Three dots appeared. Disappeared. Appeared again.She's worried about you.
He set the phone face down on the desk and went back to the report. His mother had been worried about him since he was seventeen and told her he was enlisting instead of going to college. Twenty years later and she still couldn't understand why he'd chosen this life. Why he kept choosing it.
The phone buzzed again. He ignored it. Focused on the screen. On translating violence into bureaucratic language that made it sound reasonable and necessary. On pretending that breach times and ammunition counts mattered more than the distance growing between him and the people who'd known him before he became Steele. Before he became the guy who stacked on doors at zero-dark-thirty and couldn't remember the last time he'd slept past dawn.
He finished the report. Filed it. Shut down the computer. Picked up his phone on the way out. Deleted the messages without reading the rest. His sister would understand. She always did. His mother would worry. She always did that too. Some things you couldn't fix with a phone call.
By the time he finished and headed back to their team area, the sun was up and the base was stirring. Morning PT groups running in formation. The smell of coffee and breakfast drifting from the chow hall. The normal rhythms of military life that continued whether you were part of them or not.
Their team bay was on the second floor of Building Six. Six rooms, one for each of them, clustered around a common area that served as their unofficial headquarters when they weren'ttraining or deployed. Most of the team had apartments off base, but they spent more time here than anywhere else. Someone had scrounged a couch from somewhere. Ghost had installed a coffee maker that probably violated seventeen different regulations. Risk kept a small library of medical texts and thriller novels in roughly equal proportion.
Steele found most of them already there. Bulldog was doing pull-ups on the bar he'd mounted in his doorframe, counting under his breath. Ghost sat at the table with his laptop and three cups of coffee at various stages of consumption. Joker sprawled on the couch, phone in hand, texting someone with the kind of focus he usually reserved for high-speed driving.
"She ever text back?" Bulldog asked between reps.
"Who?" Joker didn't look up.
"That bartender from Bragg Boulevard."
"Which one?"
"The blonde."
"They're all blonde."
"The one with the tattoo."
Joker's thumbs paused. "She blocked me."
Bulldog dropped from the bar. "What'd you do?"
"Existed, apparently."
Ghost snorted into his coffee.
Risk emerged from his room, hair still wet from the shower, book in hand. Medical text this time. Something about traumatic field amputations that probably wasn't appropriate breakfast reading.
"We running again today?" he asked.
"Not unless something changes," Steele said, dropping into the chair across from Ghost. "We're clear until tomorrow morning."
Bulldog grabbed a towel and wiped his face. "So, we've got a whole day to sit around and contemplate our life choices."
"You have life choices?" Joker asked.
"I choose violence daily. It's very fulfilling."
Hawk appeared in the doorway, silent as always. He had that particular stillness that snipers cultivated. The ability to be present without taking up space. "Food?" he asked.
"Chow hall's open," Risk said without looking up from his book.
They migrated as a group because that's what they did. Moved together. Ate together. Existed in each other's orbit even during downtime because the alternative was being alone with your thoughts and that rarely ended well.
The chow hall was starting to fill up. Morning shift coming off duty. Day shift heading in. The eternal cycle of military life playing out over trays of eggs and coffee that tasted like it had been brewed in a boot.
They grabbed food and claimed a corner table. Ate in comfortable silence broken only by the occasional comment about the quality of the bacon or Joker's ongoing campaign to convince the cooks that French toast was a valid breakfast food seven days a week.
Steele watched them. Listened to the easy banter. Saw the way they orbited each other with the casual intimacy of men who'd bled together and trusted each other with their lives on a regular basis.
