My Forbidden Commander (Forbidden Forces #1)

1. Gabriel

GAbrIEL

Rain hammers the corrugated roof of the briefing hut hard enough to drown out the generators.

Forward Operating Base Kestrel, eleven kilometers off the Dravosian border, and everything smells like wet canvas, diesel, and mud.

I’ve got a fresh task force arriving in twenty minutes and five personnel files spread across a table that wobbles every time I lean on it.

Four of them are exactly what I like in a soldier. Boring, competent, predictable.

The fifth is Reyes, Noah A., Specialist. Twenty-three years old.

I read the file twice, because the first time through I’m sure I’m misreading it.

Combat scores in the top two percent of his intake.

Marksmanship qualifications that would make a sniper instructor jealous.

A commendation for pulling two men out of a burning vehicle at Karsk Ridge under direct fire—which sits three lines above a disciplinary note for telling a captain, verbatim, that his plan was “a great way to mail everyone home in pieces.”

The captain revised the plan, I notice.

One evaluating officer wrote shows exceptional initiative under pressure. Another one, four months later, wrote insubordinate, resistant to command structure, recommend close supervision. Same soldier, same war.

Then there’s the incident report from Orsha Valley.

His squad walked into an ambush that killed four men, and Reyes held a collapsed farmhouse cellar for six hours with a jammed radio, a fractured wrist, and thirty rounds to his name.

The after-action report actually uses the phrase should not have survived.

And at the bottom, the part that tells me everything I need to know: a transfer request with his own signature on it. Requesting assignment to border operations. The most dangerous posting available, and he asked for it. Volunteered. Practically begged.

I close the folder and pinch the bridge of my nose.

I know this soldier. I’ve buried a dozen of him. Talented, reckless, allergic to authority, running toward something or away from something and calling it duty either way. Reyes is the kind of man who makes his squad better right up until the day he makes them dig.

The door bangs open, and men start filing in, shaking rain off their shoulders.

“Colonel.” Sergeant First Class Okafor, my senior NCO, salutes crisply and finds a spot along the wall. He’s a good man. Solid record. Two tours in the Dustlands, the last one beside me.

“Sergeant,” I greet him.

Spencer and Petrillo come next—weapons specialist and medic, both squared away, both smart enough to keep their eyes forward and their mouths shut.

Then Corporal Hayes, comms, who trips on the door frame and recovers with the dignity of a man pretending it never happened.

Then Delgado, breacher, built like a load-bearing wall.

Five. I count again. Still five.

“We missing someone, Sergeant?”

Okafor’s jaw tightens a fraction. “Specialist Reyes was right behind us, sir.”

Of course he was.

Forty seconds later, the door opens, and the sixth member of my new task force strolls in like the war scheduled itself around him.

And I understand, immediately and with a sensation a lot like stepping on a mine, that the file lied to me.

Oh, the facts are all in there. The scores, the citations, the insubordination. But somewhere in six pages of official assessments, not one evaluating officer thought to include the single most tactically relevant detail about Specialist Noah Reyes.

He’s beautiful.

Not soft. Nothing about him is soft. He’s beautiful the way a knife is beautiful—sharp cheekbones and a mouth built for saying things that end careers.

Brown hair still wet from the rain, pushed back with careless fingers.

Brown eyes that sweep the room, catalog the exits, catalog me, and take their sweet time looking away.

There’s a fading bruise high on his left cheek, yellow-green at the edges, and his knuckles carry the kind of split scabs you get from hitting something harder than a heavy bag.

Whatever got him reassigned, he wore it here on purpose.

Even the way he stands is wrong. Weight cocked onto one hip, shoulders loose.

The posture of a man leaning against a bar, not a soldier reporting to a full colonel in an active theater.

Twenty-three years old, too relaxed by half, and every instinct I’ve sharpened over two decades of command starts screaming at once that what just walked into my briefing hut is trouble. With dog tags.

“Specialist Reyes.” I keep my voice flat. Level. The voice that has ended firefights.

“Sir.” The salute he gives me is more of a suggestion.

“You’re late,” I remark, still without an inflection.

“Convoy from the airfield stopped for a mine sweep, sir. I figured showing up alive beat showing up on time.”

Hayes makes a sound like a strangled cough. Okafor’s expression could split granite.

I let the silence do its work. Most soldiers can’t survive four seconds of my silence.

Reyes takes it the way he apparently takes everything else—chin up, something bright and dangerous moving behind his eyes—and I have the unwelcome thought that this is a young man who has been stared down by scarier things than colonels and lived to be smug about it.

Should not have survived. The report’s words. He knows it, too. It’s written all over him, in the bruise and the knuckles and the transfer request. According to the paperwork, he already died once, and I get the feeling everything he’s done since has been out of pure spite.

“There’s a chair.” I nod at the empty one at the end of the table, farthest from the map board. A small order. Meaningless. A test with exactly one right answer.

He looks at the chair. He looks at me.

Then he crosses the room and sits, unhurried, draping one arm over the back of it like he’s settling in to watch a movie he’s already seen. Technically, it’s perfect obedience. It’s also a great big question mark aimed straight at me.

“Yes, sir,” he says.

Two words. Regulation words. Every soldier in this war says them fifty times a day, and not one of them says them like that—like the sir is a door he’s holding open just to see if I’ll walk through it.

I turn to the map board. Karsk Ridge in red grease pencil, patrol routes, the border crawling through the mountains like a scar. My hands are steady, my voice is steady, everything about me is exactly what it’s supposed to be.

“Gentlemen. Welcome to Kestrel. Everything east of this line wants you dead.”

I get through the briefing. I only look at the end of the table twice.

The file said reckless. The file said insubordinate. The file said should not have survived.

What it should have said is run.