It had taken Marisela twenty years to build the thing the Ashworths imagined was a desk job.

She had come up the hard way and the long way, a girl from a working neighborhood in Saltillo who had understood early that the world would make her prove twice over what it handed other people on faith.

She had proven it.

She had earned every step of it in rooms where the wrong decision was measured in lives, and she had learned there the discipline that these people mistook for coldness — the ability to keep her face still and her voice level while her mind moved fast and clear underneath, sorting the real threat from the noise, the fixable from the fatal.

That discipline had brought soldiers home.

It had held operations together when they were coming apart at the seams.