Chapter 16
Travis
The gate opened on approach, and I pulled through, and for the first time in eighteen months, the drive home hadn't been the worst part of the mission.
It had gone clean. The courier had deviated at mile six, and Sera had caught it before I did. Her voice in my earpiece, calm and precise: "He's not taking the turn. Frontage road, half a mile ahead. Cut through behind the grain elevator and you'll beat him there."
I'd made it with forty seconds to spare. Found two kids in the back of the van. Two boys, maybe six and eight. I’d dropped them in front of a twenty-four-hour urgent care. Same protocol, clean.
Without Sera's call, the whole thing would have been blown. I'd have been sitting at the wrong intercept point when the van went past. Even Maude with all her capabilities couldn’t replace the instinct Sera brought to the table. That instinct had saved two kids tonight.
But that wasn't what I kept coming back to as I cut the engine. What I kept coming back to was my body.
The hives were there, but muted. Pink instead of the angry red welts that usually lasted hours. I kept pushing up my sleeves at stoplights to confirm what my skin was telling me, because my skin had never told me this before.
The tremors were barely registering. A faint vibration in my fingers when I gripped the wheel, nothing like the full-body shaking that normally owned me from mile thirty until I was back underground with the door locked.
I flexed my hands on the steering wheel. Opened them. Closed them.
Steady.
That had never happened. And the only variable that was different? Sera.
All night, Sera's voice had been in my ear.
Not just relaying data. Present. A human tether, steady and constant, giving my nervous system something to anchor to besides its own panic.
The agoraphobia had still come, but it had hit a body that wasn't alone, and the difference was written across my skin in hives that were already fading even as I pulled into the garage.
"Your post-mission biometrics are notably improved," Maude said. "Across the board. I'd give you the numbers, but you'd just ignore them."
I parked and cut the engine. My body was running its post-mission inventory the way it always did, and the numbers kept coming back wrong.
Wrong in the right direction. My ribs ached where the asshole courier had slammed me into the side of the van, but that was standard.
Everything else was better than standard.
I should have felt good about that. But somehow I felt… off.
Sera was in the control room when I came through the door. On her feet before I was fully inside. She'd been on comms for every minute of the mission, had heard the extraction, the urgent care drop, the drive home. She already knew the kids were safe. She already knew I was in one piece.
But knowing and seeing were different things, and the look on her face when I walked through the door was the look of a woman who hadn't fully believed any of it until I was standing in front of her.
“You’re okay.” Her breath left her body in a little sigh and she crossed the room toward me, arms already lifting for a hug.
"That route call," I said, stopping her short. "If you hadn't caught the deviation, we'd have lost them."
She halted her movement toward me. Let her arms drop. "I saw the speed change on the feed and cross-referenced it against the route options. The frontage road was the only logical alternative given his heading."
"It was the right call."
She nodded. Not modesty. Accuracy. "And next time, I think we should build in a third intercept option.
A fallback position in case the deviation goes further than one alternate route.
I was already running the numbers while you were in transit, and if we tier the positioning based on probability brackets instead of a single predicted route, your coverage area triples. "
Next time. Tiered positioning. Probability brackets. She was building the next mission in her head, and the way she said it was easy. Natural. Like this was her life now.
I turned away from her and pulled off my jacket. I’d come straight here rather than go to the gear room like I always did.
Because I knew she’d be here. I’d deviated from my own system in order to see her first. That was fucking unacceptable.
The bruise where the van door had caught me lit up as I moved, and I welcomed the minor pain. It gave me somewhere to put my attention that wasn't her voice planning our future.
The missions had always cost me. Not in some abstract sense. In a concrete, physical, measurable one. Hives that covered my arms for hours. Tremors that made my hands useless. The accumulated damage of fighting people in the dark while my nervous system tried to shut me down.
That was the way it worked. Every time. The cost was the cost, and I'd never questioned whether it was right because I'd never needed to.
I stood by the desk and waited for the crash that always came after a mission.
The full-system collapse that put me on the floor or in the pool or bent over the bathroom sink with my hands braced on cold porcelain.
Eighteen months of missions, and the aftermath had never once failed to collect what it was owed.
I waited. But still it didn't come. Sera and Maude were discussing some probabilities of something, but it was almost like their voices were at a distance.
My hands were still. My skin was calm. My heart rate was settling into something almost normal just mere minutes after I arrived home.
I should have been relieved. Any rational person would have been relieved. The mission worked, the children were safe, and for the first time I wasn't paying for it with hours of physical misery.
But relief wasn't what I felt. What I felt was a hollow behind my sternum, tight and getting tighter. The sensation of reaching for something that was supposed to be there and closing my hand around nothing.
I knew why the missions hurt. I'd always known.
The pain did something for me, served a purpose I'd never had to examine because it had never been absent long enough to miss.
Now it was absent, and the thing it had been covering was right there, exposed, the way a wound looks when you peel back the bandage too soon.
I couldn’t ignore it anymore.
Naomi had died. Everyone knew that part. The operation, the ambush, the fact that I'd been there. That was the clean version. The version that explained why I lived underground and everyone thought I never left.
But her death wasn't the whole story. It had never been the whole story, at least not when it came to me and what I did to bring Kindt down.
The missions saved children. That was true. That would always be true.
But standing in my control room with steady hands and fading hives, I couldn't hide behind that anymore. Because tonight the saving had happened and my suffering hadn't happened. I should feel relief at that. Thankful.
But what I felt was cheated.
I dropped into my chair and stared at the dark monitor in front of me and let that word settle. Cheated. I felt cheated because the mission hadn't hurt me enough. What kind of man felt cheated by the absence of his own pain?
The kind who'd been using that pain for his own purposes.
Eighteen months. Every mission, every drive through the dark, every set of hives and tremors and self-administered stitches. I'd told myself it was the cost for saving lives. The unavoidable price of doing something good despite a body that fought me every step.
What if the pain wasn't the cost?
What if the pain was the reason?
I hadn't been enduring the pain. I'd been seeking it. Choosing the hardest targets, the longest drives, the operations most likely to break me. Not despite what they did to me.
Because of it.
The Ghost wasn't just a man saving children. The Ghost was punishment, and I'd built him that way on purpose, and I'd never once had to see it clearly because the pain itself had always been there to keep me from looking.
And now the pain was gone, and somehow I missed it. If that wasn’t the most fucked up thing in the known universe, I didn’t know what was.
"Travis?"
I'd been sitting at the desk with my back to her, one hand flat on the surface, staring at a monitor I wasn't seeing.
"I've been thinking about the comms setup too," she said.
"If we hardened the encryption on the secondary channel, I could run parallel data feeds during the operation.
That way, if something shifts in the corridor traffic while you're in the field, I'd catch it live instead of after. It’ll make things much easier.”
Easier.
That was the problem.
Every improvement she made, every system she refined, every minute she spent in my ear on comms made the missions easier. Made the hives fade faster. Made the tremors stop sooner. Made the pain smaller.
I deserved the pain.
"Sera, this isn't working."
The room changed. I could feel it in the quality of the silence, in the way the air seemed to lose pressure, as if the sentence had punctured something.
"What? I thought everything went great tonight.”
“It’s not about tonight. It’s about this arrangement. You being here. It's not working. I'll find you somewhere safe, a location Kindt doesn't know about, somewhere I can set up remote access for your model. But you can't stay here."
She stared at me. I held her gaze even though everything in me wanted to look somewhere else.
"You're kidding."
"I'm not."
"We just ran the most successful operation you've ever had. I made the call that saved it. You said that yourself, two minutes ago." She hadn't raised her voice. She didn't need to. "And now you're telling me to leave."
"It's a security issue. Having someone else in the compound creates vulnerabilities I can't account for."
"Name one."
I couldn't. Of course I couldn’t, because that whole sentiment was complete bullshit.
"Name one vulnerability, Travis. One that exists now that didn't exist before tonight, when the mission went better than any you've ever run."
"This isn't a discussion."
"The hell it isn't. You don't get to send me away because the mission went well. That doesn't make sense. Nothing you're saying makes sense unless there's something you're not telling me."
"There's nothing I'm not telling you."
"Then what the hell are you talking about? Two children are safe right now because of what we did together. So why are you saying us partnering doesn’t work?”
"Because I had a partner in the field before and she died." I stood up, my voice harder than I wanted it to be. "Because Naomi is dead, Sera. And I can't do this again."
Her name landed between us and sat there.
"I know she's dead, Travis. She was my sister."
"Then you understand."
"What I understand is that you kissed me in the gym and you've barely looked at me since."
My hands went still at my sides.
"And now you want me to leave." Her voice was quiet, which was way worse than yelling.
"So just say it. Say the actual reason. It's not about security.
It's not about the mission. You kissed me and it was a mistake.
You don't want me here because you don't want me, and you're too decent to say it, so you're wrapping it in protection. "
She held my gaze the entire time. No tears. No tremor in her voice. This was a woman who had practiced being steady through a specific kind of pain until steadiness was all anyone could see.
"I get it,” she continued. “I’ve gotten it my whole life. Naomi was Naomi—beautiful, a top-notch agent, someone who protected our country—and I was the other one. The one who never quite measured up.” She paused. Swallowed. "I'm not angry, Travis. I just need you to say it so I can stop."
"Stop what?"
"Hoping I was wrong for once.”
The room went silent. Not the productive silence of two people working, or the careful silence of two people circling something they weren't ready to name. This was the silence after a detonation, when everything that was standing a moment ago isn't anymore.
She thought I didn't want her.
For someone who was so great at seeing patterns, she was fantastically wrong now. She was wrong about me wanting her, and she was wrong about why I'd told her to leave. The real reason was something I'd barely gotten my own head around.
I couldn't explain it to her. I could barely explain it to myself. But that was my problem, and I could deal with it later or not at all.
What I definitely was not going to do was stand here and let her believe she wasn't wanted. If she was going to be wrong about something, it wasn’t going to be something that off the mark.
The steadiness in her face looked like a wall she'd been building her entire life, and I could see exactly what holding it up was costing her. She thought she was unwanted. That I thought of her as the lesser sister.
I’d never thought she was the lesser sister. But that was something else for me to work through alone.
I pushed away from the desk. "You think I don't want you?"
“You just told me I need to leave.”
I ignored that because honestly, there was no way I was letting her leave right now. I didn’t care what stupid shit had come out of my mouth a few minutes ago.
“I haven't stopped thinking about that kiss, about you, for one minute since you arrived.” I was moving toward her, and the words were coming out rough, unfinished.
She took a step back.
"Every meal at the table. Every hour in this room. Every night in the pool knowing you were right above me."
Another step—me forward, her back. Her eyes were locked on mine, and she wasn't blinking.
"I think about the way you tuck your hair behind your ear when you're reading data, and I lose my place on whatever I'm working on. I have spent enough time watching your hands while you type to map every freckle on your left forearm."
Her back found the wall. I closed the last of the distance between us.
"I know there are seven." My hands landed on the wall on either side of her, and I was close enough to see her pulse jumping, to watch her eyes go wide with something that looked nothing like the resignation she'd been wearing ten seconds ago.
"The problem was never that I don't want you." My voice was barely mine. "The problem is that I have never wanted anything this much."
I kissed her.