“Stop talking,” Vance commanded, pointing a trembling finger at her face. “You do not get to say his name.”
Rostova ignored the order. The memories she had suppressed for two years were flooding back, sharp and vivid. The smell of burning diesel fuel. The suffocating heat of the Afghan summer. The deafening, world-ending crack of the ambush.
“When the IED hit the lead vehicle, the convoy stopped,” Rostova continued, her voice slipping into a hollow, detached cadence. She wasn't looking at Vance anymore; she was looking through the wall, back into the dust. “They opened up on us with PKMs from the ridge. Tyler’s squad dismounted to lay suppressing fire. I followed them out. The air was entirely dust and tracer rounds.”
Vance stared at her. He wanted to scream at her to shut up, to order her to be silent, but the specific, tactical details were freezing his tongue. This wasn't something a clerk read in a sanitized report. This was the raw, unedited chaos of a firefight.
“Tyler was moving toward a ruined compound wall,” Rostova said, her voice barely a whisper now. “A mortar round hit the roof of the compound. The shrapnel came straight down.”
“Instantaneous,” Vance choked out, stepping back, shaking his head. “The report said the IED hit his truck. Instantaneous.”
“The report was written by a lieutenant who was hiding behind the rear axle of the third truck, Sergeant Major,” Rostova said, finally looking back up at him. Her dark eyes were filled with a terrible, heavy sorrow. “Tyler wasn't in the truck. And it wasn't instantaneous.”
Vance’s chest heaved. He looked at Corporal Jenkins, who was staring at his keyboard, desperately trying to pretend he wasn't hearing the destruction of a senior enlisted leader.
“I got to him,” Rostova said softly. “I put the tourniquets on. I packed the wounds. I held the pressure. We were pinned down behind that wall for twenty-two minutes before the gunships arrived.”
Vance leaned heavily against the wooden door of the Commander’s office, the dog tag digging into his palm. “No,” he whispered. It was a plea, not a command. If she was telling the truth, then his son had suffered. His son had known he was dying. The comforting lie he had lived with was evaporating.
“He was awake,” Rostova said gently. The anger she had felt at the slap was entirely gone. She was now just a medic, delivering the final, bitter medicine. “He was scared at first. But then he got very calm. He knew he wasn't going to make it to the bird.”
Inside her pocket, her fingers closed around the plastic evidence bag holding the leather notebook. She had carried the weight of Tyler’s final moments for two long years. She had tracked down Sergeant Major Vance’s unit after her deployment ended, requesting a transfer specifically to this battalion. She had promised Tyler she would find his father.
But when she arrived, she found a monster. She found a man who bullied the weak, who abused his power, who slapped soldiers for minor infractions. She had realized then that Vance wasn't ready for the truth. The truth would have broken him. So, she waited. She endured his abuse, waiting for the fever of his grief to break.
Today, when he struck her in front of the squad, the fever broke.
The heavy wooden door behind Vance suddenly clicked and swung open inward, causing the Sergeant Major to stumble slightly.
Captain Hayes, a sharp, observant man in his late thirties, stood in the doorway. He held a stack of files, his brow furrowed in annoyance. He looked at Vance, noting the man’s pale, sweating face. Then Hayes looked past him and saw Rostova sitting in the chair.
The Commander’s eyes immediately locked onto the swelling red handprint on Rostova’s face, and the dried blood on her collar.
Hayes’s expression hardened instantly. The annoyance vanished, replaced by a cold, command-level danger.
“Sergeant Major,” Captain Hayes said, his voice dropping an octave. “Get inside my office. Now.”