Chapter 21 #2
“I think she sensed it. The last few days before the operation, something shifted. She was off. Distracted. Trying harder in ways she’d never had to try before. I think she could feel me pulling away even though I hadn’t said anything.”
Sera shrugged one shoulder. “Naomi was strong. She would’ve been sad if you guys broke up, but she would’ve gotten over it. That’s nothing to punish yourself over.”
“She was distracted the night she died. We’d gotten into an argument—another one—that morning, and things were off between us. That carried over into the field. I know it did.”
“Travis…”
I looked away. “Naomi had a stellar reputation at the Agency. She was ice cold. Brutal in her focus.” She’d been that way with us personally sometimes too.
Hard. Cold. “But that night she broke cover too early. Moved before the signal. It was a half-second mistake, the kind she never made, and it put her in the open when the ambush hit. And I was right there, and I couldn’t stop it. ”
“You think she was distracted because of what was going on between you guys.”
“I think she might have been. I’ll never know. That’s the part I can’t get past. There’s no way to run that and get an answer. The ambiguity is—” I stopped again. “Guilt doesn’t need proof. It just needs maybe.”
Silence floated through the room.
“All I know is that I’d made the decision to leave her that day. I knew I couldn’t stay, not feeling the way I did. And then she died.”
There was still more. But maybe that would never get to be said. Probably for the best.
“After that, I tried to go back. Tried to function.” The way my body had completely betrayed me was actually easier to talk about than Naomi, especially to Sera.
“Three weeks after the funeral, I walked into Langley for a debrief. Made it as far as the lobby. My hands started shaking so badly I couldn’t hold my badge.
Hives up both arms, my neck, my chest. I couldn’t breathe.
I couldn’t see straight. Security thought I was having a heart attack. ”
“Travis.”
“I tried again two days later. Couldn’t get out of the car.
Sat in the parking lot for an hour with my hands locked on the steering wheel and my skin on fire.
” I didn’t look at her. “Then I stopped trying. I had a lot of money from investments I’d made over the years and knew about Warrior Security through Hunter.
I found the land in Garnet Bend. Built a place where I could control every variable.
Temperature, light, sound, perimeter, access.
If I could control it, it couldn’t hurt me.
If nothing was unpredictable, nobody could die. ”
“And it worked?”
“Inside the walls, yeah. My body calmed down. The hives stopped. The tremors stopped. As long as I stayed inside a space I’d built and secured, I was functional.
” I finally looked at her. “The first time I left for a Ghost mission, I threw up in the driveway. Then I made it about four miles through the gate before I had to pull over and throw up again. But there were kids, so I kept going.”
“Then you kept going over and over. The Ghost was built.”
I shifted to try to take some of the pressure off my side. “I never planned on doing this for so long.”
“And you kept doing it because of the penance.”
I didn’t answer. She already knew.
Sera sat in the chair with her arms around herself. I had nothing left to say. Everything I’d carried for three years was out in the open, and whatever happened next was up to her.
She was quiet for a long time. Not the processing silence from earlier, when she’d been pulling pieces out of me and assembling them as they came. This was something else. She’d gone somewhere behind her eyes that I couldn’t follow, and whatever she was building in there, she wasn’t sharing it.
I’d expected anger. Disgust. The look of a woman who’d just learned the man she’d slept with might have gotten her sister killed. I’d braced for all of it.
What I hadn’t braced for was this. The quiet. The distance. Sera still in the room but no longer fully in it, some part of her already working on something I couldn’t see.
“You need to rest.” She stood up. The shift from sitting to standing was small but it changed the entire shape of the room. “You lost a lot of blood, and we’re not going anywhere tonight.”
“Sera.”
“Let me check the bandage.”
She crossed to the couch and knelt beside me, and her hands went to the gauze along my ribs.
Clinical. Careful. She peeled back the edge, looked at what was underneath, pressed it back into place.
Her fingers were steady and her face was composed and she was right there, inches from me, and I had never felt further from her.
“It’s holding,” she said. “You need to keep pressure off it.”
“Can we talk about—”
“Not tonight.” She met my eyes. There was no anger in them.
No accusation. Something worse than both of those things, something I couldn’t name, a door that had been open an hour ago and was now closed.
Not locked. Just closed. “I need to think, Travis. I need to think and I can’t do that while you’re bleeding and I’m—” She stopped.
Pressed her lips together. “Not tonight.”
She stood up and went to the kitchen. I heard cabinets opening, the sound of her looking through whatever was stocked here. The safehouse would have basics — canned goods, dry stores, the kind of supplies that kept indefinitely because that was the point of a safehouse.
She came back with a can of soup she’d heated on the stove and handed it to me in a mug. “Eat.”
I took it. She went back and got one for herself and sat down in the chair across the room. Not the couch. The chair. Back where she’d started.
We ate in silence. The soup was unremarkable, and I couldn’t have told anyone what kind it was. Sera held her mug with both hands and stared at a spot on the wall, and I could see her turning everything I’d said over in her head, examining it from angles I couldn’t predict.
“There are beds upstairs,” I said when she’d finished.
“I know. I checked the house while you were out.” She took my empty mug and set it with hers on the side table. “Can you make it up the stairs?”
“Yeah.”
She got under my good arm and helped me up, and we took the stairs slowly. She put me in the first bedroom, and I sat on the edge of the mattress, and she stood in the doorway and looked at me with that same expression I couldn’t read. The closed door behind her eyes.
“Get some sleep,” she said. “I’ll be across the hall.”
Across the hall. Not beside me. Not in the bed with me. Six feet of hallway that meant exactly what the chair across the room had meant.
I lay back on a mattress I’d never slept on and stared at a ceiling I didn’t know. The wound throbbed with every heartbeat. The hives were still burning.
I’d told her the truth. Most of it.
The part I’d held back was worse than anything I’d said tonight. She thought the confession was over. She thought she’d heard the worst of it.
She hadn’t.
I closed my eyes. The safehouse hummed with sounds I didn’t know and couldn’t control.
I’d gotten through tonight. But the thing that would actually break us was still inside me, waiting.