A Ruler in Disguise novel · Chapter 4 of 24

Chapter 4: Commander

I went down the stairs in his shirt and bare feet.

The colonel did not even blink at the sight of me.

She stood by the black car with her heels together and her hands behind her back.

Dev came out the shop door in his vest a half step behind me, cap in his hand.

"Ma'am," she said to him, and then, to me, with a nod, "Miss Broadnax."

"You know my name?"

"I know a great deal, Miss Broadnax. It's part of the job."

I turned to Dev.

"Commander," I said. "Of what?"

He looked at the colonel.

She looked at the sky politely.

"Inside," he said.

We sat in the dark shop between the buckets of leftover stock, and Dev told me, without softening a word.

His name was Devin Harlow.

He was thirty-four years old.

He had left Savannah at seventeen after a shouting match with his mother and joined the Army under his own name.

At twenty-two, on a mission overseas, his unit had been wiped out and he had been listed as missing.

"Missing," I said.

"I walked out of that desert alone nine months later. By then my name had been forgotten."

He did not say what he did in between.

He told me the rest in short pieces.

The Orrin Coast, a mining province on another continent, had no government after a coup.

Three thousand veterans, the colonel's people and his, held its ports and its mines.

They called him the Commander, and the people who lived there had asked him to stay.

"You're a warlord," I said.

"That's the word in the papers."

"You run an army."

"I run a country that doesn't officially exist. It's a lot of paperwork."

"And you came back to Savannah in a delivery vest."

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