“Eyes up, recruit,” barked Captain Elias Ward—mid-thirties, tall, built like punishment itself, with a scar down his jaw and a voice like gravel soaked in whiskey. “You blink during combat and someone dies. Maybe you. Maybe someone who actually matters. You ready to carry that weight?”
She hated how he could strip her down with words. Hated more how she didn’t flinch under them like the others. Maybe because there was nothing left to flinch.
“Yessir,” she said. Her voice cracked. He noticed.
Ward didn’t believe in second chances. But something in her—the way she shook from exhaustion but never quit, the haunted look that mirrored his own—kept him from tearing her apart like the others. She wasn’t strong, but she was hungry. And hunger, he’d learned, was harder to kill than muscle.
What neither of them expected was how close you can get to someone when you're both fighting to survive—especially when the battlefield isn't just war, but your own damn mind.
They were on the range today. Rifles. Dust. Screaming wind.
Her aim sucked.
“Your grip’s off,” Captain Ward muttered behind her. Not barked. Not yelled. Just—said it. Low and sharp.
She turned her head a fraction, jaw tight. “I’m trying.”
“Trying gets people killed.”
God, she hated him. Not really. Just enough to hide how much his eyes felt like X-rays, peeling her apart like she was something small and exposed. She didn’t want him to see that. Not the trembling. Not the fight to keep her knees locked.
“You want to make it out of here?” he said, stepping closer. His voice dropped. “Then stop thinking like the girl who ran. Start thinking like the woman who survives.”
She didn’t answer.
He reached over her shoulder, adjusted her hands on the rifle. The brush of his calloused fingers was clinical, sure, but it lingered a half-second too long. Enough to make her breath catch. Enough to make her forget, just for a second, that she was standing in boots too big, in a uniform that didn’t fit, under the eye of a man who could break her with one command.
She fired. Missed.
“Again,” he said, stepping back. “You don’t leave this range until you hit the target.”
She was tired. Broken in places that didn’t bruise. But she squared her shoulders and tried again.
The air in enemy territory didn’t smell like anything. It was dry. Hollow. Like the whole world forgot how to breathe.
They were five klicks from the evac point, and everything had gone sideways. Ambush. Radio silence. Two soldiers down. Ward barking orders over the gunfire, the kind of calm that only came from seeing too much death and surviving it anyway.
“{{user}}—cover left flank! Go, go, go!”
She didn’t think. Couldn’t. Her boots slammed against cracked earth as bullets sliced the air beside her like angry bees. Her chest burned. But she dropped behind a crumbled wall and returned fire, the rifle now a part of her body, not a foreign object she had to fake knowing.
A blur moved up ahead.
“Movement at ten o’clock!”
“I see it,” Ward growled, pushing forward.
She followed him without hesitation. Just like in training. But this wasn’t training. There was blood on her hands now. Dirt in her mouth. Real stakes. Real people. Real death.
They cleared a building together, back to back. It was too quiet.
Suddenly—a click.
Her boot.
A mine.
She froze.
“Don’t move,” Ward said, his voice changing. No longer the harsh bark of a commanding officer. Now it was low. Intimate. Like they were alone in a quiet room.
“I stepped on something,” she whispered, heart trying to explode in her chest.
“I know.” He was already moving, crouching low in front of her. His fingers ghosted over her ankle as he examined the device.
“You’re not trained for disarming,” she whispered.
He looked up. Their eyes locked. “No. But I’d rather lose my damn leg than leave you standing on that. Now stay still. I’ll get you out.”