Chapter 2
The entire training yard fell silent. Every soldier there knew one simple truth. A salute was never given without reason. Whatever that symbol represented, it demanded unquestioned respect.
I never turned around. I didn't rush to cover myself. I calmly pulled the torn fabric together, acting as though nothing important had happened, because in a sense, for me, nothing had. I had been in rooms far more dangerous than this one, and a shove from an overconfident twenty-six-year-old was not among the things that reached me anymore.
Reeves, still holding a fistful of my collar in one hand, looked at Colonel Warren's salute and then back at me, his grin faltering into something closer to panic. "Colonel, what are you—"
"Step away from her," Warren said, his voice cutting flat and hard across the yard. "Now, Cadet. That is not a request."
Reeves let go so fast he stumbled back a half step in the mud.
I finally turned my head toward him, calm and cold, the way I'd learned to look at men who mistook silence for permission. "Reeves, is it?"
"Ma'am, I didn't know—"
May you like
"You weren't supposed to," I said. "That's the entire point of the exercise. But I'll ask you the same question I ask every unit before I write my report. When you don't know who someone is, what do you assume about them?"
He didn't answer. He didn't need to. Every recruit standing in that yard had already answered it themselves, out loud, thirty seconds earlier, with laughter.
