Chapter 824
Brenna started to ask another question, but Beatrix stopped her with a quiet, “Let her rest.”
Caroline lay there, rigid, until she heard the soft footsteps of her two bunkmates leaving the room. Only then did she dare to sit up.
She did not reach under her pillow for the manila folder. There was no folder. K.C. Bell had secured the physical file in a black evidence sleeve before she ever left Jarrod’s control, and Caroline had not been foolish enough to smuggle classified paper back into a trainee barracks.
What she had brought back was memory.
She reached under her pillow and pulled out a folded sheet of dull requisition paper covered in coded shorthand, the kind of harmless-looking notes no one would understand unless they already knew the files behind them. She had written them from memory in the dead hour before dawn, compressing names, pressure points, and vulnerabilities into a private language of initials and symbols.
The tactical debrief he’d just given her was useful, but she needed more than a quick summary. She needed to review the details, to find the specific leverage points for what was coming.
In the dim light filtering through the grimy window, she began to scan the familiar shorthand.
Melanie Thorne. She refreshed the details: the family’s political connections, her uncle, Lieutenant Colonel Marcus Thorne, and the buried disciplinary trail connected to her old academy record. The sealed report. The hazing incident that had never officially happened.
Blair Knight. Her father, CEO of a major military contractor with deep Pentagon ties. Blair’s psychological profile: a follower who needed a strong personality to attach herself to. Isolate her from Melanie, Jarrod had said. The notes confirmed it.
Then Beatrix Hendon. The Hendon family. One of Washington’s oldest political dynasties. Old money, untouchable power. But there were cracks in the armor, a family member’s financial scandal, carefully hushed up.
She was reviewing the material with new eyes now, not as revelation but as ammunition. The fight in the shower had shown her that Melanie and Blair were willing to escalate to physical violence. She needed to be ready for what came next.
She was so engrossed that she didn’t hear the barracks door open.
She only looked up when the shadows of two figures fell across her bunk.
Her heart leaped into her throat. With a single, lightning-fast motion, she folded the coded page twice and slid it deep beneath the blanket seam, where it looked like nothing more than a scrap of barracks trash.
She had just finished when Melanie Thorne looked up at her, her face a mask of pure, venomous hatred.
Melanie stood at the foot of the ladder, her head craned back, her eyes burning with a toxic mixture of humiliation and rage. Her voice was a low, menacing hiss.
“Get down.”
Caroline leaned against the wall of her upper bunk, looking down at her defeated rival with an air of detached calm. “Is there a problem?”