Chapter 843
Jarrod was silent for a long time. He stared out into the darkness, his right arm still locked across his torso inside the heavy medical brace. His splinted left hand hung rigid at his side, unable to close into the fist his rage wanted. Only the exposed tips of his fingers trembled once against the hard black frame before going still. He was at war with himself. The protector in him screamed to remove the threat, to send Sloane away, to wrap Caroline in layers of impenetrable security. But the commander in him, the man forged in the crucible of special operations, knew a different, harder truth.
“This is a test she must face,” Jarrod said finally, his voice laced with a weary, iron resolve. “If she cannot handle one compromised instructor with a personal grudge, she will not survive on a real battlefield.”
He turned from the window, the movement stiff around the brace, his gray eyes hard and clear. “Sloane is one of the best. Her skills are undeniable. Caroline will learn from her. She has to.”
He was making a calculated, brutal choice. He was choosing to use Sloane’s pain as a whetstone to sharpen the woman he loved into the weapon he knew she needed to be.
K.C. Bell’s expression did not change, but a flicker of understanding passed through his eyes. He recognized the cold, hard logic of his commander.
“Yes, sir,” he said. He rendered a crisp salute, turned on his heel, and departed, leaving Jarrod alone with his decision.
At that same moment, under the harsh glare of the training field floodlights, Sloane Hawke stood before the assembled Alpha squad.
The tear tracks were gone from her face. In their place was a calm so absolute it was terrifying. Her eyes, which had been filled with pain, now held a flat, cold light. She looked like a predator that had been wounded and was now ready to make the world bleed for it.
A piercing whistle cut through the night air.
“Emergency formation! Full combat load! You have five minutes!” she barked, her voice devoid of any warmth.
Groans of exhaustion and protest rippled through the ranks. They had just finished a grueling day. Their muscles ached. Their minds were numb.
Sloane ignored them. “We are commencing an unscheduled tactical road march into the wooded ridgelines beyond the compound,” she announced, her voice dripping with malice. “Anyone who falls behind gets left behind. Move!”
The threat hung in the cold night air.
Five minutes later, they were a column of shadows moving out of the well-lit compound and into the oppressive darkness beyond the perimeter road.
The pace Sloane set was punishing, a brutal, jarring trot over uneven, rock-strewn terrain. The weight of their rucksacks dug into their shoulders. The cold night air burned in their lungs.
Caroline fell into a rhythm, her breath controlled, her mind focused. She could feel Sloane’s gaze on her, a physical pressure on her back. She knew, with absolute certainty, that this was not a training exercise.
This was a punishment. And she was the intended target.
Sloane moved at the head of the column like a tireless phantom, her voice cutting through the darkness with a steady stream of verbal poison.
“Are you tourists on a hike?” she screamed at a trainee who stumbled. “My grandmother with a broken hip could move faster than you, Knight!”
Each insult was a whip, lashing at their dwindling morale.