Chapter 1

The laugh came first, before the words, before anyone even saw her fully cross the tape. Staff Sergeant Marcus Hale threw his head back and let it roll out of him — a loud, practiced, room-filling sound that bounced off the heavy bags and the cinder-block walls. Every head in the gym turned toward the mat.

Sergeant Elena Reyes had just stepped over the white boundary tape with her right foot. She set it flat, shifted her weight, and stood there in her heather-grey PT shirt and black shorts, hands loose at her sides. White athletic tape wrapped both hands and wrists, clean and tight, the way you wrap before you mean to work.

Hale was still laughing. He swept his right arm wide toward the mat, inviting the room to look at what he was looking at. His left hand stabbed down at her hands, then at her black flat-soled training shoes, laced tight and clean.

"You really planning to face me?" he called out. Not to her. To the room.

The room answered. A dozen soldiers along the benches snorted. Someone near the equipment cage laughed, short and sharp. The heavy bag behind Hale swung once on its chain, still moving from wherever he had been working it before she arrived.

Reyes did not answer right away. She stood there and let the noise wash over her, eyes on his face, and that silence was all the room needed. It laughed with him, harder.

Hale stepped closer until he was a stride off the tape, big across the shoulders and chest, thick-necked, his shaved head catching the hard light from the tall windows on the left. His grin was fully open. He looked down at her taped hands, then at her black training shoes, then up.

"Reyes," he said, quieter this time, so it would land. "You can still walk away."

She bent her right wrist up, bit the loose end of the white tape at her palm, and pulled it tight one-handed. Pressed it flat with her thumb. Looked at him.