Page 42 of My Forbidden Commander

GABRIEL

By the time we limp to where Maddox’s team parked Humvees, it’s morning and light comes over the ridge, gray and weak. I feel every bump in my shoulder. And there are a lot of bumps.

As soon as we’re through the wire, Okafor starts triage before I can even open my mouth.

“Uninjured showers and racks,” he says. “Everybody else, med hut.”

Nobody argues with him. Hayes and Delgado peel off toward the showers, Reyes hesitating a moment before joining them. He looks over his shoulder once, and I can see in his eyes he’d rather stay with me. He can’t.

Petrillo has Spencer on a stretcher, hauling him off to the med hut with Bishop from Maddox’s team. I’m walking under my own power, which earns me a look from Okafor that says he’d rather I didn’t.

“I’m fine, Sergeant,” I assure him.

“You’re gray, sir,” he counters.

I scoff. “It’s morning. Everyone’s gray.”

He doesn’t laugh. He does fall beside me, close enough to catch me if the adrenaline finally runs out and I stagger. And it nearly does at the entrance to the med hut, my knees deciding they’ve had enough of my pride.

The doctor—Ainsley, though half the base just calls her Doc—takes one look at my shoulder and orders me onto a table like she’s done this with worse men and lost patience for our bullshit a long time ago.

“Through and through,” she says after cutting off the sleeve and taking a closer look. “You’re lucky. Missed the joint by a finger’s width.”

“Lucky,” I repeat, but she doesn’t dignify it with a response.

Liu works beside her, prepping stitches as she irrigates the wound, and I clutch at the table edge. Across the room, Petrillo and Bishop move around Spencer. My attention keeps drifting there no matter how many times Ainsley tells me to hold still.

“Round caught the edge of his plate,” Liu says, following my eyes. “Just a fragment wound along the ribs. He’s going to hurt like hell for a month and complain the whole time, but he’ll walk out of here.”

“He doesn’t complain,” I mutter.

“Everybody complains,” he counters. “Some just do it internally.”

Ainsley’s needle bites into my shoulder, and I focus on the ceiling.

“You need twenty stitches and forty-eight hours of not being an idiot,” she says. “The stitches I can do. The other part is up to you.”

“I’ve got a base to run.”

“You’ve got a sergeant first class who’s run bases before.” She ties off the last suture and reaches for the gauze. “Kestrel survives a few nights without you standing in the mud personally.”

I don’t answer that, because the answer is that it’s not Kestrel I’m worried about surviving without me standing in the mud, and that’s not a sentence I can say out loud in a room with a doctor and medics, and Sergeant First Class Okafor standing four feet away with his arms crossed.

She wraps the shoulder, slings the arm, and tells me the sling stays on if I want the stitches to hold. She delivers that less like medical advice and more like a threat. It’s almost like rank matters nothing to her at all.

“You’re staying here for observation,” she says with finality. “Tonight, at minimum.”

“I have a bunk fifty meters away.”

“And I have a table right here.” She snaps her gloves off. “Colonel, I’ve seen the way you run this base. You don’t sleep enough on a good day. You’re not sleeping in a hut alone tonight with a hole in your shoulder and nobody checking if you go pale in the middle of the night. If the border corridor were open to medevac birds, you’d be having this conversation with a surgeon in Landstuhl instead of me.”

I open my mouth to argue again, but she looks at me much like Okafor looks at Hayes, which is to say like I’m wasting both our time.

“Fine,” I sigh.

“Fine,” she agrees, and joins Bishop and Petrillo on the other side of the room.

By noon, the med hut has cleared out. It’s just me on a cot in the corner, and Spencer two beds down, awake now, staring at the ceiling like a man conserving energy for the pain that’s coming later.