The Bottle
I shouldn’t have come. I knew that the second I stepped through the service entrance of the Plaza Hotel, mud still caked on my boots, the smell of jet fuel and Afghan dust clinging to my skin like a second layer. But Chloe was my little sister.
And despite everything—despite the years of silence, the insults, the way they’d erased me from the family—some stupid part of me wanted to see her get married.
The ballroom was obscene. Thousands of white lilies flown in from Ecuador, their perfume so thick it was suffocating.
Crystal chandeliers the size of cars hanging from the ceiling, throwing rainbow light across three hundred guests in silk and diamonds. It was perfect.
Pristine.
A fantasy world. And I was destroying it just by existing. I pressed myself against the velvet curtains near the service entrance, trying to disappear.
I was wearing combat fatigues—multicam pants with mud stains on the knees, a brown t-shirt, heavy boots that left dirt prints on the white marble.
I’d thrown a dark jacket over it to try to blend in, but you can’t hide the stench of war with a coat. My name is Elena Vance.
To everyone sipping champagne ten feet away, I was nobody. The black sheep.
The runaway.
The daughter who’d failed. To the United States Army, I was Major General Elena Vance, commander of the Special Operations Joint Task Force. Forty-eight hours ago, I wasn’t at a wedding.
I was in the Hindu Kush mountains, pulling a captured American unit out of a kill zone.
I hadn’t slept in two days. The grime under my fingernails wasn’t dirt—it was a mixture of blood, gun oil, and mountain dust.
I’d removed my rank insignia before I came. Didn’t want attention.
Didn’t want questions.
“What the hell are you doing here?”
The voice was a hiss, sharp as a knife. I turned to see my father marching toward me, his face twisted in disgust. Robert Vance looked perfect in his custom tuxedo, every silver hair in place.
His expression, though—that was familiar.
Pure contempt. He grabbed my arm, fingers digging into my bicep, dragging me deeper into the alcove behind the curtains.
“Look at you,” he whispered furiously. “You look like a homeless person.
Like you slept in a dumpster.
Did you crawl here through a sewer?”
“I just got back, Dad,” I said, my voice rough from shouting over helicopter rotors. “I didn’t have time to change. I wanted to wish Chloe well.”
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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