Sergeant Maya Okafor has thirty-one days left in the Marine Corps and exactly one rule: leave before anyone can leave you. Four years of finding targets from nineteen thousand feet have taught her to keep a clean perimeter around her own heart - and all she wants now is out. Clean, fast, unattached. Then she's pulled onto a target package with Sergeant Wyatt Cole: the all-source analyst who never sleeps, never lets a thread go, and never lets anyone close.
He needs her eyes on the ground. She needs to feel nothing at all for a man she has no future with. Neither of them gets what they want. In a freezing plywood room at the edge of the Iraq war - over stolen coffee, 0300 watches, and a secret that could end them both - two people who are experts at not needing anyone discover the one thing the Corps never taught them: how to stay. But Maya's clock is running out, the war's cost lands closer than either of them expected, and some doors, once you close them, don't open twice.
Sergeant Maya Okafor has thirty-one days left in the Marine Corps and exactly one rule: leave before anyone can leave you. Four years of finding targets from nineteen thousand feet have taught her to keep a clean perimeter around her own heart - and all she wants now is out. Clean, fast, unattached. Then she's pulled onto a target package with Sergeant Wyatt Cole: the all-source analyst who never sleeps, never lets a thread go, and never lets anyone close.
He needs her eyes on the ground. She needs to feel nothing at all for a man she has no future with. Neither of them gets what they want. In a freezing plywood room at the edge of the Iraq war - over stolen coffee, 0300 watches, and a secret that could end them both - two people who are experts at not needing anyone discover the one thing the Corps never taught them: how to stay. But Maya's clock is running out, the war's cost lands closer than either of them expected, and some doors, once you close them, don't open twice.