Glass Protocol

COLD CALIBER

Sloane

Chihuahua Region, Mexico.2:02 PM.Temp: 100°F.

The sun didn’t just shine; it bruised.

It was a physical weight, a mass of molten lead pressing down on the jagged Mexican hillside. Every breath felt like inhaling powdered glass. Around us, the desert had gone silent, the scorpions and rattlers burrowing deep into the shadows to escape the kiln of the afternoon.

I couldn’t hide. I was part of the rock.

I was welded to my McMillan TAC-338. The polymer stock had fused with my jawline, the heat of the metal searing my skin, but I didn’t flinch. Movement was death. A single twitch would send the bead of sweat trembling on my eyelid straight into my pupil.

If I blinked, I lost the hacienda. If I lost the hacienda, we all died.

Through the Schmidt & Bender optic, Hacienda El Colmillo sat like a rotted white tooth driven into the parched earth. It was too pristine. Too quiet. The white-washed walls glowed with a blinding intensity that made my retinas ache behind my goggles.

“Pulse at fifty-four,” a voice rasped to my right.

Tommy. My twin. My shadow.

He didn’t need to look at a monitor to know my heart rate. He could feel it. He was lying less than an inch away, his body a furnace that rivaled the sun. I could feel the rhythmic rise and fall of his chest, perfectly synced with mine.

We were a two-headed monster. One brain, one trigger finger.

“Steady,” he breathed. His voice was a low vibration that traveled through the dirt and into my ribs. “You’re a ghost, Slo. Ghosts don’t feel the heat.”

The air between us sizzled with more than just temperature. It was the raw, jagged friction of adrenaline. It made the hair on my arms stand up despite the sweat.

“He’s coming,” Tommy whispered.

The shift in his tone was microscopic, but I felt it like a tectonic plate moving. His muscles tightened. I mirrored him.

“North balcony. Eleven o’clock.”

I adjusted my focus. My world narrowed to a circle of glass.

A man stepped out.

He wore an oversized linen shirt, the expensive fabric fluttering in the stagnant air. He looked younger than the intelligence reports suggested. Way too young to be holding the keys to a cartel’s digital kingdom.

As I dialed the windage, the high-definition lens caught a detail that hit me like a physical blow. A small, orange sauce stain sat on the edge of his collar.

He’d just eaten lunch. Maybe he’d laughed at a joke. Maybe he was thinking about a girl.

A mundane, human detail. And I was about to erase it from existence.

My stomach did a slow, nauseating roll. My throat tightened, the thirst suddenly clawing at my esophagus.

“Target identified,” I whispered into the comms.

My voice sounded like it belonged to someone else. Someone cold. Someone dead.

“Moving in,” Brendon’s voice cracked in my ear.

It was sharp. Business-like. He and Vince were already at the perimeter, two predators moving through the scrub.

The radio went silent. The kind of silence that rings in your ears. No more jokes about the Mexican beer they were going to drink later. No more chatter. Just the sound of my own blood thrumming a frantic, primal rhythm in my ears.

On the balcony, the target stopped.

He didn’t just pause; he went rigid. He tilted his head, his nostrils flaring as he caught a scent or a sound that shouldn’t be there. His hand drifted toward the radio clipped to his belt.

“Tommy,” I breathed, my finger hovering over the cold curve of the trigger.

“I know. Take him. Now.”

It wasn’t a command. It was a release.

Tommy’s hand ghosted over my shoulder, a brief, heavy pressure that grounded me. He felt the kill-instinct spike in my blood before I even committed to it.

I exhaled. Not a shallow breath, but a full evacuation of my lungs.

I emptied myself until I was nothing but a hollow shell. No thoughts. No sauce stains. No mercy.

Between the slow, heavy thuds of my heart, I squeezed.

The recoil slammed into my shoulder like a freight train. A dull, familiar ache that I’d started to crave. It was the only thing that felt real in this shimmering hell scape.

Through the scope, the world turned into a silent horror film.

The .338 round didn’t just hit him. It disintegrated the reality of him.

His head snapped back with a violent, inhuman jerk. A spray of dark crimson mist painted the white lime wall behind him—a grotesque masterpiece of meat and bone.

The man collapsed. He didn’t fall gracefully. He slumped like a sack of wet grain, hitting the tiles with a heavy, final thud I could almost hear from eight hundred yards away.

The sauce stain didn’t matter anymore.

“Clean,” Tommy said.

His voice was terrifyingly flat. His own heart rate hadn’t climbed a single beat. He was already scanning the courtyard for the next threat, his eyes cold and predatory.

“Data recovered,” Vince’s voice hissed through the static, breathless and jagged. “Exfiltrating. We’ve got company!”

The silence shattered.

The calm of the desert was ripped apart by the scream of grinding metal and the roar of engines. Two armored ‘Monstruos’—the cartel’s DIY tanks—tore out from behind the stables. Their massive tires pulverized the cacti, sending shards of green pulp flying as they drifted into the courtyard.

“They’ve spotted the breach!” Tommy snapped.

He pushed up from the dirt, his own assault rifle already leveled at the hillside.

“Brendon, Vince, move! Jimmy, blow the gate!”

I didn’t hear the explosion; I felt it.

The shockwave rolled across the valley, a physical punch to the gut that made my internal organs vibrate. A black-and-orange fireball blossomed at the hacienda’s entrance, hurling jagged shards of iron into the air.

“Go! Down the ridge!” Tommy yelled.

We scrambled. My boots skidded on the loose shale, sending rocks tumbling into the ravine. The heat didn’t matter now. The blisters on my face didn’t matter.

My lungs burned with the acrid, biting scent of cordite and scorched earth.

Behind us, the heavy machine guns from the Monstruos began to chew up the ridge. The rock where my cheek had been resting seconds ago was pulverized into a cloud of grey dust.

“Keep moving, Slo! Don’t look back!”

We hit the base of the canyon where the quads were stashed under thermal camo netting. Brendon and Vince were already there, their faces coated in a thick layer of dust and sweat. They looked like ghosts.

Vince wasn’t cracking jokes. His hands were shaking as he clutched the encrypted hard drive to his chest like it was a holy relic.

I vaulted onto the back of the quad behind Tommy. He didn’t wait for me to get settled. He slammed the throttle open.

The engine shrieked, a raw, mechanical scream that echoed off the canyon walls.

I spun around, bracing my boots against the frame, clutching my rifle to my chest. The smoke from the hacienda rose into the azure sky—a black pillar of shame marking the spot where a young man had died for a secret.

Tommy drove with a cold, focused rage. I could feel the corded muscle of his back through his tactical vest, hard as granite.

“You got him, Slo,” he called out over the roar of the wind. His voice finally softened, the jagged edges rounding off. “You saved the team. You did your job.”

I didn’t answer. I couldn’t.

Every time I closed my eyes, I didn’t see the mission success. I didn’t see the data.

I saw the sauce stain.

We were moving fast, the wind whipping my hair against my goggles, the desert blurring into a smear of tan and red. We were heading toward the border. Toward safety. Toward a shower and a bed.

But as the adrenaline began to ebb, replaced by a hollow, aching cold, I knew the truth.

We were going home, but I was leaving a piece of myself back on that ridge.

The protocol had been followed. The target was neutralized. But as the shadows of the canyon swallowed us, I could already feel the soot of the kill settling on my soul, thick and indelible.

The safe house was a concrete bunker disguised as a dilapidated ranch house three miles outside of Marfa, Texas.

The air conditioner was hummed a dying, rhythmic rattle, barely fighting off the desert heat that clung to our skin like a second layer of clothing.

I stood in the kitchen, my hands gripped the edge of the sink so hard my knuckles were white, jagged peaks. I stared at the water running over my fingers. It was supposed to be clear. To me, it looked like it was stained with the dust of Chihuahua.

“Sloane.”

I didn’t turn. I knew the weight of that footstep.

Tommy was standing in the doorway. He’d stripped off his tactical vest, leaving him in a sweat-soaked olive drab T-shirt that clung to the hard lines of his chest. He looked raw. Primal. Like he’d just crawled out of a cage.

“Talk to me,” he said.

“There’s nothing to say.” My voice was a dry rasp. “The mission is over.”

He moved behind me, his presence a physical heat that made the small hairs on my neck prickle. He didn’t touch me—not yet—but the air between us felt charged with a frantic, unsaid energy.

In our world, death was the constant. Life was the anomaly.

“You’re thinking about the kid,” he murmured.

“He wasn’t a kid. He was a courier for a mass murderer.”

“You’re lying to yourself.”

He stepped closer, his chest brushing my shoulder blades. I felt a shiver rip through me, a jagged spark of electricity that had nothing to do with the cold water.

“I saw your eyes through the glass, Slo. You saw the human. Not the target.”

I finally turned, my back hitting the sink. “And you didn’t? You watched him die and didn’t feel a single goddamn thing?”

Tommy’s eyes darkened, turning the color of a bruised sky. He leaned in, pinning me against the counter with the sheer force of his gaze.

“I felt the only thing that matters,” he growled, his voice dropping to a low, visceral register. “I felt the breath stay in your lungs. I felt my sister come home alive. Everything else? It’s just noise, Sloane. It’s just smoke.”

He reached out, his thumb catching a smear of grease on my cheek. His skin was rough, calloused, and grounding.

The tension in the room shifted. It wasn’t just the mission anymore. It was the frantic, desperate need to feel something other than the ghost of a bullet’s recoil.

The “New Adult” pulse of the story beat between us—raw, aching, and dangerous.

“We’re broken, Tommy,” I whispered, my heart hammering against my ribs like a trapped bird.

“Yeah,” he rasped, his eyes dropping to my mouth. “But at least we’re broken together.”

Outside, the Texas wind howled, sand scouring the windows, trying to get in. But inside, in the dim light of the safe house, the only thing that existed was the heat between us and the long, dark road of the next mission.

I closed my eyes, and for the first time that day, the image of the balcony faded.

Replaced by the feeling of being alive.

Barely.

But alive.