They gave her an entire dormitory to herself. It privately irritated the living crap out of her and meant she had a significantly longer run to fall into formation in the mornings, but the admiral wouldn’t budge, apparently. She did not get to live with her classmates.

She didn’t waste her breath asking if, when she was out on SEAL missions, she would get her own tent and toilet. There would be time enough to cross that bridge later.

INDOC Day One dawned at 4:00 a.m. sharp with Grinder PT in a giant concrete parking lot. As she gutted through round after round of now-familiar calisthenics while being screamed at, the only thought in her mind, running over and over on a loop, was God Bless Cal Kettering and the Reapers for preparing me for this.

The instructors didn’t for a second give away any hint of surprise that she could keep up and pump out the required repetitions. Not so with her fellow trainees, who jeered and hassled her almost more than the instructors. But they gradually fell into silence as she matched them rep for rep.

When an end was called to the grinder and they were sent over to a water buffalo—a large tank of water on wheels—to get drinks, a big, beefy dude named Grundy sneered at her back, “Gee. I didn’t know the Navy gave us whores to fuck in training whenever we feel like it.”

Sherri whirled and strode right up to the bully. She was vividly aware of the sharp interest of all the instructors to see how she handled the moment.

Chest to chest with the slightly taller guy, she ground out, “Grundy, I’m not gonna pull rank on you, and I’m not gonna tell you that was inappropriate. I’m not even gonna tell you this course will be hard enough without us trainees being at each other’s throats, or that we should freaking work together. But I am gonna tell you this. You better sleep very, very lightly if you ever say anything like that to me again.”

“Are you threatening me, Tate?” Grundy sputtered.

“Not at all,” she replied coolly. “Just a friendly reminder that SEALs tend to close ranks when one of their own gets messed with.”

“Yeah, but you’ll never be one of them.”

She smiled knowingly. “Neither will you with a non-team-player attitude like that.”

She turned and took the cup of water an instructor held out silently to her from a range of about two feet. The guy had to have heard every word she said to Grundy. Which was no skin off her nose.

Surf immersion was as miserable as she remembered, and dang, the Pacific Ocean was cold. Honestly, she thought it was worse than the Atlantic. But the stars were beautiful, and she distracted herself by enjoying the way dawn overtook night as she lay there shivering.