Bio:

Rebecca Verdes had a father that was constantly telling her that she needed to “pull her head out of her ass” and start thinking about things before she did them. He was constantly telling her that everything she thought was stupid and everything she did was pointless. He was really just projecting his own insecurities on her. So she didn’t think very highly of herself, and gradually became a bit of a hoodlum.

During her teen years she was constantly in and out of trouble, until one day as she was being driven to the police station, the cup that was driving her told her that this was the last time she’d be going to juvenile hall.

“If you get arrested again,” the cop told her, “you’ll go to big-kid jail. And it’ll go on your permanent record, and ruin your life.”

She told Reba that she should join the army or become another statistic in the system. Reba dismissed it way first, but in jail she thought about it harder, and when she was released, she did enlist in the navy.

Military life gave Reba a sense of structure and meaning that her father never would, and since it never asked her to think, she never had to doubt things. She excelled at military life, and before long she joined the Navy SEALs.

During one of her stand-down periods, she went to a diner where a man mistook her for one of the waitresses. She tore him a new asshole. He apologized profusely, and insisted that he hadn’t assumed that she had worked there because she was a Latina, but because she was wearing the same shade of green that the restaurant was themed around. He offered to make it up to her by buying a drink for her, which she refused initially, but then on a hunch he suggested a different place that was also primarily themed green and she begrudgingly accepted.

The wedding ring he got her had an emerald instead of a diamond.

He was a college professor, and Reba thought he embodied everything she hadn’t gotten to have in life. He was kind and generous and cultured, she was rough and self-conscious and jaded. He was enthralled by the stories she had of her hoodlum days and military service, being from a background of academia and books.

She was fully smitten with him, and as a Latina muscle mommy in the Navy SEALs he was head over heels for her. They moved in together after her service term finally ended, and for a little while they lived a happy life and discussed potentially having kids. Then one day Reba came home and found him murdered.

The shock nearly destroyed her.

Reba was certain that she knew who the murderer was: a man her late husband had been competing over an arctic research grant for. Her husband had confided in her that this man wanted the grant to a worrying extent, and the lengths that he seemed willing to go to in order to get the grant were alarming. A core sample from the deep arctic had made it’s way back to the university. Initially, it had been an experiment to test an new type of drilling technology, but the core sample had contained an incredibly diverse array of fossils, and the college had opened a grant to fund a research trip to the area so that more archeological studies could be done. Reba’s husband had been excited by the opportunity, and knew he was the most qualified among the university’s researchers. He hadn’t even expected anyone else to apply for the grant.

The murder had been staged as a burglary, with several things around the apartment stolen, but her husband’s preparatory research had all been taken as well.

She tried to tell the cops, but ultimately the case went nowhere. The criminal justice system was everything that she remembered from her childhood, and even as a veteran she still felt the same way in a police station that she had as a kid.

It didn’t take a lot of investigating for her to be certain her target was whoever had taken her husband's grant and flown out to the arctic research site. Reba called in a favor from a friend and was flown out to the arctic with nothing but the pistol she was given by her commanding officer during her service.

But in the Arctic things were hardly what they seemed. Upon parachuting in, she found a small private army of mercenaries had taken over the research facilities. She snuck in and met an IT worker named Jenny Braxton who had been taken hostage by the mercenaries, and who refused to leave without saving the scientists that had been working at the research center. Jenny helped Reba gain access to the research station and together they found out that Reba’s target had taken the research scientists and moved further into the Arctic for unknown reasons.

Reba determines to follow him, and Jenny tentatively decides to follow her in the hopes of saving her friends.