And starting today, Marcus, I am your worst nightmare.
Before him, the cracked glass of the military-issue watch caught the autumn sunlight. The steel casing was scarred by shrapnel, blackened along the edges by the intense heat of an explosion that had occurred thousands of miles away in a forgotten valley. But the engraved letters remained unmistakable: Julian Vance.
It was an object Marcus had been told lay at the bottom of a riverbed in the Kunar Province, swallowed by the earth along with the rest of his older brother’s dignity. For three years, Marcus had lived with the poisonous narrative fed to him by his father: Julian had been abandoned by a reckless, incompetent female commanding officer who had panicked under fire and ordered an ill-fated advance, leaving good men to die in the dirt. That single lie had forged Marcus into an instrument of unrelenting rage, driving him into the brutal world of amateur cage fighting, desperate to prove that the Vance name could never be broken again.
Now, looking into the ice-cold eyes of the woman who held the watch, the foundation of his entire reality began to crack.
You are lying, Marcus choked out, though his voice cracked on the final syllable. He struggled to find purchase on the ground, his right wrist throbbing where Dana had locked the nerve. He pushed himself upright, his knees shaking slightly before he forced them to lock. He looked around wildly at the gathered crowd, noticing the nervous whispers, the lowered eyes, the sudden evaporation of the fear he had spent two years cultivating on this campus. The humiliation tasted like bile in the back of his throat. You stole that. You took it from his personal effects after you got him killed!
Dana did not raise her voice. She did not take a defensive stance. She simply wrapped the watch back into the faded olive cloth with meticulous, deliberate movements, sliding it into the reinforced pocket of her track pants. Her eyes never left Marcus’s face.
Julian told me you were stubborn, Dana said, her words dropping like heavy stones into the quiet air. He said you always looked for someone else to blame whenever you lost a round in the ring. He told me that when you were fourteen, you broke your own hand against a locker because you couldn’t accept being pinned. He knew you, Marcus. Better than you know yourself.
Shut up! Marcus roared, stepping forward, his hands balling into fists. His two heavyweight training partners, Tyler and Briggs, stepped up beside him, their initial shock giving way to the primal urge to protect their leader’s wounded pride. Don’t you dare speak his name! You don’t know anything about my family!
I know Julian took two rounds to the ceramic plate and kept firing his rifle until the extraction bird touched down, Dana replied, her voice dropping into an octave of pure, unadulterated command that made Tyler and Briggs instinctively halt. I know he refused the first stretcher because there was an eighteen-year-old corpsman bleeding out on the gravel who needed it more. And I know the last thing he asked me to do before they closed the body bag was to make sure his little brother didn’t turn into a monster under Richard Vance’s thumb.
The mention of his father’s name hit Marcus like an open-handed strike. He recoiled half a step, his breathing ragged. Around them, the crowd began to murmur loudly. The name Richard Vance carried immense weight in Ridgefield. He owned the Vance Logistics empire, held the mortgage on half the commercial real estate downtown, and funded the very athletic scholarship Marcus walked on. To hear a newly hired physical education instructor invoke the town’s most powerful man with utter contempt sent shockwaves through the students.
Class starts at eight tomorrow morning, Vance, Dana said, turning her back on him completely, dismissing the three muscular athletes as if they were nothing more than empty bleachers. Be in uniform, or do not bother showing up to my facility at all.
Marcus lunged forward, pure instinct overriding common sense, but Tyler grabbed his shoulder, holding him back. Not here, man, Tyler hissed under his breath, eyes darting toward the administrative wing. The deans are watching from the second floor. Look.
