Chapter 4 - THE THREAT ASSESSMENT
Marcus turned back toward her, his face turning an ugly, mottled shade of crimson. He felt the cold reception from the family, and instead of backing down, his internal embarrassment curdled into volatile, dangerous rage.
He squared his massive shoulders, dropping his center of gravity into an awkward, wide street-fighter stance. His thick fists clenched, the tendons in his forearms bulging against his dragon tattoos.
In that exact millisecond, Jessica’s internal architecture inverted.
The civilian daughter, the polite dinner guest, the girl who worked the logistics desk in Washington—she was completely gone.
Her respiration dropped into deep, autonomic cycles. Her diaphragm expanded slowly, drawing oxygen deep into her core to fuel her fast-twitch muscle fibers. Her body weight shifted almost imperceptibly from her heels onto the balls of her feet, distributing her mass evenly across her skeletal frame like a coiled spring.
Her gaze detached from his face.
She no longer looked at his bloodshot eyes, his scowling mouth, or his beard. To an operator trained in close-quarters neutralization, a human face was merely noise—a mask designed to lie.
Instead, her focus widened into a cold, panoramic scan of his structural mechanics. She watched the tilt of his clavicles; she tracked the subtle drop of his right shoulder; she monitored the rotation of his right hip; she measured the distribution of his weight over his trailing foot.
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She was no longer looking at her stepfather. She was no longer looking at a relative at a holiday barbecue.
She was assessing an incoming kinetic threat, calculating the lines of force, and preparing to neutralize the target.
