Her voice slices through the static, through the sweat, through the desert pressing against my ribs.
My lips part, but nothing comes out. Just dust. Just silence. I force myself to scan again. To catalog every angle. Every corner. Every breath of heat coming off the stones.
This is the part that kills you.
Not the bullet. Not the blast.
The wait because the wait feels endless—and I know it won’t be.
The world holds its breath.
Engines off. Radios low. Boots braced against the floor.
The dust hangs in the air like it knows what’s coming. Like it’s waiting to be painted red.
I watch the rooftops until my eyes blur, until shadows start to crawl in patterns they shouldn’t. A wire? A barrel? A kid? My brain scrambles to make sense of shapes that refuse to be innocent.
“Anything?” Reese whispers.
I shake my head. My throat’s too dry to answer.
Leo clicks the safety on the fifty. That sound is louder than a gunshot.
Torres mutters something beside me—one of his bullshit jokes he throws out when fear starts gnawing too loud. But even he doesn’t laugh this time. His hand flexes on the grip of his rifle, veins jumping in his knuckles.
I shift my weight, slow, deliberate, scanning the road in front of us. Gravel. Tire tracks. Nothing.
And then I see it.
Barely a shimmer.
Just under the sand.
The outline of something too perfect. Too neat.
IED.
“Front. Left. Ten meters,” I rasp.
The convoy stills harder. Even the dust seems to freeze.
Every man knows what that means.
We’re in the kill box now.
Reese’s hand hovers over the comms, waiting for Leo’s call.
Leo doesn’t make it.
His jaw’s tight, his eyes scanning too fast, and I know—we all know—there’s no clean way out of this.
The air changes.That subtle shift you only learn by living it too many times. Like the desert itself just whispered: run.
My pulse slams against my throat.
I grip my rifle tighter and in the middle of it—her face again.
Cassandra.
