Hayes moved to his desk, picking up a thin folder.
«Ivory Lawson. Applied through the standard civilian contractor pool. References check out. Former cleaning jobs, nothing remarkable. HR approved her three days ago.»
«Sir, with respect, there’s something off about her.»
«The dogs? What about them?»
Derek hesitated. Putting his suspicions into words felt foolish, like admitting to believing in ghosts.
«They respond to her. All of them. Even Rex, even Titan. It’s not natural.»
Hayes studied the folder in his hands. «Have you considered the possibility that she simply has experience with animals that didn’t make it onto her application?»
«I’ve considered a lot of possibilities, sir.»
«Consider this one instead.» Hayes closed the folder with a snap. «She has a one-week trial period. If she causes problems, we terminate the contract. If she doesn’t, we leave her alone and focus on the Pentagon evaluation coming up. Are we clear?»
«Crystal, sir.»
Derek left the commander’s office with his shoulders tight and his mind racing. Something about that woman didn’t add up. The way she moved, the way she held herself, the absolute absence of fear when any sane person would have been terrified. He’d seen that kind of stillness before, in operators coming back from deployments they couldn’t talk about, in veterans who’d left pieces of themselves in places that didn’t appear on any map.
But that was impossible. She was a janitor. A nobody. Wasn’t she?
The second day dawned gray and cold, a front moving in from the Atlantic that turned the training yard into a wind tunnel of misery. Ivory arrived at 0600 hours before any of the handlers had finished their first cup of coffee. She was halfway through Bravo Block when she found the injured dog.
Kaiser was a three-year-old Belgian Malinois with a service record that included two overseas deployments and a reputation for flawless aggression. He was also currently favoring his right front leg, a trickle of blood staining the concrete beneath his paw. Ivory set down her mop and knelt beside the kennel door. Kaiser watched her with wary eyes, that instinctive canine suspicion warring with something else—something that told him this human was different.
«Easy,» she murmured, her voice barely audible above the wind. «Let me see.»
The kennel door wasn’t locked during cleaning hours. Ivory pushed it open slowly, giving Kaiser every opportunity to object. Instead, the dog limped forward and presented his injured paw like a patient arriving at a doctor’s office.
The wound was a deep laceration, probably from catching his foot on a jagged edge of the fence during training. Left untreated, it would become infected within days. Ivory examined it with fingers that moved with practiced precision, probing the edges of the cut while Kaiser whimpered softly.
From her jacket pocket, she produced a small first aid kit. Standard civilian issue, nothing remarkable, but the way she cleaned the wound, applied pressure to stop the bleeding, and wrapped the sterile gauze around Kaiser’s paw was anything but standard. Her hands worked with the muscle memory of someone who had done this hundreds of times. Thousands. Her technique was textbook military field dressing, the kind taught in special operations medical courses that took months to complete.
Fern Cooper arrived with Kaiser’s morning supplements and found the tableau: small woman, large dog, and an immaculate bandage that would have made any combat medic proud.
«Where did you learn to do that?» The question escaped before Fern could stop it.
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