Chapter 5
I stood there, swaying slightly, trying to catch my breath. The violent shaking in my right hand was traveling up my arm, making my entire shoulder tremble.
Vance was staring at my hand. He looked physically sick.
He looked at the violent tremors. Then he looked down the mile-and-a-half range toward the invisible mountain ridge. Then he looked back at my hand.
His brain couldn’t reconcile the two images.
He slowly reached up and took off his tactical ball cap, running a thick hand through his buzz-cut hair.
“How…” Vance whispered, his voice barely audible over the wind. “How the hell did you do that?”
I didn’t answer him. I didn’t owe him an explanation.
I walked awkwardly toward the Humvee. My legs felt like lead. The adrenaline was leaving my system rapidly, replaced by a deep, gnawing exhaustion and the familiar, burning pain in my dead nerves.
I stopped next to the hood of the truck.
Sitting there, pinned beneath an empty ammunition magazine, was the thick stack of hundred-dollar bills. Two thousand dollars. The ultimate insult. The price of their arrogance.
Vance walked up beside me. He looked at the money, then looked at me.
“It’s yours,” Vance said quietly. All the bravado, all the mockery, was completely stripped from his voice. He sounded humbled. “You won the bet. Take it.”
I stared at the green paper fluttering slightly in the wind.
Two thousand dollars was a lot of money to a medically discharged veteran living on a meager pension. It could pay for better materials for my brace. It could pay for experimental nerve treatments I couldn’t afford.
I reached out with my left hand, the steady one.
I picked up the heavy stack of cash. I held it for a moment, feeling the rough texture of the paper.
Then, I looked Vance dead in the eyes.
I tossed the stack of money directly into the dirt at his boots.
The heavy wad of cash hit the dust with a dull thud. The wind immediately caught the top few bills, tearing them loose and sending them skittering across the desert floor into the sagebrush.
“I told you,” I said, my voice cold and flat. “I don’t want your money.”
Vance stared down at the cash in the dirt. His jaw clenched, but he didn’t say a word. He knew he had been beaten in a way that money couldn’t fix. He had been humiliated on his own firing line by a woman he had deemed unfit to hold a weapon.
“Pack my rifle,” I said to him, turning my back. “And put it in my truck. Carefully. The optic costs more than your annual salary.”
For a moment, I thought he might argue. Delta Force Master Sergeants do not take orders from medically retired civilians.
But I heard the heavy crunch of his boots in the dirt. He was walking toward the shooting mat. He was going to pack my rifle.
I stood near the open tailgate of my beaten-up pickup truck, wrapping my left hand around my violently shaking right wrist, trying to physically force the tremors to stop. It was useless. The nerve damage was permanent. The brace was the only thing that gave me temporary relief, and its battery life was painfully short.
I closed my eyes, letting the cold wind wash over my face.
I had proven my point. The kinetic dampener worked. The prototype was a success. I could shoot again.
But the victory tasted like ash in my mouth.
What was the point? I wasn’t military anymore. I couldn’t deploy. I couldn’t go back to the teams. I had built a miraculous piece of technology that allowed me to perform impossible feats of marksmanship, but I had absolutely no war to fight.
I was just a broken woman doing parlor tricks in the desert.
“Jocelyn.”
The voice didn’t come from Vance. It didn’t come from any of the Delta operators.
It was a new voice. Sharp, authoritative, and completely out of place on a remote military firing line.
I opened my eyes and spun around, my left hand instinctively dropping toward the sidearm holstered on my hip, even though I knew my right hand was too shaky to draw it.
A vehicle had arrived on the range while we were focused on the shot.
It wasn’t a Humvee or a tactical ATV. It was a massive, pristine black Chevrolet Suburban with dark tinted windows. It looked like a shark gliding through a muddy pond.
It was parked about fifty yards away, completely silent. I hadn’t even heard the engine.
Standing next to the black SUV was a man.
He wasn’t wearing tactical gear. He was wearing a sharply tailored, dark gray suit. His shoes were polished, completely untouched by the desert dust. He had silver hair cut with military precision and eyes that looked like cold chips of flint.
