Chapter 21
Travis
Wrong ceiling.
That was my first thought as I opened my eyes. The surface above me was white plaster with a hairline crack running diagonally from the corner, and I didn’t know that crack. I knew every crack in every ceiling I slept under because knowing was how I stayed alive, and this one wasn’t mine.
My side lit up when I tried to sit, and the pain knocked me flat again. A sharp, clean burn along my ribs that told me two things: someone had cleaned the wound, and the wound was worse than I’d told Sera in the car.
Sera.
Fuck.
She was sitting in a chair across the room. Not beside me. Across. A deliberate distance that had nothing to do with giving me space and everything to do with the fact that if she were any closer, one of us would say something we couldn’t take back.
My shirt was gone. A bandage covered my left side along the lower ribs, wrapped tight to hold the gauze in place. She’d done this while I was out. Made decisions about my body without my input, cleaned blood off my skin while I wasn’t conscious to control any of it.
I hated that. And I had no right to hate it because the reason she’d had to do it was entirely my fault.
“How long was I out?” The words came out scraped thin.
“Almost two hours.” She didn’t move from the chair. “There’s water on the table next to you.”
I turned my head. A glass of water, a bottle of ibuprofen, and my phone laid out in a neat row on a side table I didn’t recognize. Everything she thought I’d need when I woke up, arranged with the same precision she brought to her data layouts.
I reached for the water and drank half of it.
The wound throbbed when I shifted. Beyond that, hives had spread across both arms and up my neck.
The safehouse was doing what any uncontrolled environment did to my system: pressing on every nerve that expected walls I’d built and finding ones I hadn’t.
No tremors yet, but my hands weren’t fully steady either.
Street noise pushed through the walls. Cars. A dog somewhere. Sounds I couldn’t catalog or predict, each one landing on a nervous system that had no filters here. No cameras, no feeds, no perimeter alerts. No pool. No routine. No Maude in the walls.
Just Sera, sitting six feet away with my blood dried brown on her shirt, watching me with an expression I could read from across the room.
She was furious.
“The wound needs to be checked again in a few hours,” she said. “The bleeding stopped but it’s deep. Deeper than a graze. You’re going to need real medical attention when we get back.”
“I’ll handle it.”
“The way you handled the mission?”
I put the water down.
“No comms.” Her voice was level, not angry. “No model. A target type you’ve never hit before. In daylight. On a route you didn’t run past anyone. My model would have flagged the security issues in three minutes, Travis. Three damned minutes.”
“I know.”
“You would have known it was a bad target.”
“I know.”
“But you didn’t give me three minutes. You didn’t give me anything. You got up while I was sleeping, and you walked out without a word.”
I had nothing. Every operational justification I could offer was hollow, and we both knew it.
I’d been doing this alone for eighteen months wasn’t a defense when the one mission I’d run with her had been the cleanest of my career.
I couldn’t dress it up. I couldn’t wrap the recklessness in tactical language and make it sound like anything other than what it was.
“You’re right,” I said. “It was a bad call.”
“A bad call.” She repeated it back to me, flat.
“You almost bled out in the passenger seat. I hit a man in the face and nearly broke my hand. Your vehicle is sitting in a gravel lot fifty miles north of here with God knows what forensic evidence on it. And one of Kindt’s people may have my plates. ” She paused. “A bad call.”
“What do you want me to say, Sera?”
“I want you to tell me why.”
“I made a tactical error. I saw the transport on the feeds and moved too fast without proper—”
“Stop.” She leaned forward in the chair. “I am not one of your Warrior Security guys. I am not Maude. Do not manage me. I woke up, and you weren’t there.”
Her voice cracked on the last word. Just barely, just enough to hear the thing underneath the anger, and it gutted me.
Because this wasn’t a debriefing. This was a woman who had woken up alone in my bed after the first night we’d spent together and found cold sheets where I should have been. I’d done that to her.
“You didn’t leave because you saw a transport on the feeds.” She pressed her palms flat against her thighs. Holding herself together. “You left because you woke up in that bed and I was in it.”
I would give anything if I could deny it. If I could tell her I happened by the command room and saw something and had to leave that very second. Anything if I could erase the look on her face. The look I’d put there.
But I couldn’t lie to her.
“So tell me.” She looked smaller than I’d ever seen her. Folded into that chair with her arms tight against her body, my blood still on her shirt, eyes wet and not bothering to hide it. “Was waking up next to me so terrible that you had to go get yourself killed?”
The question landed in the center of my chest and burrowed deep, its claws ripping and shredding as it did.
“Waking up with you wasn’t bad. Not at all.”
“Then what the hell, Travis?”
“It wasn’t bad.” My voice rose as I struggled to explain something I barely understood myself. “It was the opposite of bad. That was the problem. I haven’t felt that good in three years, and I couldn’t handle it.”
“That doesn’t make sense. You felt good so you went out and got yourself shot?”
The hives on my forearms were burning. I could feel my pulse in the wound along my side, a steady throb synced to my heartbeat. Everything hurt, which should have been exactly what I wanted, except it wasn’t enough.
It was never going to be enough again because the woman sitting across from me had broken the mechanism I hadn’t even been aware I’d needed. Just by her very existence in my life, she’d taken away some of the pain and misery that the Ghost missions had cost.
How was I supposed to say that I wanted that pain back? That I needed it?
I deserved it.
“The missions are supposed to hurt.” I said it to the ceiling first. Then I made myself look at her.
She didn’t respond. She sat perfectly still, her eyes fixed on mine, waiting for the next piece.
“Every mission I’ve run for eighteen months. The hives, the tremors, the hours of being wrecked afterward. I told myself it was the cost. My body fighting me because the work mattered. But that’s not what it was.”
“What was it?”
There was only one word.
“Penance.”
She didn’t move. Didn’t blink.
“The mission with you on comms, the pain didn’t come.
Your voice in my ear all night gave my body something to hold on to, and the suffering just didn’t happen—not the way I was used to.
Not the way I needed it to. That’s why I told you to leave, even though that wasn’t what I really wanted.
” God, this explanation was a shitshow. “And then making love to you was so fucking good, and I woke up and felt…peaceful.”
“Was that so wrong?”
I stopped. Started again. “I need the missions to hurt, Sera. I need the cost. And it wasn’t there. So, I went looking for it. For the penance.”
“Penance for what?”
There it was. The question I’d been running from for three years. Running from in the dark on empty highways, running from into the fists of men who wanted to kill me, running from into the cold water of my pool at two in the morning.
Every mile, every scar, every night I’d spent putting myself back together over the bathroom sink had been running from this exact question.
“Naomi,” I said.
Sera flinched. Her whole body pulled back an inch, a small involuntary retreat that she caught and stopped but not before I saw it. Her hand went to the arm of the chair and gripped it, and when she spoke her voice had a rough edge that hadn’t been there before.
“Okay.” She swallowed. “Tell me.”
“Everyone knows she died on that op near the Canadian border. Everyone knows I was there. Partner witnesses partner’s death, partner falls apart. Clean narrative. Easy to understand.”
“But that’s not the whole story.”
“No.”
“You’re still in love with her. That’s why you ran out this morning. You’re still in love with her, and being with me felt like you were betraying her.” She wrapped her arms around herself like she was trying to keep herself from shattering into a million pieces.
I sat up, ignoring the pain. I couldn’t stand the look in Sera’s eyes. Couldn’t stand the fact that I’d put it there. I reached for her, but she flinched away.
“Sera—”
“You were right to tell me to leave. That’s the right call. It’s not healthy for us to be around each other. And then I forced you to do something you didn’t really want to do. I get it. And I apologize. I should never have—”
“Fucking stop right now.”
“We both know it’s true.”
I sat all the way up and turned so my feet were on the ground. I didn’t care what it cost me physically. “It’s the furthest thing from the truth.”
“You’re still in love with my sister!” She yelled it.
“I wasn’t in love with your sister even when she died!” I roared back.
We sat there, staring each other down.
“What?” Sera finally whispered.
I opened my mouth. Closed it. The sentence was right there, fully formed, and my throat wouldn’t release it. Three years of keeping it sealed and the seal didn’t want to break, even now, even with everything else already stripped away.
“I was going to leave her.” It came out low. Barely voiced. “Before the operation. I’d already decided. I hadn’t told her yet, but I’d made the decision.”
Sera’s hands went still in her lap.
“Things had changed between Naomi and me. We’d been growing apart. Something was wrong. Missing. I’d known it for weeks, and I’d finally stopped pretending.”
“Did she know?”