365 Days, Zero Missed Calls Chapter 06

365 Days, Zero Missed Calls Chapter 06  Lack the Equipment

Sunday night, I asked Mara to cut my hair.

It came off just above the shoulders, all one length. Practical. Two people had grabbed it in training and put me on my back with it, and I have exactly enough ego to hate losing.

When I walked into the common room, my unit whistled and thumped the table like animals.

“You look like someone who’s about to ruin a man’s month,” Echo observed.

“That’s the idea.”

Monday morning, I put on the Commander’s uniform for the first time. Black, silver crown at the collar, the single bar on the sleeve that means every Captain in the intake year answers to me.

Orson handed me my coffee and said, without looking up, “You know they all think you’re a man, right? The other Commanders. They’ve been calling you ‘him’ for a year.”

“Well,” I said. “Last time I checked, I still lack the equipment.”

“You’ve got the balls though, Commander,” Skylar said into her cereal.

I was still laughing when I ran up the steps of the main building nine minutes late.

Director Larsen was waiting outside the meeting room with the expression of a man watching a match get

carried into a fireworks factory.

“They’re all inside.”

“Wonderful.”

I opened the door.

Seven Commanders around a long table. The King at the head. A young man beside him in a dark shirt with a jaw you could cut yourself on. And near the window, arms folded, a tall man with gray eyes who looked up as

the door opened and went completely, comically still.

“My apologies for being late, Your Majesty,” I said. “One of my people had to remind me that I lack the necessary equipment to qualify as a man, and I lost track of time.”

Somebody choked on their water.

Every head at that table snapped toward me at once, and I watched seven grown men rearrange their entire

understanding of the last twelve months.

crossed to the King and bowed, small and correct. “Good morning, Your Majesty. It won’t happen again.”

The King’s face didn’t move at all. His eyes were absolutely dancing.

“Commander Vale. A pleasure to see you again. My congratulations to your unit on graduating three weeks early the first in forty years.”

Gasps. Actual, audible gasps.

“I’d put that in my bed by Friday,” said a voice in my head.

I didn’t turn my head. I just marked the direction, and the pitch, and the shape of it, and filed it.

“Commander Vale,” the King said, “my son. Crown Prince Kian.”

The one with the jaw. He shook my hand and said, deadpan, “How did your unit take the news that you’re not

a man?”

“They pointed out I have the balls anyway, Your Highness.”

Somebody at the table made a strangled noise,

“God,” I said. “I need to ask my team to help me look for my filter. It’s been missing since Tuesday.”

Kian Sterling laughed out loud. The tall gray-eyed one bit the inside of his cheek so hard I could hear it.

“And this,” the King said, “is Commander Jaylen Marek. Your neighbor for the past year, I believe.”

So THAT’S who’s been living on the other side of my wall, Marek was thinking. Twelve months. Twelve

months of calling her ‘he.’

“Commander,” I said.

“Commander,” he said. His voice did something inconvenient to my spine, which I chose to ignore, because I

was working.

“Would you excuse me one moment, Your Majesty? There’s something I have to do.”

I turned and walked down the length of the table.

Cade Fenwick was leaning back in his chair, smirking, opening his mouth to say something clever about my

height.

He went off the chair and onto the floor like a sack of laundry.

Nobody moved. The King did not move.

I crouched down where he was scrabbling on the carpet, and I made my voice very quiet and very pleasant. –

“Captain Mara Ellis. Friday. Corridor outside the kitchens. You told her that if she wasn’t naked in your roomy in an hour, you’d file a fitness report and end her career.”

Fenwick’s face went gray.

“If you ever threaten a woman’s career to get her into your bed again,” I said, “the King will be the least of your problems. I will find you, and I will make you regret the day your father met your mother. Are we clear?”

He tried to get up. I shifted my weight forward maybe two inches.

He stayed down.

“Rowan,” the King said. Not Commander. “Explain.”

So I did. All of it. And then I asked the question that made every man in that room stop breathing:

“How many women have been washed out of the Vanguard on a fitness report, Your Majesty? And how many of those reports were filed by a Commander they said no to?”

The door opened. Two of the King’s own guards came in and picked Fenwick up off the floor.

They took him out through the door that doesn’t lead outside.

“After this meeting,” the King said into the silence, “I will speak with each of you Commanders. One at a time. If any of you have ever used those tactics, I suggest you consider what you’d like your last honest sentence to

be.”

Six men went very pale.

Marek didn’t. Marek was looking at me like he’d just found something he’d stopped believing existed.