Captain Ram Kozak was in a quagmire of emotions. On a cold, windy day, he took the steps out of the Ukrainian Army Headquarters in Kyiv. The sky was swollen and pregnant with dark and light gray clouds hanging over the sprawling, beautiful capital. In his hand, he clutched a set of orders and that was what made his heart ache. As he climbed concrete steps up to the educational facility part of the massive complex, a shred of hope filtered through him, and the roiling in his gut temporarily subsided.
He was going to see Sergeant Darina Mazur, a US Army Special Forces combat medic on loan to the Ukrainian Army. She was teaching, he’d found out only earlier in the morning, advanced combat field surgery to Ukrainian Army medics. They needed this specialized training because the US Special Forces school was located in the USA and right now, it wasn’t feasible for their medics to attend it half a world away. The news that Dare Mazur was the instructor hit him like a powerful emotional earthquake. He did his best to hide the shock as his colonel, who headed up SSO Third Special Purpose Regiment, their ops group known as the Black Wolf Brigade, hurried to meet the Russian threat coming in February 2022. The orders he’d been given were special, that Sgt. Mazur, an experienced field surgeon and combat medic, who had advanced lifesaving skills, would be taken out of the classroom and placed back into his team once more.
He slid his key code card into the slot, and his brown brows fell as he pulled open the thick bulletproof glass door and entered. Well-known for his poker face, Ram was sure his boss saw the shock in his eyes, if only momentarily. Four years earlier, his team had been in Afghanistan, on the front lines, at a top-secret US camp near the Pakistan border. Dare had been their combat medic, going out on every team mission with them, risking her life. She had been assigned to his team because their medic’s tour was up and they needed a replacement. Ram wasn’t against women in combat. Almost a fifth of the Ukrainian Army consisted of women in every specialty, including combat and some of them being field medics.
At twenty-five, he’d not been prepared for the easy-going, smiling U.S. Special Forces woman. Everyone called her Dare, and in the two years she spent with his team in Afghanistan, she certainly earned her nickname. Whatever hesitancy he had about the American woman dissolved. She might save lives, but she could take them, too, when it came to their mutual enemy, the Taliban and ISIS fighters. She was also cross-trained as a sniper, a backup to the two male snipers who were already on his team.
What he hadn’t counted on was his falling in love with her. That was a shock to his system. How to remain her commanding officer and never reveal his need to share a personal relationship with her, whether on a mission, at the US camp or aiding her medical efforts to help the Afghan people of the surrounding villages. She was calm under fire. Her specialty, her gift, was her healing abilities, he’d discovered. It didn’t matter if it was a camp dog with a bloodied paw, a child with a hurt finger or one of the elderly from nearby villages who needed her medical skills. She was present and accounted for. There was nothing he could dislike about her. Compassion wasn’t his thing, but it was hers. Maybe it was her femininity, her softness and gentle nature instead of that testosterone team she was part of, that soothed the inner edges of himself, as well as the rest of his aggressive black ops team. He couldn’t really define or quantify it, but Dare’s presence was a gift.
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