Chapter 19
Sera
I reached for Travis before I was fully awake.
My hand found cold sheets. The pillow beside mine still held the dent of his head, but the warmth was gone. I lay there for a moment with my palm flat against the empty mattress and told myself it didn’t mean anything.
Travis didn’t sleep well. I knew that. The pool at two in the morning, the kitchen table in the dark, the restless pacing of a man whose brain didn’t come with an off switch.
He was somewhere in the compound. Making coffee, probably.
Or swimming laps until the quiet in his head matched the quiet in the water.
The black kitten was curled against my hip. The other two were wedged together at the foot of the bed, a small pile of fur and warmth that hadn’t registered the absence of a six-foot-two man from the mattress.
I sat up. My body was sore in places I hadn’t expected and a few I had. The T-shirt I’d pulled on at some point in the night was his, soft and too big, and it smelled like him, and I let myself have that for about five seconds before I got up.
The kitchen was empty. The coffee pot was full, which was wrong. Travis set the timer every night. Six a.m., black, no sugar. By quarter to seven he’d normally be on his second cup. A full pot with no mug on the counter meant he’d never come up to pour it.
I poured myself a cup from his untouched pot and took it with me down the hall. He could be anywhere in seven thousand square feet of underground facility. The gym, the pool, one of the rooms he never talked about. A man with that much space could disappear inside his own house without trying.
The pool corridor was dark. Water still, undisturbed. No sound from the gym.
“Maude, where’s Travis?”
The pause before she answered was too long. Not the dramatic beat she deployed before a punchline or the processing delay that preceded a data dump. A careful, measured silence.
“He’s not in the compound.”
Her words were flat. No elaboration, no humor, no dry editorial. The same voice I’d heard the night I’d sat in his chair and asked where he’d gone, and she’d said I can’t discuss that with you.
“When did he leave?”
“I can’t provide operational details without his authorization.”
I froze. Operational details. “He went on a mission?”
No response from Maude. That told me everything I needed to know.
He’d gone on a goddamned mission.
I rushed to the control room trying to wrap my head around it. It had to have been something urgent, right? Something that came through on the feeds that couldn’t wait. Something where every minute mattered and waking me up would have cost him time he didn’t have.
But that didn’t fit. He could’ve easily had Maude wake me up, even if he was literally sprinting out the door.
I sat down and started digging. It took me a few minutes. I found the comms feed, live, his unit active. And the mission log, unencrypted. He’d been in too much of a hurry to lock it down.
He’d gone after a supply transport in the northern corridor. Product and cash moving between two of Kindt’s waypoints. No children. No victims. A route I didn’t recognize from any of our work together. No intercept plan logged. No tiered positioning, no fallback options.
He’d gone out alone. On a target type he’d never bothered with before. On a route he hadn’t run through my model. Without telling me. Without waking me up.
I sat there staring at the screen and let it hit me.
He’d been inside me six hours ago. He’d said my name like it was the only word left in him. I’d fallen asleep with his arm around me and his breath in my hair, and I’d felt, for the first time in longer than I could remember, like I was exactly where I was supposed to be.
He’d waited until I was asleep and left. Hadn’t woken me. Hadn’t left a note. Hadn’t done any of the things a man does when a night meant something.
I stared longer at the screens without really seeing them.
I kept coming back to the same place. He’d touched me last night and it had felt real. It had felt like mine. But sitting here, I couldn’t stop the thought from forming.
He’d closed his eyes when he kissed me.
What if he’d opened them and seen the wrong sister?
What if he’d woken up beside me in the dark and the morning had brought clarity, and clarity had sent him running?
I’d spent my whole life being the other Bolland. The quiet one. The one who stayed behind the desk while Naomi walked into rooms and owned them. I’d made peace with it, or I’d told myself I had, and then Travis had put his hands on me and said my name and I’d believed him.
Maybe that was what I was struggling with. Not that he’d left. That I’d let myself believe it was real in the first place.
I don’t know how long I sat there. Long enough for the coffee I’d carried from the kitchen to go cold beside the keyboard.
Long enough for the screens to blur and sharpen and blur again.
The hurt kept circling, and I let it, because fighting it off would have taken energy I didn’t have and I wasn’t sure I wanted to spend.
But eventually my brain started processing what I was actually seeing.
It happened the way it always happened with me.
Not a decision, not a choice to push the feelings aside and get to work.
Just the patterns on the screen pulling at the part of me that couldn’t leave anything unexamined.
The analyst waking up inside the woman, whether the woman wanted her to or not.
If he was an hour north on the route I was looking at, and he’d left around five, the timing put him near the intercept window now.
Maybe already engaged. I pulled the corridor data and started running it against my model, the one he hadn’t used, the one that would have taken twelve minutes to validate this route.
The model flagged a problem in under three.
The transport he was targeting had more chatter around it than a standard supply run warranted. More security.
Damn it.
My model would have caught this. I would have told him the security profile was wrong, that this wasn’t a soft target, that the resistance would be heavier than what he’d planned for. That he shouldn’t hit it.
He hadn’t given me the chance.
“Maude.” I kept my voice even. “I figured out what he’s doing myself. You didn’t help me, and you didn’t violate any of his instructions. Travis’s biometric relay is part of the comms partner system he set up when he brought me into operations. He never deactivated it. Put it on my screen.”
A pause. Then his vitals appeared on the secondary monitor. Heart rate, respiration, stress indicators. The numbers were elevated but not critical. He was alive. He was functioning.
The comms feed gave me fragments. Static, ambient sound, the occasional shift in audio that might have been movement. Nothing I could interpret. Nothing I could act on. I was sitting in his chair doing the one thing I was worst at in the world, which was nothing.
Minutes passed. His heart rate held steady. Elevated, but stable. I bit the inside of my cheek and watched the numbers, and I waited.
Then the spike.
One forty-two. One fifty-one. The kind of jump that meant contact, meant violence, meant something had gone wrong fast. His breathing pattern fractured into short, ragged bursts.
Through the comms feed, sounds that were worse than silence. A crash, maybe metal. A voice that wasn’t his. Then a sound that was him, a short, bitten-off grunt that I recognized because I’d heard it when I’d stitched his shoulder. Pain—controlled, swallowed before it could become anything louder.
His heart rate held above one-forty. It didn’t come back down.
He was in trouble.
I stood up from his chair. “Maude, where exactly is he?”
She gave me the coordinates. Fifty-three miles north.
“Fastest route. I’m going after him.”
“Sera. You are not equipped for—”
“Fastest route, Maude.”
She gave it to me.
The smart thing was to stay. Monitor from here. Trust that Travis had survived eighteen months of this alone and could survive one more. The analytical, rational, data-driven thing was to sit in this chair and wait.
But he was in trouble. I knew it. And I damned well wasn’t going to let him die without giving him a piece of my mind.
I ran to my room first, pulled on some workout clothes and slipped on shoes. Then hurried to the gear room.
I knew the layout. I knew where the weapons were. I debated for a second, then I took a handgun from the safe.
I’d held one twice during training. Travis had shown me the safety, the grip, the stance. I hadn’t fired it. My accuracy would be worthless and I knew that, but sometimes it was the presence of a weapon that changed a situation.
I ran upstairs and grabbed my inhaler from the kitchen counter. Gun in one hand, inhaler in the other. If I hadn’t been so terrified I would have appreciated the absurdity.
The garage held his vehicles. I got into the SUV closest to the door, set the gun and inhaler on the passenger seat, and adjusted the mirrors. My hands were trembling. I gripped the wheel until they stopped, or at least until the trembling was small enough to drive through.
The garage door opened. Daylight poured in, bright and ordinary, the kind of clear Montana morning that had no business being the backdrop for what I was about to do.
Three weeks. I hadn’t been outside this compound in three weeks. The last time I’d been out there, men had been waiting at my apartment to kill me. Travis had pulled me out of that. Now I was driving toward him because nobody else could.
I pulled out of the garage, through the gate, and onto the road. The house disappeared behind me in the rearview mirror, and I was alone.