Chapter 2 - Supply
Before the valley, Avery Cole had been the woman behind the supply window. Batteries. Ammunition. Water filters. Radio parts. Medical kits. Forms stamped, crates counted, signatures checked. Men came to her when they needed something and forgot her the second they walked away with it.
That was fine with Avery.
Invisibility had always felt safer than expectation.
She was twenty-nine, white-knuckled quiet, and better at logistics than anyone at Forward Operating Base Griffin wanted to admit. She knew which platoon lied about batteries, which sergeant over-ordered tourniquets because he was afraid of losing men, and which operators pretended not to be superstitious while requesting the same brand of gloves before every mission.
Jason Sullivan, the SEAL sniper, had been different.
He never wasted words, never flirted, never treated the supply counter like a servant’s window. He would nod, sign, check his rounds, and say, “Appreciate it, Cole.”
That was all.
It mattered anyway.
Marcus Vaughn mattered more. He was the combat medic who brought her coffee when resupply trucks ran late and once fixed the wobbly leg on her desk with surgical tape because he said “morale infrastructure” was still infrastructure.
“You ever get tired of hiding in here?” Marcus asked her one night.
Avery looked down at the inventory sheet. “I’m not hiding.”
He smiled. “Sure.”
He did not push.
That was why she liked him.
Nobody at Griffin knew Avery had once been banned from touching rifles by her own father after she hit every tin can on a Montana fence line without missing. Nobody knew an old range instructor named Callahan Morse had later watched her deliberately ruin her own qualification score and realized she was hiding a gift.
Avery preferred it that way.
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War had enough people eager to be dangerous.
She had spent her life trying not to be.
