Collins pulled out his own tablet, typing rapidly.
“Maybe it was logged under transport?” ”I checked transport,” I replied sharply, turning three pages at once.
“Transport registered twenty gallons on Monday and nothing on Tuesday.
And it’s not just fuel.
Look at the medical supply logs.” I pulled a second ledger from the stack, aligning the margins.
I calculated the sums, rechecked the entry codes, and subtracted the field usage rates.
Within twenty minutes, the math was sitting on the page in black and white.
”There is a fifteen percent gap between what was delivered from the central depot and what is accounted for in these books,” I said, tapping the back of the pencil against the wood.
“Fifteen percent of your fuel and basic medical inventory is completely missing on paper.
How are you surviving with these kinds of obvious errors?” Collins stared at my sheet of handwritten calculations.
He pulled out his slate, re-entered my numbers, and ran the audit program.
He froze as the red error box popped up on his screen.
His jaw slackened slightly as he looked from the screen to me.
“You’re right.” I scoffed, tossing the pencil onto the table.
“Of course I’m right.
I was an accountant before I got dragged into this mountain circus.” Jace and Leila wandered over from the mess hall, holding tin mugs of coffee.
”What’s going on?” Jace asked, taking a sip.
“Why does Collins look like he just failed a pop quiz?” ”She found a fifteen percent inventory loss in twenty minutes,” Collins said, pointing a finger at my paper.
Leila raised an eyebrow, stepping closer to inspect the ledger columns.
“Is the math solid?” ”It’s completely solid,” Collins said, shaking his head in disbelief.
“I checked it twice.” I pulled a fresh stack of empty folders toward myself, grabbing three colored highlighters from the pen cup.
“Give me the rest of it.” ”Ma’am?” Collins asked.
”The ledgers, Collins.
All of them,” I said, my voice dropping into the cold, authoritative rhythm I used whenever a client tried to hide business expenses.
“If your logistics department is this sloppy, we’re probably paying for ghost rations.” It hit me, somewhere between the second ledger and the third, that the migraine hadn’t come back once.
Maybe it only fired indoors.
Maybe it was being strategic.
I didn’t care to test the theory — if the system wanted to give me a few hours of peace, I wasn’t going to ask questions.
For the next hour, I completely forgot about everything going on around me and just drowned myself in the work.
This was my daily life — nitpicking, playing with numbers.
It was easier to spot errors in figures than in people, and I’d always preferred the company of things that stayed straightforward.
Black was black.
White was white.
Numbers didn’t call me useless over breakfast.
Numbers didn’t have favorites.
If you did the work right, the page corrected you, quietly, without an audience — and then it was done.
Nobody at that house had ever offered me that kind of mercy.
”Who signed for this crate of antibiotics on Thursday?” I demanded, holding up a smudge-covered receipt.
A young private stepped back, swallowing hard.
“Uh, Sergeant Miller, ma’am.” ”Then why isn’t Miller’s signature on the master receiving log?” I asked, staring him down.
Silence filled the space around the table.
”Exactly,” I said, slamming a red stamp onto the corner of the page.
“Fix it.” Collins stood with his arms folded, watching me like I’d swapped bodies with someone competent overnight.
”What are you looking at?” I snapped at him without looking up from my ledger.
“Fetch me the other receipts.” ”Yes, ma’am,” Collins said instantly, turning on his heel and trotting toward the garage tents.
I kept working, my hands flying across the paper as I built a clean, flawless audit trail out of total chaos.
A shadow fell across the table, blocking the sunlight.
I looked up.
Dylan was standing at the edge of the tent, resting one hand on his belt as he looked down at the neatly stacked folders and the frantic private scrambling to bring me more files.
I closed the ledger in front of me with a soft thud.
“What?” ”Nothing,” Dylan said, his voice flat.
”Then stop staring,” I said, setting the pencil down.
He didn’t move an inch.
I lifted the yellow ledger in his direction.
“Unless you’re going to charge me for using your paper.” The edge of Dylan’s mouth twitched — there and gone.
His eyes lingered on me a beat too long before he looked away.
My heart made a strange, uncomfortable leap in my chest.
That tiny, subtle reaction bothered me far more than his usual cold silence ever could.
I quickly looked back down at my paperwork, my face feeling suddenly warm.
By early afternoon, the entire logistics station was running clean for the first time in what was probably months.
Collins stared at the organized folders with genuine awe, while Leila offered me a rare, approving nod.
Even Jace was looking at me with a new kind of quiet respect.
I gathered the finished reports into a tight bundle, tapping them flat against the table, squaring the edges the way I used to before every client meeting.
I wasn’t the woman who got dragged through the mud anymore — not right now.
Right now I was Stella Knox, senior accountant, and I was good at something, and for an entire afternoon, nobody in this camp had called me useless.
A small, proud smile touched my lips.
[DING!] The white chapel pillars flashed violently across my mind.
The veil dropped.
Dylan’s lips touched mine.
Snap.
I slammed my head flat onto the table with a loud groan, burying my face in the fresh folders.
Oh shit!
I should have known it wouldn’t have been that easy.
”I still hate the system,” I whimpered into the paper.