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She’s sitting opposite me in full combat gear, holding her rifle down. Her braided hair is held in a bun, special night vision glasses resting on her head as her dark eyes silently shoot a laser in my direction. “You’ll kill him with those eyes, Simone,” Jethro says from his position beside me while tapping on his computer. “Not that he doesn’t deserve it.” Jethro is tall but lean and wears frameless glasses that sit low on his nose. As a typical nerd, he usually dresses in hoodies with anime characters or metal band logos, but Simone forced him into combat gear today. Something he hates more than getting his prim, soft hands dirty. I met Jethro—then Eduard—in college. Soon after, he got arrested for breaching some Pentagon security. I knew I needed his services, so I arranged his murder during the transfer, made him a ghost, and gave him a new identity. Ever since then, he’s been my right hand. He's the one who found Simone a year later. She quit the army and was wasting away in a mid