Chapter 26
Travis
I’d planned to call. Video, the way I’d done all my Warrior Security meetings, except when I was hiding bruises and said my camera was down.
My face on their screen, everything controlled, everything at a distance I could manage.
But somewhere between picking up the phone and dialing, I’d put it back down. These men had been looking at me through a screen for three years while I lied to their faces. They deserved better than another screen.
Sera had walked me to the garage. She hadn’t tried to come. Hadn’t argued about it or offered to be there for support. She’d just put her hand on my chest and held it there until my heart rate was something she could accept, and then she’d stepped back.
“I’ll be here,” she’d said.
The drive across Garnet Bend took thirty minutes.
I drove by the tiny town—the place I’d called home—all the time on the way to missions, but that was usually in the middle of the night.
I rarely paid attention to its charm, to the old-fashioned buildings surrounded by the beautiful Rocky Mountains.
I didn’t pay much attention to it now, either. I couldn’t.
I drove onto the Resting Warrior Ranch property, hoping that no one was monitoring the cameras right now, that no one would see me.
The Resting Warrior guys would have just as many questions as to why I was out of the house as my teammates would.
By the time I pulled up in front of the Warrior Security office, hives were spreading across my chest, and my hands were trembling against the wheel.
I’d called the meeting an hour ago. Routine, I’d told them.
Something I wanted to run by the team. They’d be in the conference room by now, gathered around the table, the main screen waiting for my face to appear on it the way it always did.
The way it had multiple times a month while I sat in my control room and performed the version of myself they believed in.
The version that never left his house.
I got out of the car and walked to the door, taking one calming breath before opening it.
It didn’t work. I went inside and headed down the hall to the conference room—something I knew because of studying schematics when I helped design the electronic flow of the building, not because I’d been here in person.
Beckett was leaning back in his chair with his feet on the table. Coop was across from him. Hunter sat at the head, scrolling through something on his phone.
The main screen behind Hunter was dark, waiting for my call.
Beckett saw me first, almost tipped his chair over from the shock. It hit the wall behind him as he stood up. “What the fuck.”
Coop jolted, stood up too. Hunter didn’t move, but something shifted in his face that I’d never seen before. Not surprise, exactly. Hunter didn’t do surprise. But close.
“Travis.” Beckett was already coming toward me. “What the fuck are you doing here? Are you okay? Did your house burn down? What happened?”
“Nothing happened. I’m fine.”
“You’re not fine. You’re here.” He stopped about four feet away, his eyes moving over me.
I knew what he was seeing. The hives climbing my neck above my collar.
The sheen of sweat I couldn’t control. The way I was holding myself slightly off-center because the wound along my ribs was ten days healed and still pulled when I stood straight.
“You look like shit,” Beckett said. “And you’re shaking.”
“That’s the agoraphobia.”
“The agoraphobia that keeps you from going outside.” He said it slowly, like he was trying to figure out some puzzle. “Which you went outside to get here.”
“Sit down, Beck.”
“Sit down? You’re standing in our office. You don’t stand in our office. You don’t stand anywhere that isn’t your house.” He looked at Coop, then Hunter, then back at me. “Is that what happened? Your house did burn down, didn’t it?”
“No. I—”
“Is someone dead? Is this a someone-is-dead situation? Because that’s the only reason I can think of that you’d—”
“Nobody’s dead. I need to tell you something, and I’m not doing it through a screen.”
The room changed. I watched it happen. The concern on Beckett’s face reorganized itself into something more guarded. Coop sat back down but his posture was different. Hunter’s hands stayed flat on the table.
“Sit down, Beck,” I said again. “I need you to let me get through this before you respond.”
Beckett didn’t sit. He leaned against the wall with his arms crossed.
“Okay,” he said. “Talk.”
I didn’t sit, either. I stood at the end of the table opposite Hunter because sitting felt like I’d be hiding behind the furniture, and I hadn’t driven here to hide.
“For the past eighteen months, I’ve been running solo tactical operations against Lucian Kindt’s trafficking pipeline.
Yes, the same people that killed Naomi.” I kept my voice level.
Operational. The language I knew how to use.
“I’ve been intercepting courier transports, recovering victims, and disrupting his network across the northern corridor across the state and up into Canada.
Kindt’s organization has a name for whoever’s been doing it. They call the source the Ghost.”
Silence.
“The camera was never broken during our meetings,” I said.
“I kept it off sometimes because I couldn’t let you see my injuries.
The bruise from the server rack was from a man who outweighed me by sixty pounds in a cinderblock building outside Polson.
There were other times, other bruises. I knew if you saw them regularly enough, you’d start asking questions. Easier to blame a broken camera.”
Beckett’s arms tightened across his chest. He didn’t speak.
I told them about the first night. Not the details, not the play-by-play. Just the shape of it. Children on my screens that nobody was coming for. My body fighting me the whole way out the door. Going anyway.
“How many times?” Hunter asked. His voice was the same as it always was. Level, economical. But the question underneath it wasn’t casual.
“I stopped counting individual missions around month six. But… dozens. Across the full northern corridor.”
“Dozens.” Beckett pushed off the wall. “Dozens of times you went out alone, no backup, no comms, no support. While we sat in this room and worried about whether you were eating enough.”
“Yes.”
“While I called you every goddamn week to make sure you were still alive.”
“Yes.”
“And you sat there, and you let me worry. You let me make jokes about the camera and nag you about vegetables, and you never once, not once in eighteen months—”
His voice broke. Not loudly. Just a fracture in the middle of a sentence that he couldn’t close. He turned away from me and put his hand on the back of a chair and gripped it.
The room was quiet.
“Who stitched you up?” Coop. Always quiet. Always asking the questions no one else thought of, sitting forward with his elbows on the table. His voice was calm, but his jaw was set. “You got hurt. I know it had to have been more than just some bruises.”
“Yeah, it was more than bruises a lot of times. Cracked ribs. Knife wounds, gunshot. I stitched myself up mostly over the bathroom sink.”
Coop closed his eyes for a second. When he opened them, he looked at Hunter.
Hunter hadn’t moved. His gaze was fixed on me with an intensity that I’d seen him direct at operational targets and threat assessments and never, in all the years I’d known him, at a member of his own team.
“You used our friendship as cover,” Hunter said. “The agoraphobia, the isolation, the reclusiveness. All of it was real, but you weaponized it. You knew that if you stayed the man who never leaves his house, none of us would question what you were doing inside it.”
“Yes.”
“You lied to every person in this room. For three years.”
“The Ghost started eighteen months ago. But I’ve been monitoring Kindt’s operation since I built the compound. So yes. Three years.”
“Why.” Not a question from Hunter. A demand.
This was the part where the operational language ran out.
“Because I couldn’t stop.” My voice sounded different to my own ears.
Rougher. Stripped of the control I’d been holding since I walked through the door.
“I saw children on my feeds, and I went. And then I went again. And it became the only thing that made the guilt bearable, because every time I walked out that door and my body tried to tear itself apart, it felt like payment. Like I was earning the right to keep breathing.”
“Payment for what?” Beckett had turned back around. His eyes were red, but his voice was steady.
“For Naomi. For things I did and didn’t do before she died. Things I’m not getting into right now, but they’re the reason. The Ghost was penance.”
The word sat in the room. Nobody touched it. Every single one of them had their own personal penance, so they understood.
“You could have died,” Beckett said. “Any of those nights. You could have died alone on some back road, and we would’ve found out when someone discovered your body, and we would’ve spent the rest of our lives trying to figure out what happened because we thought you never left your fucking house.”
“I know.”
“Do you? Because I need to hear you say you understand what that would have done to us.”
“I understand what that would have done to you.”
“Goddamnit.” Beck slammed his hand down on the table. “Do not just repeat my words back to me, Travis.”
“I’m not.” I met his eyes. “I know exactly what it would have done to you. I knew every time I went out. And I went anyway because the alternative was leaving kids in the back of a van, and I couldn’t do that either.”
The quiet stretched.
“Eighteen months of solo ops against a trafficking network.” Coop broke the silence. “No backup, no extraction plan, injuries managed solo. And you’re still here.”
“Yeah. Barely, sometimes. But yeah.”
He nodded once. “You know my history, what I went through with Mia. I’ve been barely sometimes. I know what that looks like from the inside.” He paused. “It’s an ugly place to live.”
Something shifted in the room. Not forgiveness. Something smaller and more fundamental.
Recognition.
These men had carried their own missions, their own damage, their own versions of the thing that wouldn’t let them sleep. They knew what guilt built when you gave it enough time and enough silence.
I could see it in Coop’s face. In the way Beckett’s anger was cracking along fault lines that ran deeper than betrayal. Even in Hunter’s stillness, which had changed from assessment to something I didn’t have a name for.
“There’s more,” I said.
“Of course there is,” Beckett muttered.
“Naomi’s sister, Sera. She’s at my house. She’s been there for weeks. She’s an FBI contractor and a data analyst. She built a predictive model on Kindt’s pipeline that’s better than anything I could have done alone. She’s also the reason I’m standing here instead of dead on a highway.”
I let that settle.
“She found something. A gap in Kindt’s route structure. She’s identified the operational center of his entire network.”
Hunter’s fingers pressed into the table surface. The first physical reaction I’d seen from him.
“If she’s right, and I believe she is, taking that location doesn’t just disrupt Kindt. It ends him. The entire pipeline collapses.”
“How big is the site?” Hunter asked. Tactical. Precise. The question of a man already running operational math in his head.
“We don’t have full confirmation yet. Forty-seven acres, shell company ownership, power consumption consistent with a commercial facility running around the clock.”
“That’s not a two-person job,” Coop said.
“No. It’s not.”
I looked at the three of them. Beckett back in his chair with red eyes and a jaw like concrete. Coop leaning forward with his elbows on the table. Hunter at the head, hands flat, already calculating.
“I can’t do this alone,” I said. “I’ve been trying to do everything alone for three years and it almost killed me, and it would have left Kindt’s operation standing. I need help. I need you guys.”
Nobody spoke right away. I hadn’t expected them to.
This wasn’t a movie where the team rallies on cue, and someone delivers a line about having each other’s backs.
This was three men processing the fact that their friend and teammate had been living a double life and was now asking them to step into the middle of it.
Hunter looked at Beckett. Beckett looked at the table. Coop looked at me. For a moment I thought they were going to refuse. I couldn’t blame them if they did. They all had women they loved now, and way too much to haphazardly risk.
But damn it, so did I.
Shit. I loved Sera.
I should’ve felt shocked or nervous at the realization, but I didn’t. There was no drama around it. It just was.
“We’ll need full access to your operational data,” Hunter said. “Everything. The intercepts, the route maps, Sera’s model. All of it.”
My chest unlocked. Just slightly. Just enough to take a breath that didn’t hurt.
“How soon can you have it ready?” Hunter asked.
“It’s ready now. It’s been ready.”
Beckett’s chair scraped against the floor as he stood back up. He walked to where I was standing at the end of the table and stopped about two feet away. Close enough that I could see the anger still sitting right behind his eyes, tangled up with something else that was harder to look at.
“I’m furious with you,” he said. “I want you to know that.”
“I know.”
“And if you ever lie to me again, about anything, I will come to that compound and I will physically drag your ass outside and leave you in the parking lot of Deja Brew until you learn your lesson.”
“Understood.”
“And I need you to eat an actual meal in front of me sometime in the next week so I can confirm with my own eyes that you remember how food works.”
I almost barked out a laugh. “I can do that. I actually like cooking.”
He looked at me for another long second. Then he pulled me into a hug that hit my healing ribs, and I didn’t care. I put my arms around him and held on, and for a few seconds neither of us said anything because there was nothing left to say that mattered more than this.
“Okay,” he said roughly. “Let’s go get this son of a bitch.”