Super long chapter alert.

But, I'm actually proud of this one. It gives a bit more insight into Lola and develops her character a little bit more, I hope.

As always i'm dying to know what you all think so hit me with it!

Big kisses xxx

Have you ever heard of a deafening silence?

It's a strange thought, right?

I couldn't recall the first time that I had heard the phrase but I remember how it was described to me.

"A striking absence of noise, so profound that it seems to have its own quality.

It, and silence in general for that matter, was something that I had never really encountered before joining the SAS. I had grown up at 1/6 of a very hectic, very busy family where finding five minutes of silence was akin to winning the lottery on your first go. Fresh into my first year of university, I had fallen into my friendship with Steve and Charlotte, the two biggest Chatty Cathy's to ever grace our fair planet.

To me, a silence could never be deafening. Never. It was something pure and golden. It's not to say that I didn't enjoy, and love, the daily onslaught of noise from my delightful best friends but, Lord know, on the – very – rare occasions when I would find myself home alone, I would lie on my bed and just bask in the sound of absolute nothingness. Have you ever just sat and listened to the sound of the world passing by? It is absolutely incredible. Eventually the inevitable would happen and Steve and Charlotte would return home in a whirlwind of screeching and laughter and my perfect little silent would would be thrown back into the disarray that I had grown to love and rely on.

A silence in the SAS, however, was something completely different.

A silence in the SAS was not something to enjoy, or bask in.

A silence in the SAS was something to fear.

I had learnt very quickly that the base was never silent. There was always something going on and it was as if the air in the space that we inhabited had it's own forcefield of energy. It was as if our strange little world was plugged into a power supply that quietly hummed away 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.

Even in my own private sleeping quarters, which were, obviously, situated away from all of the lads, I could never find a true, meaningful silence.

I'd eventually started to put it down to the idea that nobody ever truly switched off from being a soldier. It was there, hanging on our backs, the elephant in the room. A job could arrive at any time and when it did we had to move fast. No time for questions or explanations. Suit up, ship out, kill the bad guys and go home. It was that simple.

You know how New York is the city that never sleeps?

Well let me tell you, the Big Apple ain't got shit on Credenhill.

I swear to God, in the the seven years that I had known Price, I think I had actually seen him asleep on three occasions.

I had deduced that my lovely Captain had to be some sort of robot. Probably the kind that would one day wipe all Humankind.

So, I had become comfortable with this underlying buzz of anticipation and atmospheric tension that resided in the barracks that when I finally found a silence, or rather, when a silence found me, it was always completely, overwhelmingly terrifyingly deafening.

And honestly, you really had never known true silence until you were staring down the scope of a sniper rifle with a team at your back who all knew that you had just one chance to make the kill.

So really... no pressure then.

That's where I found myself now. Hidden in the retreating daylight, concealed within a building in some village in the Azerbaijan outback. My body was tense, unmoving, positioned over the sniper rifle, finger over the trigger and eyes trained onto the person that I had been ordered to kill.

I'm sure there were noises around me but I couldn't hear them. I was so completely fixated on controlling my breathing and blocking out the energy from Price that an alien spaceship could have landed right next to me and I wouldn't have noticed.

I knew that Price was struggling to keep his mouth shut. He knew how I worked. He couldn't stick his oar. I had made it perfectly clear to him on more than one occasion. But, unfortunately for me, it was completely against his personality to not butt in with a million questions.

I knew that it was just his way but did he really have to think so loudly?

Are you sure it's the right guy?

Yes.

Is the gun loaded properly?

Let's bloody well hope so, eh?

Do you have the headshot? The MoD want this to be clean. One bullet. One shot. No other casualties unless it's necessary.

No headshot, no. Not yet, anyway. Give me time.

Do you want me to take over?

I'd rather shit in my hands and clap.

My breathing was as steady as it could possibly be, my hands still and my heart was beating at a completely normal rate. If anybody in this room was going to take the shot, then it was going to be me. It's what I was born to do. I was the best God damn Sniper that the British Armed Forces had.

Nobody, and I really do mean nobody, could do this exact job, at this exact moment in time, better than me.

I narrowed my eyes slightly as I took in the figure of the target as he moved around my scope. He was erratic, never stopping in one place for more than two seconds. Not long enough to get the head shot.

Not long enough to get any kind of shot actually, the crafty little prick.

I could tell from the way that the target moved that he was nervous. It was evasion tactics 101. Never stop moving long enough for somebody to get you in their line of sight. Never follow a pattern. Keep all movements short and sharp.

I remember Gaz teaching me to run in zig zags if I ever found myself under fire. Nobody can get a shot on an idiot running in zig zags and even in they tried to, they'd waste so many bullets that they'd probably end up out of ammo before they even came close to hitting you.

So it really shouldn't have come as much of a surprise that Khaled Al-Asad, AKA The Target, was moving around his office with the gusto of a man who knew that he was being watched, or at the very least, suspected that his actions were drawing attention from all the wrong people. We had the primary kill order on him but I knew that the Green Berets were just waiting for us to fuck it up so that they could storm in and claim all the glory for themselves, and it honestly wouldn't surprise me if the Spetsnaz were hiding out in the next room like the sneaky bastards that they were.

Al-Asad wasn't just on the shit list. He was the Lord and Conqueror of it.

No wonder he was pacing.

"Shit..." I breathed. Another figure came into my sight. "There's a kid." I said into my mouthpiece. "A toddler."

I watched as he bent down and scooped the child up into his arms.

Cheap trick, Al-Asad. Cheap trick.

I heard a collective groan behind me as Gaz, Price and Soap let out their frustrations at my newest update.

"And he's-"

"-holding him? Yep." I responded to Price's question before he managed to ask it. "Sorry Boss, but I'm not taking a chance when there's a baby involved." I stared at the child. "Nobody said anything about a kid."

"The bastard obviously knows he's got eyes him." Price growled in frustration. "What kind of man uses his own kid as a bulletproof vest?"

"The same kind of man who's on a one way mission to start World War 3." Soap responded. "Lo, is there-"

"-even if I did manage to somehow defy the Coriolis effect, I don't want to be the reason that he has recurrent flashbacks of his dad's brains all over the wall." I cut him off. "We don't need anymore angry, fatherless children with wild ambitions of seeking out revenge on the West."

I felt a shift in the group behind me and Price appeared at my side. I still had my eyes trained down the scope of the rifle, but I knew that it was him. He had been itching to get involved from the moment that the kill order had come through and I had just given him the opening. His hand appeared on my shoulder. It was a silent command. He was taking over and I really didn't have a choice in the matter.

I straightened up and stepped away from the rifle. I didn't need telling twice. What Price wants, Price gets and that's just the way it goes.

I allowed all of the muscles in my body to relax and I turned to face the back of the room. Soap raised an eyebrow at me and I shrugged. Gaz watched us intently. It had been five months since our awkward exchange in my car as we had travelled back to the base following his realisation that Soap and I had slept together and he was still suspicious. Not that he needed to be. Soap and I had both stayed true to our respective words. Nothing had happened since that day and we had fallen back into our happy, comfortable friendship. It had quickly become the most meaningful friendship that I had in the SAS and one that I wasn't sure I do without anymore.

I shook my limbs out as I walked towards the back of the room, before I fell into line beside them. I settled my back against the cold stone wall on which they were both leaning. A few seconds passed before I felt Soap bump his shoulder against mine. I smiled to myself and bumped him back.

It was such a small, gentle gesture but one which flooded me with a warmth that spread right to the tips of my fingers and toes. It was his way of checking if I was okay. My bump back signalled that I was. My eyes fell on Price's figure huddled over the rifle and my stomach twisted. Although I loved him dearly, Price was a cold hearted bastard. I saw a kid. A gorgeous little chubby cheeked toddler. Price would see an obstacle that could be overcome. Collateral damage, if you will.

Morality is a strange game to play when you do what I do. I mean, on one end of the spectrum, the job that I do means that millions and millions of people can sleep soundly at night protected from the occasional flash of lunacy from one extremist and his band of merry men. But on the other hand, I'm a killer. A murderer. It's a fine line to toe, and one which I tread across very, very carefully. I'm aware that, morality-wise, what I'm doing is wrong but that doesn't mean I'm ever going to stop.

What it does mean, however, is that when I'm faced with these decisions where I can take a shot, neutralise my target but kill, or at the very least, mentally scar his infant son for the rest of his life, I will often choose to take the moral high ground. It doesn't help me sleep better at night, and it certainly doesn't fill me with the warm and fuzzies but it's a glimmer of light in the dark tunnel that is the SAS life and that's enough for me.

"BASTARD!" Price hollered. He rested his head against the rifle. "He's got the kid up on his shoulders! Next thing you know he'll be wearing him as a hat."

I closed my eyes as Price started kicking the wall. I leant my head back against the smooth concrete behind me, shivering as the coldness spread through my skull.

I remember the first person I ever killed.

Everybody does and anybody who pretends that they don't is a goddamn liar.

I had entered the SAS under the false assumption that I knew what death was. I mean, I had lost both of my parents to a cruel, unnecessary act of terrorism. Death rested on my shoulders like a heavy black cloak of doom that I would never be able to shake off. I was wizened to it. Wasn't I?

When I had passed selection, I had been so elated and overwhelmed by the crushing sense of relief that I had actually managed to do the impossible, that I hadn't really taken much time to consider that killing people as going to be a part of my job description. I had done the hard bit, hadn't I? I had marched until my feet bled, survived a nasty bout of pneumonia whilst ensconced in the jungle and remained completely unmovable during the infamous torture training. Surely, the rest had to be a piece of cake?

Oh man, was I wrong?

So very, very wrong.

It's actually kind of funny just how wrong I had been.

I would have laughed, had I not been so completely horrified.

His face entered my thoughts far less often than it used to but I'm sure that I will never be able to forget the look of abject horror that had entered his eyes as he realised that his world was ending. We had been in close combat and I had been privy to the life draining from his eyes as he had slumped to the floor, blood trickling from his nose and mouth. I spent the flight back to base in a trance. Nobody could get through. I was a zombie.

I had just played God and taken a life that really wasn't mine to take.

What made me any different from the man who had killed my parents?

His face had plagued my thoughts as I had tried to sleep and I had found myself sobbing until my throat had burned and I had thrown up the entire contents of my stomach. Price had pulled me aside the next day.

"Bad night's sleep?"

"Something like that." I had groaned.

"I know what this is about." He looked at me, giving me one of those long, hard Price looks that I had since come to love. "The first one is always the worst. Ask any of the lads and they'll tell you the same."

I nodded. "Does it get easier? Or will I always feel like a murderer?"

Price shook his head fiercely. "All's fair in love and war. Dog eat dog, kill or be killed. It's just that simple, girl"

He thought this was simple.

Was he mad?

(In hindsight, the answer to this question was a resounding yes. Price was, in fact, as mad as a hatter.)

"I spent all night thinking about that man. He's somebody's son. He could be a brother, a nephew, an uncle, a husband..." I paused as tears appeared in my eyes. It remains that only time that Price has seen me cry. "He could be a father." I sobbed. "I wonder if his family hate me as much as I hate the person who killed my parents."

He grabbed me by the shoulders and shook me. "NO!" He shouted. "You don't ever think like that again, you hear?" He growled. "You are nothing like that idiot who out your mum and dad! We are not doing this because we want to kill innocent civilians on a bus to make a point. We are doing this because we don't want anybody to feel that same pain that you are fighting with on a daily basis. We don't want anybody else to die like your parents did." His eyes found mine. "Thinking any other way is going to get you killed and I'm not going to watch that happen. You deserve better."

Back in the present, I pushed myself away from the wall. Price was packing away the rifle with a thunderous look on his face.

"B-Team, what's your position?" Gaz's voice appeared in my ear.

"Still at the drop zone with Nikolai, mate." Meat responded. "All quiet out here."

"Good, let's hope it stays that way. We're heading back now. ETA three minutes."

"Roger that."

Price looked at me. I raised an eyebrow at him and he nodded.

We had done the right thing. I knew it. He knew it. The MoD probably wouldn't agree but that was their problem. It was easy enough to sit in an office and dole out kill orders like they were nothing, but it was a much harder thing to live with ramifications that those kill orders brought with them. There would be other opportunities and we had the kill order until we made an actual attempt on Al-Asad's life. The guys at the top wanted him gone for a reason. I just hoped that the delay in his execution wouldn't mean the condemnation of millions of others.

"Let's get the fuck out of here." Price growled as he slung the deconstructed rifle over his shoulder. "Stay sharp. Nobody is dying in this Godforsaken place."

It wasn't Azerbaijan's fault that we hadn't killed Al-Asad but it was on the receiving end of Price's fury.

Beside me Gaz and Soap readied their weapons. I copied them. The four of us exchanged nods before moving towards the door.

You know that whole thing about silence being deafening?

Do you want to know what's even more deafening?

Blood chillingly deafening?

"GRENADE!"

Soap turned and threw himself against me before I had a chance to react to Gaz's shout. We hurtled towards the floor as the explosion tore through the wall. His body pressed mine into the floor as he wrapped his hands around the back of my neck to stop my head from bouncing off the floor. The head from the blast engulfed us and I found myself pressing my face into his chest and clinging onto his jacket. He held me tightly, using the full force of his strong body to protect me from debris and shrapnel that was flying through the air at an alarming rate.

The room settled and seconds passed before he shifted, pushing himself up onto his elbows, his hands entangling themselves in my hair. He was staring down at me, his eyes wide and his skin pale.

"Lo! Are you okay?" He cupped my face in his hands and brushed my cheeks with his thumbs. "LO!"

My fight or flight instinct kicked into high gear. Somebody was trying to kill us. We had been compromised. We were sitting ducks. I had to get up and we had to move.

I nodded at him. "I'm good." He visibly exhaled and dropped his head onto my chest before looking back up at me. "Price? Gaz?"

"Both okay." Price's voice appeared in my ear. "We need to evac. NOW."

Soap leant back onto his knees and extended a hand to me. I reached out towards him and he pulled me into a sitting position.

"Masks on!" Price shouted, appearing at my side. "Nice save, lad." He said to Soap, reaching out and clapping him on the back as he stood up.

I fumbled with my mask, eager to block out the thick black smoke that was beginning to pool in my lungs. I struggled into a crouching position my limbs protesting at me.

"B-Team, this is Price. We've taken a hit. These bastards are trying to blow us up. No casualties but Lola's not looking too perky." I glared up at him. I was plenty perky, thanks. "We don't know what's downstairs waiting for us. Leave the Evac zone and head to our location. You might be able to flank them."

"We just heard the blast! No bogeys here. Heading to your location now."

"Stay sharp, lads." Price said.

"Aye, Captain."

He extended a hand to me and pulled me to my feet. "We keep this tight. Make every shot count." He turned to me. "And time to get down off that moral high horse. These people want you dead. Don't ever forget that."

I nodded at him, the sharpness in his voice rattling me. "I'll take point."

"Is that wise?" Gaz asked.

"I said, I'll take point." I fired back at him, quickly. "Soap protected me from the blast. I'm fine."

Price nodded at me and the three of them fell into line behind me as I moved to the door. The building that we had scoped out was only four storeys high and relatively open plan. Easy to navigate in a hurry. We had stationed ourselves on the third floor as this had been the best vantage point into Al-Asad's compound. The stairs to the fourth floor had been completely obliterated by a previous explosion and there was no way of getting any higher. I pushed through the smoke into the main corridor.

There was that silence again.

It was just too damn quiet.

Nothing good ever came from silence.

I felt like I was being watched and it wasn't a feeling that I enjoyed.

Ahead of me lay the stairs down towards the second floor. I held my hand up signalling the men behind me to stop. There was a flicker of a shadow on the wall. Somebody was down there. There was a discarded glass bottle on the top step. I stepped forward and gently nudged it with my foot. It rolled before it began loudly spiralling down the steps, glass against stone. It continued until it smashed loudly against the wall at the foot of the staircase.

There was a flurry of shouts and bullets. I leant over the hand rail and took out three flailing targets. Easy. The bodies hit the floor as Price, Soap and Gaz charged past me. They took the stairs two at a time. More bullets, more shouting, more thuds as SAS bullets connected with the panicked insurgents.

"We're on the ground floor Captain!" Meat's voice was in my ear. "There's a couple of bogeys. No uniforms. Homemade guns. Nothing major."

"Take them all out. Nobody leaves this fucking building apart from us."

"Yes, Sir!"

A bang alerted my attention to the space behind me. It was quiet enough that the three men hadn't heard it, but loud enough the my interest was piqued. I turned around.

"Lo? Everything okay?" Soap's voice appeared, he couldn't hide the concern in his voice even if he had tried.

Is it bad that the accent still made me melt a little bit?

"You guys push on. I'm going to check out this floor and make sure there's nobody hiding away."

I headed towards the origin of the noise slinging the rifle around my shoulders and pulling out my handgun. Clicking the safety off, I walked towards the room in which we had been stood. The wall was a charred mess. The grenade had impacted about a foot left of the actual doorway. It was an amateur throw which had meant that the wall itself had taken the brunt of the explosion. Not something which anybody really hoped to achieve when they threw a grenade. There was a noise behind me. It was slight but it was definitely there and it had come from the room that was situated opposite our stakeout spot.

"Please..." A tiny voice greeted me as I stepped into the new space. I raised my gun instinctively, gasping when I found the owner.

It was a boy. He cowered away from me, attempting to make himself as small as possible in the vain hope that I hadn't seen him. I lowered my gun and stared at him. He was small, dressed in rags with no shoes on and clutching a rifle to his chest that was far too big for his skinny little arms to hold.

"I'm sorry." He whimpered, tears streaming down his cheeks. "Please don't kill me."

My heart was thudding against my chest as I studied him. It was nothing new. A lot of these small places built their armies from child soldiers who were brainwashed into believing that they were an essential part of the fight against the West when, in reality, they were just the pawns. The stupid, dispensable pawns that got between us and the people who we were actually after.

But he had to be the youngest that I had ever seen, a realisation that had rendered me completely speechless.

We stared at one another in silence which only served to highlight the sound of bullets and cries in the space below us. He jumped at every single shot and fresh tears streamed down his cheeks. There was a constant narrative in my ear as Price, Gaz and Soap navigated the batch of targets on the first and second floor. My stomach churned at the thought that there were more like him and my heart broke into a million tiny little pieces as I realised that the lads wouldn't really stop to care. I switched off the feed to my headset. I couldn't hear them and they wouldn't be able to hear me.

"Throw your gun over there." I told him, crouching down so that I was on his eye level.

He nodded and tossed the gun to the side of the room. Predictably, it shattered at the slightest impact. We both watched as a solitary bullet rolled from the chamber. My heart broke even more. He had been sent into a fight that had no chance of winning. He was a number to them. He wasn't a boy that had his whole life ahead of him. He looked up at me with wet eyes as I placed my gun down on the floor.

I held my hands up to him. "I'm not going to hurt you, okay?"

He nodded. I lowered myself into a crosslegged position, my eyes on him the entire time. He wiped his damp cheeks with the sleeve of his top.

"Did you throw the grenade?" I asked.

He lowered his eyes and nodded. "The older boys told me to. They said that they would tell the leaders if I didn't."

"And what would happen then?"

"They would kill me."

I stared at him, watching as his face crumpled and more tears leaked from his eyes. It was a heartbreaking situation, wasn't it? The poor mite was damned if he did and damned if he didn't.

"What's your name?" I asked.

He looked at me, all big brown eyes. "Javid." He paused. "What's your name?"

"Lola." I answered. "How old are you Javid."

"Nine." He told me. "Nearly ten."

I thought about what I had been doing when I was nine. It certainly wasn't what he was doing.

"Do you go to school?" I asked.

He shook his head. "The leaders don't want us to go to school." He paused. "I liked it there. I was good at reading."

My heart ached.

"You can still be good at reading." I told him. "You can be whatever you want to be."

He shook his head. "I have to be a soldier." He told me. "That's all I can be."

"No." I said. "You can do so much more than this. There's a World outside of this place and it's just waiting for you."

"But how do I get there?" He sniffed. "The Leaders will kill me if they found out that I was hiding instead of fighting."

I paused, looking at his tiny little face.

"Do you want to know what I would do?" I asked him. "If I was you?"

He nodded slowly.

"I would wait up here until it was quiet and the SAS had left, then I would go downstairs and I would bloody myself up, maybe find a knife and give myself an injury..." I paused. "Nothing to serious, but enough that it looks like somebody managed to get close to me." He nodded. "Then I'd hide underneath another body to make it look like I fell down well before the fight was over and then I would wait until somebody found me."

"What if one of the older boys is still alive?" He asked. "They would tell the Leaders who would kill me for lying."

I didn't know how to break it to him that the SAS shot to kill and anybody that went up against them didn't come out of it alive.

He understood my silence and didn't ask again.

"And then I would do what I could to stay alive until I was old enough to get away from here." I looked at him. "And I would ignore all the bullshit that the Leaders try and tell me and remember the blonde girl that spared my life."

His eyes darted away from mine to the space behind me and he went pale. I moved quickly, picking up my gun and spinning to face our guest. Soap stared back at me, his own gun raised.

"Put it down." I told him. "And then turn around and walk back down those stairs."

"Not without you." He responded, his gun remaining at my eye level.

We stared at one another.

"Soap..." My voice dropped. It was a plea. He knew it. He lowered his gun.

"I found her." He said into his mouthpiece. "She's okay. Hit her head during the blast, I think." He stared at me meaningfully. "I'm bringing her down now." He flicked the switch to his headset and I knew he was entering radio silence.

I turned back to Javid who was staring at Soap with a horrified expression. "He's not going to hurt you." I told him before turning to Soap. "Are you?" I asked.

Soap shook his head. I looked back to Javid. "You remember what I told you, okay?" I implored. "You do what you can to survive."

He nodded, his eyes still fixated on the scary Scot behind me. Soap moved beside me and put his hand on my shoulder. Just as Price had done earlier. This was his command to me. We were leaving. No ifs, ands or buts. I looked at Javid one more time before allowing Soap to steer me towards the door.

He waited until we were in the corridor of the second floor before he span me around so that I was looking him in the eye. He backed me up against the wall, his arms either side of my head.

"What the hell was that Lo?"

I rolled my eyes. "It's not a big deal."

"Not a big deal?!" He glared at me. "I was barely able to do my job because I was so worried about you!" He exploded. "You don't think a quick heads up would have been the right thing to do?"

I laughed. "And how would that have worked?" I scoffed. "Erm, Price, Gaz can you both stop listening for the next few seconds whilst I tell Soap that I'm sitting in a room with the kid who tried to kill us with a grenade and advising him on how he can stay alive?" I growled. "Get real."

"You're telling me to get real?" He laughed, incredulously. "Did you even stop to think that all may have been a trap? Suck you in with the weepy little kid whilst his older comrades sneak up behind you and put a bullet through the back of your skull?"

I shifted my weight onto one leg and folded my arms tightly across my chest. My silence spoke volumes. He knew he had me.

"I wasn't going to kill him." I said. "And I won't apologise for that." I stared at him.

He sighed and dropped his head so that his chin rested against his chest. "And I won't apologise for worrying about you." He looked back up at me. "Not now, not ever."

My hard glare softened. We stared at one another until his eyes skimmed down my face.

"Fuck it."

He moved quickly, closing the gap between us and crashing his lips into mine. I gasped as they collided. He kissed me like he was drowning and I was air. It was passionate and desperate and like nothing that I had ever experienced before.

"SOAP?"

Gaz's shout broke our spell and I pushed him away from me. He stared at me, eyes dark. My body was screaming in protest. He rubbed his mouth with the back of his hand as if to wipe away the traces of my lips.

"Climb on my back." He said.

I could hear the strain in his voice.

"Why?"

"Because I told Price that I thought you'd hit your head in the blast." He told me. "You can't just go skipping downstairs like nothing happened."

I nodded and he turned away from me and crouched down so that I could clamber onto his back.

His back. His broad, sexy, muscly back. I had visions of myself dragging my nails across it and sinking my teeth into it.

I wrapped my legs around his waist and he circled his arms around them, holding me in place.

"Ready?" He asked.

I nodded, words suddenly eluding me and he walked down the stairs.

The silence between us was deafening.