She encouraged them to save ten percent of their energy for helping each other. She told them that when they decided to quit, they should give it five more minutes before taking action. She warned them that the instructors would likely force them into survival situations that required them to attack each other and even beat the hell out of each other. She told the guys not to hold back because she was a girl, and she would do the same for them. She even told them she expected to share body heat with them, to sleep spooning with them, and to end up mostly naked with them a time or two.

And last of all, she exhorted them not to even think about quitting. To get it in their minds that they would die before giving up. They made a group pledge to stick it out as a team, come hell or high water. Pun intended.

On that pledge, they dispersed to get one last night’s sleep before the next five days and nights of no sleep, demolition pits, obstacle courses, night drowning evolutions, surf passage, mud flats, two hundred miles of running, and whatever else the instructors could throw at them to break the will of any normal mortal.

Griffin came to her as soon as she turned her lights out.

As she settled in his arms, she murmured, “Any last advice?”

“Yes. When you think you can’t make it one more second, remember I’ll be waiting for you when it’s over. We’ll go hang out on my boat, and you can sleep about eighteen hours straight. I’ll have all the food you want, and I’ll have ice packs and massages waiting for you. All you have to do is keep going until you get there.”

She nodded, grateful for the mental image to hang onto.

Griffin’s last words, whispered to her just as she fell asleep, were “I believe in you.”

Chapter 19

Hell Week was…hell. If she took every miserable moment she’d experienced over the entire course of her training, magnified each one by ten, crammed them all together, and added sleep deprivation, mental torture, and completely inhuman pain to the mix, it still wouldn’t come close to the agony of it.

Griffin had told her if she could make it to Wednesday night, she could surely make it the rest of the week, for it would just be more of the same. She randomly remembered his observation while falling into a pile with her boatmates on the beach. They’d actually won a surf passage race, compliments of excellent teamwork, and had earned a five-minute nap. Which was manna from heaven.