Page 39 of My Forbidden Commander

“Third time.” He doesn’t ask why. He just holds my eyes for a second, then goes back to the map.

At the start, I told myself I’m joining the patrols to keep my edge sharp, to lead from the front the way men expect from a colonel who’s earned his rank in the mud instead of behind a desk. And maybe that was true once. But it stopped being true the day Noah Reyes joined this team, and it’s been a lie of omission ever since.

I join because if something goes wrong out there, I want to be close enough to do something about it. Close enough to him.

“Step-off at 0200,” I tell Okafor.

The formation forms up in the cold at 0150. Their breaths fog, but the sky is crisp tonight, the stars bright. Delgado checks his kit twice, Hayes mutters something about beauty sleep, Petrillo shoulders his aid bag like it weighs nothing, and Spencer racks the belt-fed gun with the competence of a man who’s done it ten thousand times.

Reyes stands near the back, rifle slung, hair pushed back under his cap. When his eyes meet mine, I see they’re steady. There’s no smirk on his face now, just a soldier waiting for orders. I only take one extra second to look at him—any more and Okafor would notice.

“Order of march,” Okafor says. “I’ve got point, Delgado, Spencer, Petrillo, Hayes. Reyes at six. Colonel walks trail.”

Nobody argues. Reyes doesn’t even glance my way when his name gets called, when he’s positioned right in front of me, and I feel a small, useless swell of pride at that.

“Move,” I say, and we go.

The trail to the Velin waypoint climbs through pine and broken shale. It’s so cold up here, it feels like a knife slicing through three layers of clothing like it’s nothing. We move in bounds, stopping every few hundred meters to listen. But the mountain gives us nothing but the wind.

I walk trail, watching the file ahead of me, and every time we stop, I find Reyes’s silhouette in the green wash of my night vision goggles before I check anything else. It’s become an instinct I don’t want to fight anymore.

Ninety minutes in, Okafor’s fist comes up, and the column freezes.

I go to a knee, sweep my sector, and wait for the signal to come down the line. It comes fast: cache, ahead, fifty meters. Exactly where Callahan’s team marked it.

We approach slowly, weapons up, fanning out. The cache appears exactly as described—crates stacked under a tarp, bike tracks pressed into soft dirt, and there, scratched into the bark of the nearest tree at eye level, three quick strokes shaped like a wolf’s head.

I freeze, and it has nothing to do with the cold.

“Too obvious,” I murmur, and key my radio. “Okafor, this doesn’t sit right.”

He comes back to me immediately. “Sir?”

“They wouldn’t leave a mark like that unless they wanted it found.” I thought the same thing about the range card and didn’t listen to myself hard enough then. “Pull back from the crates. Now.”

The order is barely out of my mouth when the night explodes with sound. Muzzle flashes bloom from the treeline, from the rocks above us, from a gully I’d have sworn was empty thirty seconds ago. They had this position mapped before we ever set foot on the trail, and the cache wasn’t a waypoint. It was bait, and we walked into the middle of it like recruits on their first patrol.

“Contact! Multiple directions!” Okafor’s voice cuts through the chaos. “Cover, cover, get to cover!”

I drop behind a boulder as rounds smash into the dirt where I stood half a second ago. Through the ringing in my ears, I can hear our side return fire. Delgado’s rifle cracks nearby, Spencer’s heavy gun opens up with long, ugly roars that chew apart the treeline, and Hayes shouts grid references into the radio with a steadiness that would surprise anyone who’s only ever heard him complain.

Reyes.

My heart climbs into my throat by the time I find him through my scope, prone behind a fallen log, cheek pressed against his stock. He’s shooting at shapes moving through the gully, calm and unhurried. He puts three rounds into one shape, then two into another, then finds the next muzzle flash and takes that shot too. He’s shooting exactly the way he shot on my range that first cold morning after he arrived, precise and unbothered.

It should reassure me more than it terrifies me.

“Spencer, cover Delgado’s bound!” I shout and push up to move.

That’s when I hear the crack of a shot, closer than expected, and the thump of it finding a body. Spencer goes down behind the gun like his strings got cut.

“Spencer’s hit!” Petrillo’s already moving, aid bag banging against his hip as he drops to the ground next to Spencer. Now they’re both open.

I don’t decide to move. My body does it for me. I get to Spencer and Petrillo and put myself between them and the treeline, weapon up, firing into the muzzle flashes as Petrillo works on Spencer. The math is simple—two of my men are exposed, and I’m the only cover they have right now.

The round takes me in the shoulder before I even hear the shot go off. It spins me half around and drops me hard into the dirt, the impact knocking the air out of my lungs. For one long, white-hot second, there’s nothing in the world but the fire tearing through my shoulder and the taste of blood where I’ve bitten my tongue.

“Colonel!”