Chapter 18
Travis
I woke at four with Sera's back against my chest and my arm around her waist and the black kitten curled in the space behind her knees.
I lay there not wanting to move. Sera's warmth against my chest. Her hair against my jaw. The barely perceptible weight of her hand resting on my forearm where I held her. The kitten's purr, a tiny motor running at a frequency that vibrated through the mattress.
Then my brain woke up the rest of the way.
Sera. In my arms. In my bed.
Naomi's sister.
The warmth I'd been lying inside turned sick. My stomach clenched and my throat went tight and I held very still.
I'd slept with her. Not in the abstract, not in the theoretical space where I'd been keeping her for four years. I'd put my hands on her and my mouth on her, and I'd been inside her and she'd said my name, and I had wanted it more than I had ever wanted anything.
I'd known this would happen. Even while I was kissing her, even while I was inside her, some part of me had known I'd end up right here. Awake in the dark, sick with it, wishing I could cut the last six hours out of my body and knowing I'd do every second of it again if she let me.
The guilt didn't care that I'd chosen her. It just sat in the center of my chest with the full weight of a dead woman behind it and waited for me to stop pretending I was allowed to have this.
Sera shifted in her sleep, pressing closer. Her shoulder blade settled against my chest and the contact sent warmth radiating through me, and the warmth made the hollow worse because I could feel both things at the same time and they were pulling in opposite directions.
I had taken something good for myself last night. Her body, her trust, the way she'd looked at me in the dark like I was worth looking at. I'd taken it and it had been the best thing I'd felt in three years, and now something in me was demanding I give it back.
Not because it was wrong, and very fucking definitely not because it had been bad, but even thinking about it now had my cock getting hard.
It was because I didn't get to have this. I didn’t deserve it. Didn’t deserve Sera and her gentle stubbornness.
The reasons were tangled together so tightly I couldn't pull them apart in the dark. Naomi was dead, and there were things about her death, about me, that Sera didn't know. Things that would change the way she looked at me if she found out.
I wanted her right now. Lying in the dark with her breathing against me, I wanted to wake her up and pull her closer and bury myself in her again and let the stillness hold.
Instead, I moved.
Slow. The same controlled extraction I'd used a hundred times leaving positions in the field. Easing my arm from under her, shifting my weight inch by inch, letting the mattress absorb each movement so the surface barely changed.
Sera's breathing didn't alter. The kitten opened one eye, assessed me with the indifference of an animal that had zero investment in my psychological crisis, and went back to sleep.
I stood in the doorway and looked back at her.
A shape in my bed. In my room. In the space I had designed for one person because one person was all I could justify.
She was lying where I slept every night, and she looked like she belonged there, and the fact that she looked like she belonged there was the thing I couldn't stand.
The wanting and the guilt were the same size. I couldn't hold both, so I left the room and pulled the door closed behind me.
The kitchen was dark. I turned on the light over the stove because the overhead was too bright and I didn't want bright. The coffee machine was set on its timer the way it always was, but the timer was set for six, and it was four-fifteen.
I could make coffee manually. I stared at the two mugs sitting in the dish rack.
Two mugs. Hers and mine, washed together yesterday, dried and placed side by side.
One of the kittens was asleep on the chair Sera always sat in.
The gray one, sprawled across the seat cushion in a position that suggested it had no spine.
On the counter next to the stove, Sera’s legal pad sat where she'd left it, handwriting so precise it looked typeset, equations and variables mapped in a system only her brain could navigate.
Everywhere I looked there was evidence this compound held two people now.
Not because I'd planned it or allowed it or engineered it into the design specs, but because she had walked in and stayed, and the space had made room for her without asking my permission, and I had let it happen because some part of me had wanted it to happen.
I left the coffee maker and went to the pool.
The pool had always been my reset. Three years of living underground, and the ritual was the one thing I could count on to bring my system back to baseline.
Cold water, controlled breathing, the repetitive pull of my arms through the surface.
Mechanical. Predictable. The kind of stimulus that quieted everything else.
I changed, dove in, and started swimming.
The water was the same temperature it always was. My stroke was the same stroke. The length of the pool hadn't changed, the light from the underwater fixtures hit the surface at the same angle, and the echo of my breathing off the concrete walls sounded exactly the way it always sounded.
But the reset didn't catch.
I swam four laps. Eight. Twelve. Waited for the point where my mind went blank and my body took over and the noise behind my thoughts faded into the rhythm of the water.
That point had never failed me. Not after the worst missions, not after the nights I'd stitched myself up over the sink, not after the mornings I'd stood in the shower and counted the new scars and wondered how many more I could accumulate before the math stopped working.
Tonight the point didn't come. Because the thing I was trying to reset from wasn't pain or overstimulation or the post-mission wreckage my system knew how to process. It was contentment, and contentment didn't respond to cold water and controlled breathing.
I stopped at the wall after twenty laps and hung there with my arms on the edge and my forehead against the tile. The silence in the pool corridor was supposed to be the good silence. The productive silence that let me think clearly and plan precisely and keep every variable in its proper column.
Instead, the silence gave me Sera. Her smooth skin under my hands.
The sound she'd made against my neck. Her full breasts pressing against my chest. The taste of her on my tongue.
The way she'd looked at me afterward with something on her face I didn't deserve and couldn't return and wanted so badly it made my chest ache.
I got out. Dried off. Didn't go back to the kitchen. Didn't go back to the bedroom. Went downstairs to the control room because that was where my hands had somewhere to go, and right now my hands needed somewhere to go before the rest of me followed them back to the woman sleeping in my bed.
The screens were cycling their standard overnight feeds.
Kindt's communication channels, the regional monitoring arrays Maude maintained, satellite data on known corridor routes.
I sat in my chair and let my eyes move across the data the way they moved across it every morning, scanning without directing, letting the patterns surface on their own.
It wasn’t very exciting but anywhere was better to place my attention than with the woman upstairs.
The feeds scrolled, and I let them. Routine chatter. Scheduling noise. Nothing that required me. Nothing to stop this noise inside my head.
I wanted to hit something. The heavy bag was waiting in the gym fairly screaming at me to come get it, the need to put my fists into something solid until the calm cracked open and something I recognized bled through.
But it wouldn’t be enough.
So I sat at the screens and pretended to work. Pretended I wasn’t completely coming apart. Pretended I couldn’t feel myself being pulled back toward that bedroom more with each passing second.
I couldn’t go back there.
I couldn’t think of the weight of her against me. The way she'd pulled me back to her mouth when I'd tried to slow down. The sound of my name in her throat.
I started scanning the overnight feeds more aggressively. Anything to try to keep my mind occupied.
I didn’t deserve her. I would never deserve her.
I couldn’t stay here. I had to get out.
My eyes stopped randomly sweeping the screens and became more definitive in their search.
I had to get out.
I could feel the shift happening, the operational part of my brain shouldering forward, hungry for something to lock onto in the screens.
Anything. Any reason to leave this compound and drive into the dark and feel the hives come and the tremors start and the punishment land the way it was supposed to land.
Then I found it.
A courier handoff flagged in a communication. A supply transfer between two of Kindt's logistics nodes, scheduled for early morning. Not a transport. No victims in the vehicle. Just product and cash moving between waypoints on a route I recognized.
The handoff was happening at dawn. A stretch of highway I'd driven before, timing that was tight but workable if I left now.
Any other morning, I would have flagged it and waited. Run it through Sera's model. Let her pull the route apart and build the intercept plan the way she'd built the last one. The smart play. The play that had a hundred percent success rate.
Hitting something like this wasn’t what I did. No kids were involved so the risk wasn’t worth the reward.
Fuck that. I didn’t deserve any sort of reward. I didn’t deserve rest with no hives or tremors. And I definitely didn’t fucking deserve the woman sleeping upstairs.
I was going.
"It's four forty-seven in the morning," Maude said.
I didn't stop typing. "I'm aware of what time it is. I’m going out. There's a transport in the northern corridor. I’m going to hit it.”
“That’s not the type of transport you normally target. Plus, it will be daytime.”
“Yeah, well, I’m targeting it this time. And you always say I need more Vitamin D.” I grabbed a comms unit and placed it in my ear. I didn’t want to take a chance on Maude’s talking waking Sera up. “I’m going Maude.”
“This mission is ill-advised. You have not studied the route with the normal thoroughness we attempt. There are too many unknown variables. You have no back-up, and Sera won’t be on comms.”
“I planned and executed every mission solo before Sera got here,” I said. "Prep the mobile unit.”
Silence. Not the processing kind. The kind that meant she was choosing her next words and knew they wouldn't work but was going to say them anyway.
"She's upstairs in your bed." Maude's voice was quieter now.
Not the dry clinical tone or the sardonic pushback I was used to.
Something underneath both of those things that I'd never programmed, and she'd developed on her own.
"She is going to wake up, and you are not going to be there.
And she is not going to check the mission logs to figure out what happened.
She's going to look at the empty side of the bed, and she's going to have all the information she needs. "
"She'll understand."
"Yes. She will. That's the problem."
The control room hummed around me. Servers processing, feeds cycling, the low electrical pulse of a system I'd built to keep the world at a distance I could manage. Every piece of it designed by me, for me, calibrated to the precise specifications of a man who operated alone.
"Open the garage," I said.
The gear room was cold. It was always cold, a function of its position at the far end of the underground level where the ventilation ran hardest. I moved through the ritual on autopilot. Vest off the hook. Plates checked by feel, fingers along the edges. Straps buckled, left side first, then right.
I loaded the Glock. Magazine seated, spares in the vest pockets. My hands were steady. Completely, infuriatingly steady. No tremor in my fingers, no fine vibration running through my wrists. My body was rested and calm and my skin was clear, and I wanted the hives.
I wanted the tremors. I wanted the familiar suffering that told me I was doing something hard, paying something real, earning the right to exist in the space between the man I was and the man I should have been.
The garage was dark. I got in the car and started the engine and the gate opened ahead of me. The night air came through the window, and I waited for the hives to start. The familiar burn under my skin, the body's protest, the physical evidence that what I was doing cost me something.
They came late. Miles later than usual, and when they finally surfaced, they were mild. A faint prickling across my forearms that would have been invisible in decent light.
My body was still running on whatever Sera had given it. The calm she'd poured into my system through proximity and touch and the simple act of being present. Even now, driving away from her, the effect lingered like warmth from a fire that had been banked but not extinguished.
Even that felt like betrayal. The punishment was supposed to work. The body was supposed to rebel. That was the contract. I suffered, and it was payment for existing.
I drove north on a highway I hadn't analyzed, toward a target I hadn't vetted, on a route I hadn't run through Sera's model. No partner on comms. No tiered intercept positioning. No fallback plan.
No voice in my ear telling me to come home.
I knew exactly what I was doing. I knew it was reckless and I knew it was selfish and I knew that Maude was right about every single thing she'd said.
Sera was going to wake up in my bed and reach for me and find cold sheets, and she was going to understand, with the same precision she brought to every data set she'd ever touched, exactly what that meant.
I pressed the accelerator and the dark highway opened in front of me, and I drove into it alone because alone was what I deserved, and if some part of me knew that was broken thinking, the rest of me didn't care.