He pressed them together.
He hadn’t felt that particular kind of tension in years.
He knew what it meant. His body had recognized a threat before his mind had decided what to do with it.
But Derek wasn’t an enemy combatant. He was a young man with a gym, a fragile ego, and a girlfriend who happened to be married to somebody else.
Cole wasn’t going to pretend this was a battlefield.
He opened his duffel bag.
Beneath his clothes lay an old photograph of five men standing beside a military vehicle in Fallujah. They were dusty, exhausted, and smiling at something beyond the camera.
Cole was the youngest man in the photograph.
He had a different expression back then. More confident, perhaps. Or simply less aware of what confidence could cost.
He touched the edge of the picture.
Four of those men had come home.
One hadn’t.
Sergeant Daniel Reeves had been the sort of man who could make an exhausted soldier laugh without saying anything particularly funny. He had taught Cole to slow his breathing when fear threatened to take control.
