*****
Sam seemed to simply appear before Jane, stepping in between her and her opponent. She was lucky she hadn’t been injured. Jane had had to pull back a sweep of her legs to avoid taking her down. All Jane could do was blink, riding the wave of adrenaline still coursing through her. She vibrated with the desire to push Sam aside and knee the blighter in the balls.
Sam held her hands up. “Stop.”
Adam Iverson, who she’d been fighting, crossed his arms and smirked. Fuck. He knew—he knew which buttons of hers to push. Bile rose. She twisted her bracelet around a knuckle and fought the bile down. The bastard had done this on purpose. Her blood boiled and she took a step forward, ready to brush Sam aside, but a hand fell on her shoulder, stopping her and spinning her around.
“Johnson. Report to my office,” Coop said, his voice carrying through the hushed room.
“But he—”
“My office. Now.”
“I didn’t start this!”
Coop’s glare promised retribution. “Everyone out,” he ordered the crowd.
The crowd. For the first time since she and Adam had tumbled into the room, tossing barbs and insults, Jane’s awareness expanded beyond the urge to strangle him. The crush of bodies seemed to seal her fate. Their collective groan when they realized the show was over—that she was the show—made shame burn through her, heating her face.
Great. Now she was turning into Sam, who blushed at everything.
“This wasn’t my fault.”
Coop held up a hand and pointed to the door, where a few stragglers lingered. “You still have an audience. We can do this now, and let the whole base know, or go back to my office.”
She could practically feel the interest coming off the remaining people. It was the exact same feeling she used to get as Janey Jones, the illusionist who got away, whose existence proved there was hope. People had clamored after her, desperate to have their questions answered and their hopes lifted. They had been relentless in their pursuit, until her dad began moving around, staying one step ahead of the savior-hungry Gifted.
At the army base, she was Jane Johnson, the reckless one. They watched her, waiting for the next explosion, the next piece of drama they could share around the cafeteria table, as if she provided the sole entertainment for the army. As though she was constantly in trouble.
And when she was in trouble… Narrowing her eyes, Jane studied the group. She was searching for someone specific. Someone with closely cropped dark hair, annoyingly broad shoulders, a few inches taller than her, and eyes that judged and condemned.
It was impossible not to be acquainted with those brown eyes, belonging to the one who’d made it his life mission to stick his fingers in her business. Her life as a soldier in the Gifted army, not her lady business. She shuddered.
He stood behind the more curious, arms crossed as he stared disapprovingly. Their gazes locked, and she felt a jolt, the same jolt of anger she always did. Will fucking Brown. She had no problem with witnesses to her fight with Coop—and she was going to fight him on this—but Will would twist her words to make it seem worse than it was.
The way he did every time.
Her lips curled into a snarl before she remembered she’d promised herself not to let him see how he got to her. That was it. That was the last time. She put on her blank mask, the one she used to drive people away. Or to keep Will from realizing he pushed her buttons to perfection.
A swift victory would be enough to make it stop, but he refused to fight.
Only one decision was preferable. “Office.”
“We’re disappointed.”
Sam’s words, soft and heart-felt, were a well-placed blow that echoed in Coop’s office. No physical pain compared to the weight of Sam’s furrowed brow and frown.
“Adam called me—”
Coop held up a hand. “You had a choice: a choice to fight and a choice to walk away. You chose wrong.”
“—a whore,” Jane finished. “You can’t expect me to walk away from that.”
“We can and do.”
“But—”
“This is precisely the type of situation that forced us to take you off active duty in the first place,” Coop said. “And yes, we know that’s where you want to be. But until you learn how to temper your reactions, we can’t put our army at risk by having you fight with them.”
Jane’s eyes widened. “I would never put anyone at risk.”
If he and Sam didn’t understand that, they didn’t understand her at all. The charm, originally her mom’s, on her bracelet was cold, but it calmed her. She wanted to put an end to the Hunters as much as—more than—everyone else. No one deserved to die the way her mom had. And the testing—she shuddered. It had to end.
“What do you think of Will Brown, Janey?”
“He’s the one who tattled on me again, isn’t he? Bastard.”
“His parents were married, actually,” Coop said. “But the point isn’t how we learned about this incident. It’s that it happened. You can’t go a full day without attracting the attention of half the base. Will does his job and does it well. If we see him, it’s because he wants to be seen. That is the kind of person we need. That’s the kind of person who will help us win this war.”
She wasn’t ready to admit he was right, so she discarded the thought. Crumpled it up and burned it so it didn’t burrow in. She could—would—be successful.
She raised an eyebrow. “And I suppose you would have been cool with someone calling Sam a whore?”
Coop’s blue eyes snapped, and Jane’s lips curled at the direct hit. But he merely gave her a tight-lipped smile, and said, “I’d be furious. But I know how to solve my problems without drawing a crowd. And that’s why you’re here and Brown does what he does.”
She slammed a fist into the wall. “I need to get out there.” The need blazed a path through her body, masking the pain in her hand and surging until she shook with it. The Hunters had to die. She would wipe them out. Reed deserved to die. She would make sure he paid for everything he’d done.
Coop shook his head. “We’re putting you on temporary leave. For the next week, you’re relieved of your duties. After that, you can earn our trust back by staying out of trouble and scrubbing toilets.”
Jane waited for the world to break—for a jagged line to appear along the wall, open itself up, and drag her in. But it didn’t. An hour passed, then two, then a day, and she was still without something to do.
No amount of appealing to Sam or Coop moved them to put her back in the classroom—let alone on active duty.
Everything she’d poured into the army—time and energy and skill—meant nothing.
It hadn’t put her closer to killing Reed.
Sam and Coop wouldn’t give her the opportunity. She understood that now. Understood it the way she understood that no jagged line would appear in the wall to swallow her whole, no matter how much she wished it to.
A crack in the wall certainly wouldn’t appear on its own. But she could stop waiting. She could make her own crack, disappear into it.
She could create her own opportunity to kill Reed.
Isn’t that what she’d always done? Her dad had hidden her from the world after the Gifted came asking questions she had no answers to. She’d created a new identity and given herself freedom from her name. She’d left her world behind for the Gifted army. Not her first choice—she had tried, once, to scale the fence of the Hunter compound only to be shocked by its electricity—but the army had given her the best opportunity. Except sitting alone in her office, the exact place she’d spent the day without a place to be, told her that her time here was over.
Time to strike out on her own again. She was different from the fledging Jane Johnson, who’d thought to storm the Hunter compound. This time, she would take what she needed any way she could.
Her entire life had moved forward with one mission: kill Reed. She’d prepared for it since Coop had delivered her to
her dad alive, but not unharmed. Her missing Gift still ached, especially in moments like this, when the anger faded and hopelessness set in.
Without her Gift, she wasn’t really Gifted.
And if she wasn’t Gifted, she didn’t know who she was.
But what she was, that was easy to name. Broken. She ran a finger over her bracelet.
Below her sternum, where her energy should be, everything felt stiff and rigid, not fluid. It should be easy to dig deep within herself, call the energy, and send it racing outward to form an illusion.
But it wasn’t.
She’d hidden the defect for years. With her dad forbidding anyone to ask about the Hunters and whisking her away from those who followed, dodging questions had been easy. He’d peppered her with plenty of questions when she’d first started talking again, but she refused to answer. And he never forced the issue.
That time—and her secret—belonged in a special compartment in her head that stayed locked.
With her decision made, she just had to figure out a way to leave the base without Will Brown—or anyone else, for that matter—catching on to her plans.
Reed would pay. His death would close that chapter of her life, and she could move on.
A knock on the door startled her from her thoughts. She propped her feet on the desk and folded her hands behind her head. “Enter.”
Davidson slipped in and shut the door. She had no idea how old he was—he could have been anywhere between forty-five and sixty. He’d been with Sam and her grandma for years before joining them.
And he was always in everyone’s business. He smiled.
She scowled. “What do you want, Davidson?”
“To talk.”
“No.”
Rather than listening, he took a seat.
“Please, sit down,” she said with enough sarcasm to earn her a brow raise.
“Don’t do it,” he said.
“Do what?”
“Whatever you’re planning.”
“I’m not planning anything,” she lied. She shifted in her chair, trying to recall if she’d recently felt the prick of energy that meant a memory-bringer was poking into her life.
He chuckled. “You forget I’m a memory-bringer.”
“I haven’t.” If he’d had a memory of her, she would have felt it. And she’d felt nothing.
“I have my ways, Ms. Johnson. Or should I say Ms. Jones?”
The bottom of her stomach dropped. She stood abruptly, sending her chair rolling back. “Get. Out.”
“If you’re worried about the word getting out, I assure you, I’ve kept bigger secrets.” He remained seated.
She didn’t want this. She didn’t like people knowing who she was. If they knew, they’d look past her fighting skills and watch her for signs. Signs of whether she was still scarred from her time with the Hunters. And she was. Deep down, so deep she couldn’t bring herself to admit it, she was. No one could know.
“Get out.”
“I will eventually. First, we must discuss what you’re planning.”
“I’ll report you to Sam and Coop.”
He dismissed her words with a wave of his hand. “You bark so well I forget your bite hardly stings. I know you want to kill someone within the Hunter organization. I’m not opposed to this. But you forget that your actions have consequences.”
“I’m well aware of consequences.” And how could she not be? She’d been relieved of her duties. She and consequences were on intimate terms. She was routinely fucked by them.
“Not those consequences. You have a commitment to this army, not just to follow orders, but to help them defeat the Hunters. Bigger things are at work here than your wounded ego. If you leave, you put those in jeopardy.”
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Amanda Shofner (n.)
1. Writer who creates stories to satisfy her opposing desires: adventure and staying home
2. Coffee aficionada and “wine away the whine” proponent
3. INTJ: introverted, intuitive, thinking, judging; HSP: highly sensitive person; left-handed; curly-haired
4. Secret admirer of quirky and unapologetically passionate people
Origin:
Made by combining the words Amanda (lovable, worthy of love) and Shofner (an Americanized German surname, thought to be derived from Schaffner), Amanda Shofner is from Minneapolis, Minnesota.
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