Chapter 2 - The Son of a Hero
Before that moment, Marcus had ruled the cadet command like grief made him royalty. His father, Captain Daniel Vance, was a name spoken with lowered voices on base: decorated, respected, killed in combat during a classified joint operation twelve years earlier. The official story was clean enough to frame. Enemy contact. Sacrifice. Heroic death. Marcus had been a boy when it happened, and everyone around him had fed that story until it became his spine.
The problem was that I had been there.
Daniel Vance did not die the way the report said. He died buying time for twelve people to get out of a compromised extraction zone after someone sold the route. He knew, before the end, that the leak came from our side. He also knew his son was young enough to be shaped by whoever controlled the story afterward. So before the final medevac bird lifted, Daniel shoved a sealed patch and a coded evidence slip into my hand and made me promise not to give it to Marcus until the boy was old enough to survive the truth.
I kept that promise longer than I should have.
Marcus grew into a man who worshipped a version of his father that had been edited for convenience. He repeated phrases from memorial speeches like scripture. He treated doubt like disrespect. And when I arrived at the training facility asking questions about old personnel connections, he decided I was insulting the dead.
The confrontation moved fast after that. A challenge in the yard. A shove near the wall. Grant throwing the first punch when Marcus lost control. Tyler laughing too loudly. Owen saying almost nothing, which made him the most interesting man on the roof. My right arm was already damaged from an old mission, and the four of them knew it. They pushed me toward the ledge believing numbers would solve what truth had started.
They were wrong.
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Now I hung from the wall while Marcus leaned close, his face pale beneath the rage.
“Don’t talk about my father.”
