Chapter 5
Travis
Someone was in my pool.
My pool. Underground. Behind a gate that required a code, inside a house that required a second code, down a stairwell that should have been locked, in the one room in this compound that existed for the sole purpose of putting me back together after nights like this one.
Someone had gotten through all of it. While I was gone. While my system was running full perimeter protocol. While Maude was monitoring every sensor I’d spent three years installing.
And they were swimming.
The woman in the water had gone vertical the second I spoke.
Now she was choking, coughing, grabbing for the edge with her hair plastered across her face.
I stood in the doorway with the Glock level and my finger alongside the trigger guard, and every part of me that had been shutting down and relaxing thirty seconds ago was fully, painfully back online.
I stared at the woman as she decided whether to drown or get her shit together. Not a stellar start as far as assassins went.
It was hard to see her exactly in the muted light coming from the pool, but I could see more as she made her way closer.
Dark hair. The line of the jaw. The shape of the face, half-lit by the blue glow from the underwater lights.
For one full second my brain broke. The Glock began shaking in my hand.
Naomi.
The thought went through me like voltage. Then the rest of my brain caught up and started cataloguing the differences with the ruthless precision of a system that couldn’t turn off.
No, not Naomi. This woman was smaller, shoulders narrower. The build softer, rounder, nothing like the lean athletic frame I’d known for years.
Similar features arranged into a different woman. A woman who was very much alive and still coughing in my pool.
Sera Bolland.
“Travis. Travis, it’s me. It’s Sera. Sera Bolland. Naomi’s sister.”
I’d known it for about four seconds, which was three seconds longer than I’d needed and about sixty years short of how long it was going to take me to process it.
I flipped on the overhead lights so I could see her more clearly. Both of us blinked against the sudden harsh light.
I didn’t lower my weapon. “Are you alone?”
“What?”
“Are you alone. Is anyone else in this house?”
“No. It’s just me. Travis, I—”
“How did you get in?”
“The gate code. I guessed it. Then the front door. Same code.” She was gripping the pool edge with both hands, treading water, shivering despite the heat. “Can you please not point that at me?”
She was in a bra and underwear. No weapon. No place to put one. But a woman in my pool at three in the morning when nobody should have been within a mile of this building wasn’t something I was accepting on instinct alone.
“Maude,” I said. “Scan the property. All signatures.”
“One vehicle in the rear driveway. Registered to Sera Bolland, Spokane, Washington. No other vehicles detected. No additional heat signatures on the property. Gate log shows a single access at 12:47 a.m. using the primary code.”
One person. One car. Alone.
I grabbed the sweatshirt I kept on the hook by the pool door—part of the post-swim routine, always in the same place—and pulled it over my head.
The fabric dragged across my ribs, and I locked my jaw until the pain passed.
I tucked the Glock into my waistband at the small of my back where the sweatshirt covered it.
Then I grabbed a towel off the rack and held it out without looking directly at her as she climbed out. She took it and wrapped it around herself and stood there dripping on the concrete, three feet away from me. The last time I’d seen her she’d been in a black dress at her sister’s funeral.
Three years. She looked different and exactly the same, and I couldn’t think about any of that right now because my ribs were screaming and my hands were trembling, and I had about twenty minutes of functional capacity left before my body shut down whether I gave it permission or not.
It had been a long fucking night, and this was not how I’d expected it to end.
“Come upstairs.”
“Travis, I need to explain—”
“Get dressed and let’s go upstairs. Now. Whatever this is, it’s not happening down here.”
She heard something in my voice that made her stop talking.
She dried off as best she could and slid her clothes on.
I led her up the stairs and through the hallway, and I was conscious of every step, every door she might have opened before I got home, every part of this level she might have already seen.
The control room door was closed. I checked it without breaking stride. Still locked. Gear room, locked. Just the pool corridor open, which was exactly what she’d found.
The kitchen was annoyingly bright. I pulled a chair out from the table and she sat down, clutching the towel around her shoulders, her hair dripping onto the floor.
Her hands were wrapped around each other in her lap, fingers laced too tight, and the skin under her eyes had that bruised, translucent look that came from too many hours without sleep.
“How did you get through my gate?”
“The keypad. I guessed the code.”
“You guessed an eight-character alphanumeric code.”
She looked down at the table. “I tried Treasure.”
The word landed somewhere behind my sternum. A place I thought I’d sealed off, concreted over, buried under three years of silence and concrete walls and the specific kind of forgetting that required constant maintenance.
Treasure.
“Naomi mentioned it once,” Sera said. “The nickname. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have used it. I shouldn’t have come in at all. I tried calling you first. Multiple times. You never answered.”
“I don’t answer my phone.”
“I noticed. You didn’t return my calls either.”
No, I hadn’t. We both knew it, so I didn’t say it.
The silence stretched. I’d typed that word into the keypad three years ago when I’d moved out here and set up the system, because my fingers needed something to hold onto and that was all I had left of Naomi.
I should have changed it since. Any of a hundred nights when I was down here running diagnostics and could have swapped it for something that didn’t mean anything.
I hadn’t. That was a problem for a version of me that had the capacity to think about it, and that version didn’t exist right now. White spots were dancing in front of my eyes.
“What are you doing here, Sera?”
“I need your help. I’m a contractor with the FBI now, data analysis, and I’ve been building something for the past two years—”
“Stop.” I held up a hand. “Not tonight.”
“Travis—”
“I can’t do this tonight. Whatever you came here to tell me, I need you to understand that I physically cannot process it right now. Tomorrow. First thing. I’ll listen to every word. But not now.”
She studied me. I turned slightly so the left side of my jaw with all the bruising was angled away from the overhead light. Casual. Just a man leaning against his kitchen counter at three in the morning. Nothing to see.
“Okay,” she said. “Tomorrow.”
She was still shivering. Wet hair, damp towel, sitting in a kitchen that I kept at sixty-four degrees because I never had reason to keep it warmer. My hands needed something to do that wasn’t shaking, so I put the kettle on.
I pulled a mug from the cabinet. Opened the next cabinet and found the box of chamomile tea behind a row of energy drink cans and a bottle of ibuprofen, and I made her a cup without thinking about it. Bag in first, then the water just off boiling, steep for four minutes. No sugar.
I set it in front of her and she stared at it.
“You have chamomile tea.”
“Apparently.”
“I figured you’d only have black coffee. That’s what Naomi—” She stopped. Recalibrated. “Naomi used to give me a hard time about the tea. She said it tasted like someone boiled a field and gave up halfway through.”
That sounded like Naomi. Exactly like Naomi.
I opened my mouth to say something and found that I had absolutely nothing, so I closed it again and turned back to the counter and poured myself coffee that had been sitting in the pot since before I’d left for the mission. It was brutal. I drank it anyway.
“I don’t know why I have it,” I said, because she was still looking at the mug like it contained a question she didn’t know how to ask. “Probably grabbed it by accident.”
She wrapped her hands around it and took a sip and didn’t push further.
“How are your parents?”
“They’re fine.” She said it the way people said fine when the answer had rooms they weren’t opening. “My mom’s redecorating again. My dad retired from teaching last year. They’re... fine.”
“And you’ve been at the FBI for how long?”
“Almost three years. Contractor, not agent. Green badge, not blue. I do pattern analysis. Data work.” She tucked a strand of wet hair behind her ear. “What about you? What have you been doing out here?”
“Consulting. Tech infrastructure. Remote work.”
“That sounds like you.”
“It does.”
She nodded like that was a complete answer, and I let her because it was all I had. Two people sitting in a kitchen at three in the morning, both offering the version of the past three years that could survive a conversation.
Hers sounded like a quiet career in a cubicle. Mine sounded like a quiet life behind a computer. Neither of us was lying, exactly. We were just leaving out every part that mattered.
She coughed. Tried to suppress it, couldn’t. It deepened into something that pulled her forward in the chair, one hand pressed flat against her sternum.
“Do you need your inhaler?”
She looked up. Surprised that I remembered, probably.
“It’s in my bag. In the car. I’m fine.” She took a slow breath, held it, let it out through pursed lips.
Again. The third one came easier. She sat back in the chair.
“Sorry. The cold air and then the warm water and the temperature change—my lungs just have opinions.”
“Your lungs are allowed to have opinions.”
“It’s not a big deal.”