more inconvenient than upsetting.
“He’s trying,” she said.
A small, dangerous sound moved through the room.
Bull’s grin thinned.
“Excuse me?”
She met his eyes.
“You heard me.”
The challenge in her voice was so slight most people would have missed it.
Bull heard it perfectly.
Humiliation is gasoline to a certain kind of man.
Add witnesses, and it becomes an explosion.
He stepped closer until they were only inches apart.
“You think you’re funny?”
“No,” Alexis said.
“I think you’re drunk.”
Several Marines at Bull’s table winced.
That should have been the last chance.
Pete came out from behind the bar, slow and deliberate, palms visible.
“That’s enough,” he said.
“Crawford, you settle your tab and go home.”
Bull spread his hands without looking at Pete.
“I’m not the one causing a problem.”
“You kicked a customer out of a chair.”
“Then throw me out.”
Pete almost did.
But before he could take another step, Alexis lifted one hand slightly—not to Bull, to Pete.
Wait.
It was the barest motion, easy to miss, but Pete stopped.
So did Mercer.
She wanted this to continue.
Not because she enjoyed it.
Because she was measuring something.
Bull mistook the pause for fear.
That was his second fatal mistake.
His first had been putting his hands on her.
He leaned in until the smell of whiskey and aftershave wrapped around her.
“You Navy?” he asked.
“Admin? Public affairs? Some little office where they hand out medals to people who never earned them?”
Alexis said nothing.
Bull smirked, taking her silence as surrender.
“That’s what I thought.”
What he didn’t notice was what everyone else began to notice.
Her hands.
They were relaxed.
Not curled.
Not trembling.
Not hidden.
Just open at her sides, fingers loose, as if she were standing on a range waiting for the signal to begin.
There was no panic in her.
No scramble.
No uncertainty.
Only patience.
Mercer exhaled slowly through his nose.
He had seen that patience before.
It was the look men wore just before a door came off its hinges.
Reyes finally stood from Bull’s table.
He didn’t do it loudly.
He didn’t want attention.
But the scrape of his stool still cut through the room.
Bull glanced over in irritation.
“Sit down, Reyes.”
Reyes swallowed.
“Gunny…
maybe we should just go.”
That landed badly.
Bull stared at him as if he’d been slapped.
“You got something to say?”
Reyes’s face burned.
He looked at Alexis, then at Mercer, then back at Bull.
There were twenty ways to say it and every single one felt like a betrayal.
In the end he chose the one that sounded least impossible.
“I think you don’t know who that is.”
The bar went dead still again.
Bull turned back to Alexis with the slow disbelief of a man who thinks everyone around him has joined some private joke at his expense.
“Should I?”
Alexis’s expression didn’t move.
Mercer answered for her.
“Yeah.”
Bull barked a laugh, but it came out thinner now.
“What is this? Some kind of setup?”
Mercer took a step closer.
“No.
This is me trying to save you from yourself.”
Bull’s jaw flexed.
He could still have walked away.
He could have sneered, tossed cash on the table, and left with enough dignity to
