Chapter 12
Travis
I knew before the door was fully open.
The screens behind her were wrong. Not the feeds I’d left running, not the partitioned view I’d set up for her workstation.
She was in my chair, at my station, and the data on the monitors was mine.
The real data. The operational logs, the mission timestamps, the communication intercepts I’d spent ten days making sure she never saw.
She’d found all of it.
Sera sat with her hands flat on the desk and her face lit blue by the screens. Not angry. Not confused. Clear. The absolute clarity of a woman who had solved an equation and was waiting for the variable to confirm itself.
“I know what you’ve been doing,” she said. “You’re the Ghost.”
My body was still running on mission protocol.
Heart rate elevated, adrenaline cycling down, the shoulder wound throbbing under my shirt where I’d been holding pressure against it since the car.
Every system I had was telling me to move, to manage, to control the situation the way I controlled every situation.
There was nothing to control.
“Sera.”
“Don’t.” She stood up from my chair. “Don’t tell me it’s not what I think.
I found the gaps you carved out of my access.
I found the Ghost in Kindt’s communications.
I matched every disruption to your timeline.
I matched your injuries to mission dates.
” Her voice was steady. Controlled. The voice of an analyst presenting findings. “I am not guessing.”
I leaned against the doorframe because my legs were making a decision about how much longer they planned to hold me up. “For the record, they named me, not the other way around. I would’ve gone with something less dramatic. Maybe The Hermit. Or The Guy Who Should’ve Changed His Passwords.”
“I don’t care about the name, Travis. I care that you’ve been lying to me since the day I got here.”
Her voice cracked on the last word. Just barely, a fracture she sealed over immediately, but I heard it.
“I was trying to keep you out of it.”
“By lying to my face every morning? Heavy bag. Shelf edge in the storage room. Server rack. Every excuse you gave me, every morning you came upstairs with fresh damage and a reasonable explanation, and I believed you because I trusted you.”
That landed somewhere behind my ribs where the mission damage couldn’t reach.
I opened my mouth to respond, and what came out instead was a slow exhale through my teeth, because my shoulder had shifted against the doorframe and the pain spiked hard enough to steal whatever I’d been about to say.
Sera’s eyes dropped to my left side. “You’re bleeding.”
“It’s not bad.”
“You’re bleeding through your shirt, Travis.”
I looked down. She was right. The dark fabric had hidden it in the corridor, but under the control room lights the wet patch across my left shoulder was unmistakable.
I’d been pressing my arm against it since the drive back, and the pressure had kept it manageable, but manageable was a relative term, and Sera’s definition was clearly different from mine.
She pointed at my chair. “Sit down.”
“I’m fine standing.”
“You are not fine standing. You’re bleeding through your shirt and leaning on a doorframe because your legs won’t hold you. Sit down.”
I sat. Not because she told me to. Because she was right, and my body had decided to side with her, and the chair was closer than the floor.
“Where’s your med kit?”
“Supply room. Third shelf, left side, black case.”
She left and came back with the case and set it on the desk beside me and opened it with hands that were steady. Then she looked at my shirt and at me.
“It has to come off.”
She found the shears in the med kit before I could reach for my collar. “Don’t move your shoulder.”
She cut the shirt from hem to neck in one clean line and peeled it away from the wound, and I sat under the lights of my own control room while eighteen months of hiding came off with it.
I didn’t need a mirror to know what she saw.
The scar along my left rib cage from a knife four months in.
The raised line across my right forearm from the eleven stitches I’d done over the bathroom sink.
Smaller scars across my shoulders and back from impacts and falls and the accumulated damage of dozens of operations conducted alone in the dark.
And the hives. Still blooming across my chest and arms, red and raised and angry.
“Those look really bad,” she said.
“They’ll fade in a couple of hours. They always do.”
“You get them every time you go out?”
“Every time.”
She stared at the welts across my chest. Then at the scar along my ribs. Then at the shoulder wound, still bleeding sluggishly.
“I’ve never stitched anyone up.”
“I’ll walk you through it. Curved needle in the kit, already threaded. Suture pack, blue wrapper.”
She found it. Her hands were shaking now. Mine weren’t, and I watched that difference register on her face. “You normally do this yourself?”
“Yeah. I’m sure my stitching leaves a lot to be desired, but I’ve managed.”
“What if you’d gotten hurt more than you can patch up yourself? Broken a bone? Gotten shot?”
It had always been a risk. At some point it had probably slid more into statistical probability territory. But so far, I’d gotten lucky. “I would’ve dealt with it.”
“Right.” She looked like she wanted to punch me but that was just going to add to my injuries. “Tell me how to do this.”
“Clean the area first. Gauze pad, saline solution. The brown bottle.”
She cleaned the wound. I gritted my teeth through the sting of the saline and the careful pressure of her fingers on my skin. I had done my own sutures dozens of times, and it had never felt like anything except maintenance. This didn’t feel like maintenance.
“The needle goes in about a quarter inch from the edge. Perpendicular to the skin. Even bites on both sides.”
“Even bites.”
“Equal distance from the wound edge on each side. Push through, loop, tie. I’ll tell you when the tension is right.”
“Don’t you need something for the pain?”
“I’m okay.”
She was staring at my shoulder, hands still shaky. “Are you sure?”
I reached up with my other hand and squeezed her arm. “I promise, I’m okay. Having you do this is much easier on me than having to do it myself.”
She squeezed my fingers and nodded. That seemed to be enough to reassure her.
She pushed the needle through, and I held still. The pain was familiar. Hurt like shit, but bearable. She pulled the suture through and looked at me.
“Good. That’s right. Now the other side, same distance.”
She worked slowly. Each stitch deliberate, her lower lip caught between her teeth in concentration. I could feel her breath against my shoulder. Her fingers steadier now than when she’d started.
“How did this start?” she asked on the third stitch, not looking up from the wound.
I’d known the question was coming.
“About a year after Naomi died, I was monitoring old feeds I shouldn’t have still had access to.
Kindt’s pipeline. The same corridor you and I have been working on together.
” I grimaced while she placed the fourth stitch.
“Maude flagged movement on a route I recognized. A van heading to a holding location, and the thermal imaging showed heat signatures inside. Three of them were too small to be adults.”
Her hand stopped. Then she placed the next stitch.
“I threw up in my driveway before I left the house. My body rejected the idea of leaving so hard that I almost went back inside.” I stared at the far wall. “I didn’t go back inside.”
“You went alone.”
“There was no one else and no time. If I’d waited for the proper channels, those kids would have disappeared.”
“So you just went.”
“I just went.”
She tied off the last stitch. Set the needle down. Her hands were down at her sides, and she was looking at the closed wound on my shoulder, but her focus was somewhere else.
“How many times have you done this, Travis?”
“I don’t keep exact track.”
“Ballpark.”
“Does it matter?”
She looked at me for a long moment. Then she turned to the ceiling.
“Maude. How often does he do this?”
Silence. Maude was electronically gagged. Sera raised an eyebrow at me.
I let out a tired sigh. “Go ahead, Maude.”
“He’s averaged one operation every eight to twelve days since starting eighteen months ago, with the longest gap being twenty-three days following a mission in April that resulted in a dislocated shoulder and two fractured ribs.
This week he’s gone on three missions, but honestly, I think that has to do with you. ”
She raised an eyebrow. “Tell me the rest.”
“He has self-administered sutures on fourteen occasions,” Maude continued, probably thrilled to be able to finally gab.
“He has treated his own fractures three times, two of which should have received professional medical attention. His pre-mission stress response has worsened progressively. Average pre-departure heart rate six months ago was ninety-eight. Current average is one-twelve.”
Shit. She was making me sound like I was on death’s door. “Maude…”
“His weight has decreased by eleven pounds since the missions began. His sleep patterns have deteriorated. He has not once, in eighteen months, allowed me to contact anyone for assistance, medical or otherwise.”
“Enough, Maude.”
“It is nowhere near enough,” Maude said. “But it’s a start.”
The control room was quiet. The servers hummed. The screens cycled. I sat, stripped to the waist, under the lights with fresh sutures in my shoulder and eighteen months of damage visible on my body.
“So what happens now?” Sera asked. Her voice was calm. Too calm. It was the voice of a woman who’d already decided something and was waiting for me to catch up.
“Nothing changes for you. You’re here because Kindt wants you dead. Because your apartment is burned and you need a safe place to build your case. That’s what this is. I’m not dragging you into the rest of it.”
“You didn’t drag me anywhere. I found it myself. I’m in this whether you like it or not.”
“Sera. You work for the FBI.”
“The FBI doesn’t know the Ghost exists. They are trying to come at Kindt from traditional means and are too stupid to see that isn’t working. The only place you exist is in Kindt’s internal communications, and the FBI doesn’t have access to those.” She leaned forward.
“If they ever find out—”
“What? I’ll lose my career?” Something flared in her face. “My career is a green badge and a cubicle and a supervisor who pats me on the head when I bring him intel that could save children’s lives. That’s not a career. That’s a waiting room.”
She held my eyes. “You’ve been doing this alone for eighteen months. No backup. No partner. No one watching your screens while you’re in the field. You come home and stitch yourself up in the dark and go back to your desk like it never happened.”
“It works.”
“It is killing you. Maude just told us your heart rate is twenty points higher than when you started. You’ve lost eleven pounds.
You have scars that healed wrong because you wouldn’t let anyone help.
” Her voice dropped. “I sat in your chair for two hours tonight not knowing if you were alive. I’m not doing that again. ”
I looked at her. At the suture thread still on her fingers. Eyes red from hours of staring at screens. Every part of her aimed at me with the same precision she brought to her data.
“You’re not going in the field,” I said.
“We can discuss parameters later.”
“That’s not a parameter. It’s a condition.”
“Fine. But I’m on comms. I’m on screens. I’m part of the operation. Not sitting in the guest room wondering if tonight’s the night you don’t come back.”
The room settled. I looked at the screens, at the feeds cycling through corridors I’d been running alone for eighteen months. At the med kit open on the desk. At the shirt cut in pieces on the floor.
At Sera, standing in front of me in a room I’d built my life around, refusing to leave it.
“Okay,” I said.
She nodded once. Then she reached for a clean gauze pad and pressed it over the wound on my shoulder and taped it down with careful hands. The same hands that had held the needle. The same hands that had shaken and then steadied.
I let her.
For the first time in eighteen months, someone was taking care of the damage, and I didn’t want to stop her.