Chapter 857
Sloane’s smile widened. “This is training, Sharpe. Let them sort it out.”
Caroline’s rage was a blinding inferno, but somewhere deep inside, her training held. Her punches were brutal, but they were aimed at the body, the shoulders, instinctively avoiding the temple or the throat. It was a beating, not an execution.
Melanie, after the initial shock, began to fight back with the desperation of a cornered animal, but her body betrayed her. Her right hand was still splinted and trapped against her chest in its sling, useless except as a source of white-hot pain every time they hit the ground. She used her heavier build, her left forearm, and the dead weight of her shoulder to try to roll Caroline off her. They tumbled in the mud and gravel, a chaotic mess of grunts of pain, torn fabric, and bodies fighting for leverage.
High above the chaos, in the quiet, sterile environment of the base command tower, Jarrod watched the scene unfold through a high-powered spotting scope mounted on a fixed observation stand.
He saw it all. The stumble. The stomp. The sickening crunch. He saw the precise moment the light of reason died in Caroline’s eyes, replaced by pure, protective fury.
A cold, murderous rage, unlike anything he had ever felt, seized him. The air in the small room seemed to drop twenty degrees. K.C. Bell, standing silently beside him, felt the shift and instinctively tensed.
Jarrod did not slam the scope down. He couldn’t. His right arm remained locked across his torso inside the heavy medical brace, and his splinted left hand hung rigid at his side. Instead, his whole body went still in a way that was far more dangerous.
“K.C.,” he said, his voice a raw, ragged growl. “Patch me to range safety. Now.”
K.C. moved at once, crossing to the console and opening the secure channel. Jarrod’s eyes never left the field.
He couldn’t watch passively anymore. This wasn’t part of the plan. His “training” was meant to forge her, not to get her thrown in the brig for assault.
“Sir,” K.C. said, calm even as he worked the controls, “you cannot go down there. Your presence will confirm every suspicion Instructor Hawke and Trainee Thorne have.”
Jarrod’s jaw flexed so hard a muscle jumped beneath the skin. “My wife is being attacked.” The words were torn from him, a confession of the truth that protocol demanded he hide.
“She’s winning, sir,” K.C. replied, his voice unyielding. “And your intervention will put her in far greater danger. They’ll see her as someone who needs her Colonel to fight her battles. She’ll be a pariah. Every trainee on this base will turn against her.”
K.C.’s words were a bucket of ice water, dousing the flames of Jarrod’s rage with cold, hard logic. He knew K.C. was right.