My Aunt Sneered: “No Medals? You’re Just A Desk Secretary.” I Sipped My Wine. “I Don’t Answer Phones.” She Laughed. “Oh? Then Who Are You?” I Said, “Oracle 9.” Her Son, A Navy Seal, Went Pale. “Mom… Stop Talking.

But under the thin fabric of my gray blouse, beneath the layers of scar tissue, my nerves fired a warning shot. Marjorie’s perfectly manicured fingers were tapping directly over a jagged three-inch scar, a souvenir from a mortar round in Syria two years ago. She saw a pale, office-bound spinster.

She didn’t see the memory that was etched into my skin. Aleppo, 2012. The heat was suffocating, smelling of dust and cordite.

I wasn’t wearing a blazer then. I was in full kit, body armor heavy on my chest, sweat stinging my eyes. I was sitting across from a tribal leader, a man who held the lives of forty schoolgirls in his hands.

The negotiation was delicate. One wrong word, one wrong look, and the intel on the safe house would vanish. Then the first mortar hit.

The ceiling collapsed. I took a piece of shrapnel to the shoulder while shielding the interpreter. I didn’t leave.

I wrapped it with a field dressing, gritted my teeth, and finished the negotiation. We got the girls out. “I get enough sun, Aunt Marjorie,” I said, my voice calm, pushing the memory back down.

“Just been a busy week.”

“Busy doing what?” She laughed lightly. “Updating spreadsheets?”

If only she knew. She thought my dark circles were from binge-watching TV or sleeping in on weekends.

She had no idea that for the last thirty-six hours I hadn’t seen a bed. I had been locked inside a SCIF, a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, deep within the bowels of the Pentagon. It was a windowless, soundproof box kept at a constant sixty degrees to keep the servers and the analysts awake.

The air smelled of stale coffee and ozone. For a day and a half, I had been the lead targeting officer for a joint special operations task force. We were tracking a shipment of illegal surface-to-air missiles moving across a border in North Africa.

I had watched the live feed from a Reaper drone hovering at 20,000 feet. I had made the calls. I had given the green light.

The stress was a physical weight pressing down on your chest until you forgot to breathe. When the mission was over, when the threat was neutralized and the assets were safe, I hadn’t celebrated. I had simply driven home, showered for ten minutes, changed into this suit, and driven straight to this dining room to be told I looked lazy.

“Something like that,” I replied, taking a sip of water. The ice clinked against the glass. Across the table, Nathan was watching me.

He wasn’t eating. His fork was resting on his plate, and his eyes—sharp, blue, trained—were locked on my face. He was a SEAL.

He knew how to read people. He knew what exhaustion looked like, the kind that comes from adrenaline dumps and sleep deprivation, not boredom. More importantly, he noticed what I was doing.

Without thinking, my eyes had scanned the room again. I checked the main entrance. I checked the sliding glass doors to the patio.

I noted that the heavy drapes were open—a sniper risk, technically, though in suburban Virginia it was just a privacy issue. I checked the position of the knives on the table. It was automatic situational awareness.

You don’t turn it off just because you’re eating cranberry sauce. “Collins,” Nathan said, his voice cutting through his mother’s chatter about her new Pilates instructor. “You okay?”

I met his gaze for a second.

Just a second. There was a silent communication between us, warrior to warrior. “I’m fine, Nathan,” I said.

“You look wired,” he said, choosing his word carefully. “Like you’re expecting the door to get kicked in.”

My heart skipped a beat. He was getting too close.

I forced a small, self-deprecating smile. The mask slipped back into place. “Just too much coffee, probably.

The new machine at the office is aggressive.”

Nathan frowned, not buying it. He opened his mouth to ask something else, something probing. But Marjorie, sensing the spotlight shifting away from her son, intervened.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Nathan,” she scoffed, waving her hand dismissively. “She’s not wired. She’s just stressed.

You know how it is with these administrative types. The copie

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