wire. Any sane soldier would spend tonight figuring out how to go invisible.

Instead, I’m thinking about a pair of gray eyes going dark at the end of a table, and the way he held my stare one second past professional, and I’m smiling at a water stain like an idiot.

That cellar taught me how to breathe without making a sound. How to count rounds by feel. It also taught me to stop wanting things, because wanting things is how you get killed.

Eleven kilometers from the border, on my first night at Kestrel, I can already feel that last lesson coming apart.

3

GABRIEL

The clock on the footlocker glows green in the dark, and I’ve been staring at it since 0350, which means I got maybe three hours of sleep in small, useless pieces.

I don’t lose sleep. Sleep is a discipline like everything else. Twenty-two years of deployments taught my body to shut down on command—in transport planes, in fighting holes, in a monastery basement outside Ravnik with artillery pounding the ridge above me. I slept the night before Velin Pass, and I slept the night after, when nine of the men I brought out didn’t.

Tonight I closed my eyes and got brown ones staring back.

I sit up, put my feet on the cold plywood floor, and rub both hands down my face, stubble rasping under my palms. The rain quit sometime after midnight. Now there’s just the generator hum, the drip off the eaves, and a twenty-three-year-old specialist sitting at the end of a briefing table in my skull with his arm draped over the chair back, saying yes, sir like a dare.

This does not happen to me.

I have commanded young soldiers for two decades. Cocky ones, pretty ones, broken ones, all of it. I have processed exactly none of them as anything other than assets and liabilities. I built my life like a weapons rack, everything in its slot, everything accounted for. Work in one slot. Women in another—rare, brief, chosen because they never asked questions I couldn’t answer. Most importantly, I never let the question in my own head finish forming. Forty-five years of never letting it finish forming.

One briefing. One mouthy specialist with split knuckles and a bruise going yellow on his cheek, and I woke up at 0350 hard as a rifle barrel with his voice in my ear.

Fine. I’ll treat the problem the way I’d treat any tactical failure. Identify the breach. Seal it. So I stand, dress in the dark, and refuse to examine the fact that I’ve dressed in the dark ten thousand times and this is the first time it’s felt like arming up for contact.