Part 1:
The Crowbar wasn’t the kind of place where you asked questions. It was a dive bar sitting just outside the perimeter of Fort Braxton, a watering hole where the air was perpetually thick with cigarette smoke, the smell of stale hops, and the heavy egos of Rangers fresh off deployment. I was one of them. Sergeant Allaric Dunwood. I was loud, I was arrogant, and I was about to make the biggest mistake of my life.
I was holding court at the center table, three beers deep, retelling a highly embellished story about an airstrike in the sandbox. My squad was eating it up, laughing at the right beats, nodding at the feigned heroism. It was a high, a rush of validation that I wore like armor. That’s when I saw her.
She was sitting at the far end of the bar, nursing a whiskey. Civilian clothes—jeans, a gray button-down that looked like it had been washed a thousand times. She was small, unassuming, huddled in on herself like she was trying to disappear. In a room full of peacocks, she was a shadow. And for some reason, that irritated the hell out of me.
I pushed off the table, the liquid courage sloshing in my veins. “Watch this,” I muttered to my buddies, grinning as I swaggered toward the bar.
Tav, the bartender who’d been serving soldiers since ‘Nam, shot me a warning look, but I ignored it. I leaned against the counter, invading her personal space, boxing her in. “What’s a nice civilian girl doing in a place like this?” I asked, my voice dripping with that condescending charm I thought was irresistible. “You look a little serious, sweetheart. Desk job? Librarian?”
She didn’t even look up. She just swirled the amber liquid in her glass.
My grin tightened. I wasn’t used to being ignored. I reached out, my fingers brushing the sleeve of her shirt, pulling it up slightly. “Or are you playing soldier?”
That’s when I saw it. A tattoo on her wrist. It wasn’t some flash art from a strip mall parlor. It was geometric, precise—a unit marking. But not one I recognized. It looked… black ops. Ghost stuff.
I laughed, a harsh, barking sound. “What is that? You get that out of a cereal box? What’s your call sign, darling? ‘Lonely Heart’?”
She finally turned.
I froze. I expected fear. I expected annoyance. I didn’t expect the gray, dead calm of a hurricane’s eye. Her eyes were voids. They looked through me, past my uniform, past my rank, dissecting the pathetic insecurity beneath.
“Phantom One,” she said.
The name hit the room like a physical weight. Two officers by the dartboard stopped mid-throw. Tav froze, a rag in his hand. The silence was sudden and violent.
I frowned, my brain trying to catch up. “Phantom? That’s… that’s a myth. That squadron was wiped out in Azerbaijan three years ago. Dead. Gone. You’re a liar.”
“Show respect,” she whispered.
That’s when I felt it. A vibration. Not in the floor, but in my hand. The beer glass I was holding—a thick, heavy pint glass—started to hum. It grew hot against my palm. I looked down, confused, and saw hairline fractures spiderwebbing across the glass, spreading like frost.
“What the—”
CRACK.
The sound was like a gunshot. The glass didn’t just break; it detonated. Shards of glass and beer exploded outward. I shouted, stumbling back, blood welling up in my palm where a jagged piece of the rim had sliced me.
I stared at my bleeding hand, then at her. She hadn’t moved a muscle. Her hands were flat on the bar. She looked at me with a pity that cut deeper than the glass.
“Next time,” she said, her voice low and terrified me more than any drill sergeant ever had, “ask for a name before you ask for a fight.”
She dropped a twenty on the bar and walked out. The door swung shut, and just as it did, Colonel Resnik—the base commander, the scariest man at Fort Braxton—walked in. He looked at the blood, the glass, and the terrified silence of the room.
“Who mentioned Phantom Squadron?” Resnik asked. His voice was soft, lethal.
I looked at my shaking hand. I looked at the door where the woman had vanished. And I realized, with a sinking dread in my gut, that I had just kicked a hornet’s nest that was going to get us all killed.
Part 2:
The silence in The Crowbar following Resnik’s exit wasn’t peaceful; it was the suffocating quiet of a held breath. The air conditioner hummed, a rattle in the vent sounding like a dying engine, but no one moved to fix it.
My hand throbbed. The blood had soaked through the bar napkin Tav had thrown at me, turning the cheap white paper into a heavy, crimson pulp. I stared at the door where the woman—Phantom One—had vanished. The memory of the glass shattering played on a loop in my mind. It hadn’t been grip strength. I knew what crushing a glass felt like; it was messy and resistant. This had been different. The glass had screamed—a high-pitched vibrational whine that vibrated in my marrow before it simply ceased to exist as a solid object.
“You okay, Sarge?” One of the privates, a kid named Miller, nudged my elbow. He looked pale.
“I’m fine,” I lied, my voice sounding like gravel in a mixer. “Just a freak accident. faulty glass.”
Tav was wiping down the counter where the explosion happened. He didn’t look at me. He just scrubbed at the beer and blood with a rhythmic, angry intensity. “Go get patched up, Dunwood,” he muttered, not breaking his rhythm. “And forget you ever saw her.”
“Who is she, Tav?” I asked, leaning in.
He stopped scrubbing. He looked up, and for the first time in the five years I’d known him, the old bartender looked afraid. “She’s a ghost story, kid. And you just invited the haunting in. Go.”
The Base Infirmary was sterile and cold, smelling of rubbing alcohol and floor wax. The medic, a bored corporal who looked like he’d rather be anywhere else, stitched my palm with efficient indifference.
“Nasty cut,” he commented, tying off a knot of blue thread. “Bar fight?”
“Something like that,” I grunted.
“Funny,” he said, peeling off his latex gloves. “Colonel Resnik’s aide called down ten minutes ago. Asked for the specific medical report on ‘Sergeant Dunwood’s hand injury.’ Wanted to know if there were burns.”
My stomach dropped. “Burns?”
“Yeah. Like friction burns. Or electrical.” The medic shrugged. “I put down lacerations. Because that’s what they are. Weird that he asked, though.”
I walked out of the infirmary into the humid Georgia night, the paranoia settling onto my shoulders like a wet wool blanket. Resnik knew. He knew exactly what that woman was, and he was checking to see if I had been touched by whatever power she used.
I didn’t go back to the barracks. I went to my off-base apartment, a shoebox on the second floor of a complex that housed mostly divorced dads and drift-less townies. I locked the door, engaged the deadbolt, and then wedged a chair under the handle. It felt ridiculous—I was a Ranger, for God’s sake—but the fear in my gut was primal.
I needed answers. And in the modern military, answers didn’t live in filing cabinets; they lived in the deep code.
I pulled my burner phone from my go-bag and dialed. “Zephyr. I need you. My place. Now.”
Zephyr Novak was a Specialist who looked about twelve years old and had an allergy to military regulation haircuts. But he could bypass a DoD firewall faster than most people could type their password. He arrived twenty minutes later, looking annoyed, carrying a laptop covered in anime stickers.
“This better be good, Ric,” he said, dropping onto my worn-out sofa. “I was in the middle of a raid.”
“Phantom Squadron,” I said.
Zephyr froze. He looked at me, then at the window, then back at me. “You’re drunk.”
“I’m stone sober. I need to know what happened in Azerbaijan three years ago.”
“Ric, stop,” Zephyr whispered, opening his laptop but not turning it on. “That’s a black hole. You type that into a search bar, and you get flagged. I’ve heard rumors about guys in Intel looking into that op. They get reassigned to radar stations in Alaska. If they’re lucky.”
“A woman walked into The Crowbar tonight,” I said, pacing the small room. “She called herself Phantom One. She blew up a glass in my hand without touching it. And then Resnik showed up looking like he wanted to execute the whole room.”
Zephyr’s eyes went wide. He opened the laptop. “Okay. Okay, that’s… that’s something.”
He didn’t use the military network. He routed his connection through a series of proxies—servers in Estonia, Singapore, Brazil. His fingers flew across the keys, the screen reflecting in his glasses as cascades of code scrolled by.
“I’m hitting heavy encryption,” he muttered, sweat beading on his upper lip. “This isn’t standard redaction. This is a data scrub. Someone tried to wipe this unit from existence.”
“Can you get through?”
“I can get fragments,” he said. “Hold on… caught a ghost file in the backup cache.” He turned the screen toward me.
It was a grainy photo, likely taken from a helmet cam. It showed a squad of eight operators in unmarked gear standing in a desert landscape. Their faces were pixelated, but the stance of the figure on the far left—slight build, shoulders hunched—was undeniable. It was the woman from the bar.
“Project Mind Shift,” Zephyr read from a recovered text fragment. “Experimental neuro-cognitive enhancement. Goal: Remote kinetic manipulation and accelerated threat processing.” He looked up at me, face pale. “Ric, this isn’t just special ops. This is human experimentation. Telekinesis. They were trying to build Jedi.”
“What happened to them?”
Zephyr scrolled down. “Official report: Catastrophic failure. Unit liquidated due to ‘biological contamination’ in the field. No survivors.”
“She survived,” I said, staring at the pixelated ghost. “And Resnik wants to finish the job.”
The screen suddenly flashed red. “Shit!” Zephyr slammed the laptop shut. “Tracer! Someone’s watching the node. We’re burned.”
He stood up, panic vibrating off him. “I gotta go, Ric. I was never here. You never saw me.”
“Zephyr—”
“Delete your browser history. Burn your router. I’m serious!” He bolted out the door, leaving me alone in the silence of the apartment.
I didn’t sleep. I sat in the dark, my service pistol on the coffee table, watching the shadows stretch and warp.
0800 hours came too fast.
Colonel Resnik’s office was a testament to his ego—spartan, clean, with awards perfectly spaced on the wall behind his desk. He didn’t look up when I entered. He was reading a file, his pen scratching loudly against the paper.
“Sergeant Dunwood,” he said finally, laying the pen down. “How is the hand?”
“Fine, sir. Stitched up.”
He stood and walked to the window, looking out over the parade grounds where new recruits were marching in formation. “You’re a good soldier, Dunwood. Exemplary record. Good leadership potential. It would be a shame to see that wasted because of an overactive imagination.”
“Sir?”
He turned. His eyes were like shark glass—dead and unblinking. “Stress does strange things to men. Post-deployment fatigue. Sometimes we see things that aren’t there. We imagine conspiracies where there is only protocol. We imagine magic where there is only physics.”
He walked closer, invading my personal space just as I had invaded hers. “That woman at the bar is a mentally unstable washout. A civilian with a grudge and a flair for theatrics. She is not your concern. Do you understand?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good.” He smiled, but it didn’t reach his eyes. “Because if you were to continue asking questions about defunct units, I would have to assume you are suffering from a psychological break. And we would have to process you. Indefinitely.”
The threat hung in the air, heavy and suffocating. He wasn’t just threatening my career; he was threatening to lock me away in a psych ward.
“Dismissed, Sergeant.”
I walked out of headquarters, my heart hammering against my ribs. Resnik wasn’t just covering up a failed mission; he was protecting a crime scene. And I was the only witness he hadn’t silenced yet.
I returned to my apartment that evening to find the door unlocked.
I froze in the hallway, hand drifting to the small of my back where I kept my personal carry—a Glock 19. I hadn’t left it unlocked. I knew that for a fact.
I pushed the door open with my foot, weapon drawn, sweeping the room. “Clear right. Clear left.”
“Put the gun away, Sergeant.”
The voice came from the shadows of the kitchenette. I spun, aiming center mass.
She was sitting at my small dining table, her hands folded calmly in front of her. Meridian Frost. Phantom One. She looked different than she had in the bar. The fear was gone, replaced by a weary, dangerous resolve.
“Give me one reason not to call the MPs,” I said, my aim steady.
“Because the MPs work for Resnik,” she said softly. “And Resnik wants us both dead.”
“He thinks you’re crazy. He thinks I’m hallucinating.”
“He knows exactly what I am,” she corrected. “And now, so do you.”
She looked at the gun in my hand. “I asked you to put it away.”
“I’m keeping it right where it is.”
She sighed, a sound of profound exhaustion. “Okay. Have it your way.”
She didn’t raise her hand. She didn’t chant. She just looked at the weapon.
Suddenly, the polymer grip heated up against my palm. I gasped, instinctively loosening my grip, but the gun didn’t fall. It floated. It hovered three inches above my hand, rotating slowly.
Then, with a metallic click, the slide racked back on its own. The magazine dropped out, floating in mid-air. The barrel twisted and slid free. The recoil spring ejected. In three seconds, my functioning firearm had been disassembled into its component parts, all orbiting each other like a miniature solar system in the middle of my living room.
I stared, my mouth dry. The physics of it made my brain hurt. It was impossible, yet there it was.
“Project Mind Shift,” she said, her voice devoid of pride. “They wanted to create the ultimate assassin. No fingerprints. No ballistics. Just a thought, and an enemy’s heart stops. Or their vehicle swerves. Or a glass explodes.”
The pieces of the gun gently lowered themselves onto the table, arranging themselves in a neat row.
“Why are you here?” I asked, my voice shaking.
“Because I need a witness,” she said. “And you’re the only one loud enough to be heard.”
She stood up and walked to the window, peering through the blinds. “We weren’t killed in action, Allaric. We were executed. We were sent to Azerbaijan to extract a target. But when we got there, the ‘terrorist cell’ was a safe house for American journalists. Stringers for the Times and the Post. They had uncovered a money trail linking Resnik to private arms sales in the region.”
She turned back to me. “Resnik ordered us to level the building. ‘No survivors,’ he said. He called them enemy combatants. We refused. My team… my family… we stood down. So Resnik triggered the contingency.”
“Contingency?”
“The implants in our heads,” she tapped her temple. “Supposed to be for comms and tactical data. But they had a kill switch. A localized charge.” Her voice broke, just for a second. “I watched seven of my friends drop dead in the sand. Their brains… scrambled. I survived because my body rejected the implant a week prior. The scarring blocked the signal.”
The horror of it washed over me. It wasn’t just murder; it was a massacre of his own troops.
“I’ve been running for three years,” she said. “gathering evidence. I have the original mission logs, the biometric data of the kill switch activation, the financial records. It’s all on a drive.”
“Where is the drive?”
“Hidden,” she said. “But I can’t get to it. I triggered a silent alarm when I entered the perimeter. They’re tracking me. If I go to the drop site, they’ll intercept.”
“So you want me to get it.”
“I want you to help me broadcast it,” she said. “There’s a secure uplink at the old Blackwater Bridge. It’s an abandoned comms relay. If we can plug the drive in there, it uploads to every major news server on the eastern seaboard simultaneously. Resnik can’t kill the story once it’s everywhere.”
“This is treason,” I whispered. “If we’re wrong…”
“If we’re wrong, I go to prison,” she said. “If we’re right, and we do nothing, Resnik keeps creating monsters.”
The Blackwater Bridge was a rusted skeleton of iron spanning a gorge five miles north of the base. It was raining—a cold, miserable drizzle that slicked the metal grating.
We parked my truck a mile out and hiked in. Meridian moved through the woods like a predator, silent and fluid. I lumbered behind her, feeling every ounce of my gear.
“The relay is in the maintenance box at the center of the span,” she said, her voice barely audible over the wind.
We stepped onto the bridge. The river roared two hundred feet below, a black ribbon of violence.
“Allaric,” she stopped. “If this goes south… don’t try to save me. Save the drive.”
“Let’s just get it done,” I said.
We reached the center. Meridian knelt by a gray metal box, pulling a multi-tool from her pocket. She worked the lock, her hands steady. “Got it.”
She pulled a small, ruggedized hard drive from inside the box. “This is it. The smoking gun.”
“Hand it over, Commander Frost!”
The voice boomed from the darkness at the end of the bridge. Floodlights snapped on, blinding us. I threw my arm up to shield my eyes.
Silhouettes emerged from the light—armored figures. Not MPs. These guys were wearing black tactical gear with no insignias. Mercenaries. Or Resnik’s private goon squad.
“You didn’t think it would be that easy, did you?” Resnik’s voice came over a loudspeaker. “You’re predictable, Meridian. You always return to the scene of the crime.”
“Run,” Meridian hissed at me.
“There’s nowhere to go!” I shouted. We were pinned.
“I said RUN!”
Meridian stepped forward. She raised both hands. The rain around her seemed to stop, the droplets hovering in mid-air, vibrating. Then, with a scream of effort, she thrust her hands forward.
The rain turned into shrapnel. The droplets accelerated to bullet speeds, slamming into the floodlights. Pop-pop-pop! The lights shattered, plunging the bridge back into darkness.
“Go, Allaric!”
I scrambled back toward the tree line, but the thumping of rotor blades cut off my escape. A Blackhawk helicopter rose from the gorge, hovering level with the bridge. A sniper leaned out the side.
I saw the muzzle flash before I heard the shot.
Meridian jerked as if punched. She grabbed her shoulder, spinning around, and dropped the drive. It skittered across the wet grating, teetering on the edge.
“No!” I dove for it.
My fingers brushed the cold plastic just as a boot stomped down on my wrist.
I looked up. A soldier stood over me, rifle pointed at my head. “Don’t be a hero, kid.”
They had us.
I woke up in a cell that was too small to lie down in. It was dark, damp, and smelled of mildew. My wrist—the one Resnik had stomped on—was swollen and throbbing.
I didn’t know how long I’d been there. Hours? Days? They had stripped me of my uniform, leaving me in a gray jumpsuit. The isolation was absolute. No sound, no light. Just the beat of my own heart and the crushing weight of failure.
I had lost. Meridian was probably dead. The drive was gone. Resnik had won.
Then, a sound. Tap. Tap. Scratch.
It was coming from the ventilation grate near the ceiling.
Tap-tap-tap. Tap-tap-tap.
Morse code. S-O-S.
The grate rattled. A screw fell to the floor. Then another. The grate swung open, and a face peered down.
It was Tav. The bartender.
“Catch,” he whispered.
He dropped a bundle. It was a stun grenade and a key card.
“How the hell—” I started.
“I told you,” Tav whispered, hanging upside down like a gargoyle. “I owe her father. Now, listen. Resnik has Meridian in the Medical Research wing, Sub-level 3. He’s not going to kill her yet. He wants to study her. He wants to know why she didn’t die with the others.”
“The drive?”
“Resnik has it in his office. But he hasn’t destroyed it. He’s arrogant. He kept it as a trophy.”
“Tav, I can’t fight a whole base.”
“You don’t have to,” Tav grinned, his teeth white in the gloom. “I brought friends.”
Somewhere outside, an explosion rocked the building. Alarms began to scream.
“That would be the distraction,” Tav said. “Go. Get the girl. I’ll get the drive.”
I moved through the corridors like a ghost. The base was in chaos. Smoke billowed from the motor pool—Tav’s distraction was significant.
I reached the Medical Research wing. The key card Tav gave me worked. I slipped inside, descending into the belly of the beast. Sub-level 3 was cold, quieter than the rest of the base. This was where the secrets were kept.
I found the lab at the end of the hall. The door was reinforced glass.
Inside, Meridian was strapped to a vertical tilting table. She looked terrible—pale, sweating, her shoulder bandaged crudely. Resnik was there, along with two scientists in hazmat suits. They were attaching electrodes to her temples.
“Let’s increase the voltage,” Resnik was saying, his voice muffled by the glass. “Stimulate the temporal lobe. I want to see the neural flare.”
“Sir, her vitals are critical,” one scientist argued. “If we push her, she’ll stroke out.”
“She is property,” Resnik snapped. “Push it.”
I didn’t have a plan. I just had rage.
I pulled the pin on the stun grenade Tav had given me and cracked the door open. “Hey, Colonel!”
Resnik turned just as I rolled the grenade into the room.
FLASH-BANG.
The light was blinding, the sound a physical blow. I rushed in while they were disoriented. I pistol-whipped the first scientist, sending him crumbling. I kicked Resnik in the chest, knocking him into a tray of instruments.
I scrambled to the table. “Meridian! Meridian, wake up!”
Her eyes fluttered open. They were bloodshot, unfocused. “Allaric?”
“I’m getting you out.” I fumbled with the restraints. They were magnetic, heavy duty. “Come on, come on…”
“Leaving so soon?”
I spun around. Resnik was standing up, blood trickling from his nose. He had a gun in his hand—my gun, the one they’d taken from me.
“You are a persistent nuisance, Sergeant,” he spat. He raised the weapon.
I froze. I was dead. There was no way I could reach him before he pulled the trigger.
“Look at her,” Resnik sneered, gesturing to Meridian. “Broken. Weak. A failed experiment.”
Meridian’s head lolled forward. Then, she stopped breathing.
“She’s gone,” Resnik laughed. “And you’re next.”
But she wasn’t gone.
The air in the room suddenly grew heavy. The pressure dropped, popping my ears. The lights overhead flickered and exploded, showering us in sparks.
Meridian lifted her head. Her eyes were glowing—not metaphorically, but literally. A faint, bioluminescent gray light leaked from her pupils.
“I… am… not… weak,” she grated out.
The restraints on her wrists groaned. Metal twisted, shrieked, and then snapped.
Resnik’s eyes went wide. He fired. Bang!
The bullet stopped. It hovered three feet from Meridian’s chest, spinning angrily against an invisible shield.
Meridian screamed—a sound of pure, raw power. She threw her arms out.
The bullet flew backward, embedding itself in the wall inches from Resnik’s head. The medical equipment—carts, monitors, trays—lifted into the air and hurled themselves at the Colonel. He was buried under a pile of steel and electronics.
“Allaric!” she shouted, her voice echoing with a strange distortion. “The wall!”
She pointed to the far wall of the lab. “Blast it!”
“With what?”
“With me!”
She grabbed my hand. I felt a jolt of electricity shoot up my arm, not painful, but energizing. She channeled her focus through me.
“Push!” she commanded.
We thrust our hands forward together. The reinforced concrete wall didn’t just crack; it crumbled outward, blowing a hole straight into the drainage tunnel behind it.
The exertion broke her. Her knees buckled, and the glow in her eyes faded. I caught her, throwing her arm over my shoulder.
“Resnik…” she wheezed.
I looked back at the pile of debris. Resnik was crawling out, battered, bleeding, but alive. He looked at us with pure hatred.
“This isn’t over!” he screamed.
“It is for you,” I said.
I dragged Meridian into the tunnel just as the structural integrity of the lab gave way, sealing the entrance behind us.
We met Tav at the rendezvous point—an old airstrip five miles east. He was leaning against a beat-up Cessna, looking smug. He tossed a small hard drive to me.
“Found it in his desk,” Tav said. “Top drawer. Like I said, arrogant.”
We loaded Meridian into the plane. She was unconscious, barely breathing, but alive.
“Where do we go?” I asked Tav.
“Washington,” Tav said, firing up the prop. “I made a call. General Vanguard—the real Vanguard—is waiting for us at Andrews. She’s convening a tribunal.”
The hearing was not a spectacle. It was a quiet, deadly serious affair in a soundproof room deep within the Pentagon.
General Kalista Vanguard sat at the head of the table. She was terrifying in a way Resnik could never be—cold, precise, and absolutely moral.
Resnik was there, in handcuffs, looking smaller without his uniform. His lawyer was blustering about classified information and national security.
Then, I stood up. I placed the drive on the table.
“This drive contains the unredacted mission logs of Task Force Phantom,” I said. “It contains audio recordings of Colonel Resnik ordering the execution of non-combatants. And it contains the financial records of his offshore accounts.”
Vanguard looked at the drive, then at Resnik. “Is this true, Colonel?”
Resnik sneered. “I did what was necessary. I protected this country from weakness.”
Then, the door opened. Meridian walked in. She was wearing a dress uniform, borrowed, but it fit. She looked tired, frail, but she walked without support.
She stopped in front of Resnik. She didn’t use her powers. She didn’t throw him across the room. She simply looked him in the eye.
“You didn’t protect the country,” she said softly. “You just protected yourself.”
She turned to Vanguard. “General, I am Lieutenant Commander Meridian Frost. And I am reporting for duty.”
Vanguard stood up. She saluted. “Welcome back, Commander.”
Three weeks later.
The Crowbar had a new sign out front, but the smell inside was the same. The jukebox was playing some old classic rock, and the mood was light.
I sat at the bar, nursing a beer. A cold one. In a sturdy glass.
The door opened, and Meridian walked in. She was wearing civilian clothes—jeans and a leather jacket. She looked healthy. The haunted look was gone, replaced by a quiet peace.
She sat next to me. Tav slid a whiskey to her without a word.
“He got life,” she said. “Leavenworth. Solitary.”
“Good,” I said. “He deserves worse.”
“Vanguard offered me a job,” she said, swirling her drink. “Instructor. Teaching the next generation about ethical warfare. And… helping them monitor the other subjects.”
“Other subjects?”
“There were other programs,” she said. “Mind Shift wasn’t the only one. There are other people out there like me. Someone needs to find them before another Resnik does.”
She looked at me. “She needs a liaison. Someone who isn’t afraid of things they don’t understand. Someone stubborn.”
I laughed. “You offering me a job, Phantom?”
“I’m offering you a mission, Allaric.”
I looked at my hand, at the faint scar where the glass had cut me. I looked at her—the woman who could move mountains with her mind but chose to fight with the truth instead.
I clinked my glass against hers. Gently.
“I’m in,” I said. “But no blowing up the office furniture.”
She smiled, and for the first time, it reached her eyes.
“No promises.”
