“Move!”

The command cracked through the Anchor’s Rest a split second before the impact came.

A heavy boot slammed into the leg of a wooden chair, and the chair flew sideways across the stained floor.

The woman sitting in it went down hard, shoulder striking first, one hand catching the edge of the table in time to keep her skull from smashing into the corner.

The bar stopped breathing.

Conversations broke off in pieces.

A man at the pool table froze with his cue in midair.

A server carrying two baskets of fries stopped so suddenly one of the paper liners fluttered onto the floor.

Even the jukebox seemed to dull under the colored neon, the song thinning into something far away and wrong.

Standing over the fallen chair was Gunnery Sergeant Marcus Crawford.

Most people called him Bull, and no one in Jacksonville had ever had to ask why.

He was six-foot-three, broad through the shoulders, thick in the jaw, thick in the neck, and thick with the kind of confidence that came from years of being the loudest man in every room he entered.

His face was flushed from whiskey and approval.

His grin was all appetite.

“Stay down, sweetheart,” he said, glinning at the room more than at the woman on the floor.

“This place is for real warriors.

Not little girls playing soldier.”

A few men at his table laughed because that was what they always did when Bull performed.

The woman on the ground did not answer right away.

She shifted once, tested her weight, and touched the split in her lip with the tip of her tongue.

The taste of blood spread bright and metallic through her mouth.

Not much.

Enough to notice.

Not enough to matter.

Then she stood.

It wasn’t dramatic.

That was the strange thing.

She rose with the kind of control that made the whole scene feel more dangerous, not less.

No shaky anger.

No wild rush.

No cursing.

She just came up in one smooth motion, brushed the dust from one sleeve of her dark jacket, and looked directly at the man who had kicked her to the floor.

Captain Alexis Kaine was not physically imposing the way Bull was.

She was lean where he was heavy, compact where he was oversized.

Her dark hair was pulled back cleanly, and there was a stillness in her face that read, at a distance, like composure.

Up close, it read like warning.

“You should leave,” she said.

Her tone was calm enough to make the words feel colder than a threat.

Bull laughed, loud enough to reclaim the room.

“Or what? You gonna cry to somebody? Run to your chain of command? Sweetheart, everyone in this place knows me.

Nobody knows you.”

Behind the bar, Pete Whitman stopped pretending to wipe glasses.

Pete was sixty-two, gray-bearded, and had spent enough years tending bars outside military bases to stop being impressed by rank, muscles, or cheap swagger.

He knew drunks.

He knew fighters.

He knew men who mistook noise for authority.

He also knew when a person had learned how to shut pain out of their face so completely it became part of them.

Alexis had that look.

Bull stepped in and shoved her shoulder with one open palm, rough and dismissive,