My name is Eleanor Voss, and I am a four-star general in the United States Army. Thirty seconds ago, I was standing in my mother’s cramped suburban kitchen in Ohio, sipping lukewarm coffee and authorizing a covert strike team deployment over a secure satellite phone. Now, I have cold steel biting into my wrists.
“Who the hell do you think you are?” Frank roared, spittle flying onto my cheek. My stepfather, a small-town police lieutenant whose highest career achievement was busting teenagers for weed, glared at me with years of festering insecurity boiling over.
“Frank, let go,” I said, keeping my voice dangerously level.
“Stolen valor is a felony, Elly,” sneered Tyler, Frank’s obnoxious twenty-something son, leaning against the fridge. “Dad, she’s impersonating a federal officer.”
Frank had overheard the Pentagon aide on speaker address me as ‘General.’ Instead of realizing his estranged stepdaughter had risen through the ranks while he wasn’t looking, his fragile ego snapped. He violently twisted my arms behind my back and ratcheted his standard-issue cuffs around my wrists, forcing me into a rickety dining chair.
“You’re a fraud,” Frank spat, snatching my encrypted comms device from the counter.
“Sir,” the icy voice of my Pentagon aide, Colonel Vance, echoed from the dropped device. “You are interfering with a Tier-One Department of Defense communication. Cease immediately.”
Frank’s face turned violently purple. He completely lost his temper. “Shut up!” he screamed at the phone. He drew his service weapon, stepping toward me with terrifying unpredictability. With a violent, open-handed shove, he threw me backward. The chair tipped, and I crashed hard onto the linoleum, the breath driven from my lungs.
I tasted copper. Blood pooled in my cheek where my teeth had caught my lip. I looked up at the barrel of his Glock aimed at my chest. But instead of begging, I simply smiled. Because Frank didn’t know that five black SUVs filled with heavily armed military personnel were already less than two minutes away, about to storm this house and show him exactly who he just assaulted.
Option A: Taunt Frank, pushing him closer to the edge before the cavalry arrives. Option B: Stay completely silent and let the approaching thunder of the SUVs do the talking.
Frank just pulled a gun on a four-star general, and he has no idea what’s about to hit his front door. Will Eleanor push him to the edge (Option A), or let the military strike team do the talking (Option B)? The suspense is killing me! The rest of the story is below 👇
