Chapter 29
Travis
The four-year-old had both fists locked in Beckett’s shirt and would not let go.
The other five children were huddled against the far wall of the room, some sobbing, some trembling, their faces streaked and hollow in the dim light.
But the smallest one, a girl with dark hair matted against her forehead, had latched on to Beckett the moment he’d crouched beside her and hadn’t loosened her grip since.
Her fingers were white-knuckled in the fabric over his chest, her face buried against his shoulder, her whole body pressed into him as though she could disappear inside the safety of him if she just held on hard enough.
Beckett had his arm wrapped around her, his jaw set so hard I could see the muscle jumping from across the room.
He’d seen things in his career. We all had.
But the strength in those tiny hands, the desperation in the way she clung to the first person who’d knelt down to her level, said everything about what these children had been living through.
I was on comms with Hunter and Coop, coordinating the ground floor sweep while keeping my voice low enough not to frighten the children further. Hunter had cleared the east corridor. Coop was holding the south entrance. Lachlan and the perimeter team were still keeping the outside secure.
The operation was on schedule. Clean. Controlled. Everything running the way we’d planned it.
Then Sera’s voice came through my earpiece, and the floor dropped out from under me.
“Travis. Anyone. This is Sera.”
She was on the encrypted channel. The channel that required proximity to the relay node the team carried inside this building. She was supposed to be a mile away in the equipment shed, listening. Receiving only. She could not transmit from that distance.
Which meant she wasn’t at that distance anymore.
“The FBI has located the hub. They are staging a tactical operation eight miles southeast. You have less than thirty minutes before they—”
Scuffling. Her voice again, sharper, desperate. “Travis, did you hear me? The FBI is on their way. You have to—”
Something hard and sudden. A grunt of pain that wasn’t voluntary.
Silence.
The channel went dead.
I stood in that room with six children, and Beckett’s eyes found mine. The world tore open. They had Sera. Suddenly there wasn’t enough air. I could feel the hives breaking out all over my body, and it had nothing to do with agoraphobia.
I forced it down. I forced all of it down because six children were watching me, and Beckett was holding the smallest one and there was no room in this moment for my body to betray me.
Sera was somewhere on this property—and Kindt’s men had her. Beckett and I were surrounded by a half dozen terrified children. And the FBI was thirty minutes out.
Fuck.
“You need to go find her.” Beckett’s voice was steady, but his eyes had changed.
“I can’t leave you with them.”
“We can make it. Get the rest of the team up here.”
I keyed the channel. “Hunter, Coop, I need you on the second floor with these kids. I’m going after Sera. Lachlan, pull your perimeter team to the exits to receive. We have less than thirty minutes.”
Hunter’s response was immediate. “Copy. On our way up.”
“Copy,” Lachlan said. “Moving now.”
Beckett’s eyes were already on me. “Go. Now.”
I looked at him one more time. The four-year-old’s face was pressed against his shoulder. The other five children watched us, huddled together.
Beckett met my eyes over the dark hair of the child in his arms. He nodded once.
I went.
I was halfway down the stairwell when the explosion hit.
The building shuddered, a deep concussive force I felt in my teeth and my chest before I heard it.
Then heat, rolling up from below, and the unmistakable chemical smell of accelerant.
Someone had set this building to burn deliberately, and the placement had been planned to spread fast.
Kindt. Destroying his own operation rather than let it be taken.
Above me, the children screamed. I stopped. Every instinct I had told me to go back up those stairs. That’s what Sera would want.
But goddamnit, I would not survive if Sera didn’t. Ghost, no Ghost, I knew that for a fact.
“Travis, keep moving.” Beckett’s voice on comms, hard and certain. “I have them.”
“We’re on the second floor,” Hunter said. “We can see Beckett and his little posse. Go get Sera.”
I stood on that stairwell for one second with the building shaking around me and smoke starting to curl up from below and the sound of a four-year-old’s scream still hanging in the air above my head. My team was up there. The children were up there.
And Sera was out there. In Kindt’s hands.
I kept going.
The first floor was already thick with smoke. The accelerant had been placed in multiple locations, a planned destruction meant to erase everything Kindt had built here before anyone could catalog it. Walls, records, evidence.
Children, if they’d still been locked in that room.
I moved through the smoke with my weapon up and my shirt pulled over my mouth, navigating by the layout I’d memorized from satellite imagery and recon. The nearest exterior door was forty meters ahead.
Hunter’s voice cut through the smoke on comms. “The kids are out. We’re—”
A figure came out of the smoke on my left.
He was swinging before I saw him clearly, a metal baton that caught my left forearm and knocked my gun to the ground and my comms unit off my vest. I closed the distance before he could swing again, drove the heel of my hand into his nose, grabbed the back of his head, and put him into the wall.
He went down, and I didn’t wait to see if he stayed.
I picked up my weapon from where the impact had knocked it loose and reached for my comms. The earpiece gave a burst of distorted static and went silent. I pulled it out. The housing was cracked, internal components crushed from the baton strike.
I was on my own. But at least the kids and the team were out safe.
The smoke was thickening. The fire was spreading through the walls now, eating through drywall and insulation, and the heat was building toward something I could feel pressing against my skin. I had minutes before this floor became unnavigable.
I moved toward the west corridor, the direction Kindt would go if he was heading for the access road vehicles. The smoke thinned slightly as I turned the corner, the fire not yet reaching this section of the building, and I saw them.
Kindt was dragging Sera down the corridor toward a fire exit at the far end. He had one arm locked around her upper body and a handgun pressed against her temple. Her feet were barely touching the ground. Blood ran from a gash above her left ear, dark against her skin.
She was conscious. Barely. Her eyes were open but unfocused, her body limp in his grip. Whatever had hit her had hit hard.
I stepped into the corridor, weapon raised. Sightline clear to Kindt’s position but no clean angle. Sera’s body shielded his. The gun at her temple made every trajectory lethal to her.
“Stop.”
Kindt stopped. His men stopped. The fire crackled behind me, throwing shifting orange light down the corridor. Smoke curled along the ceiling above all of us.
He pulled Sera tighter and pressed the gun harder into her temple. She made a sound. Small. Involuntary.
“Put your weapon down,” Kindt said.
His voice landed differently in person than it had through the intercepted video. On a screen, the calm had been chilling. Here, in a burning corridor with a gun to the head of the woman I loved, it was something closer to obscene.
“Let her go,” I said.
“I don’t think I will.” He adjusted his grip on Sera, casual and proprietary, the way a man handles property. “Doesn’t seem like that’s in my best interest, does it?”
My weapon was up. My arms were steady. I had no shot.
Sera was in the way, and his gun was against her skull, and if I fired and missed by a fraction of an inch, she was dead.
If I didn’t fire and he decided she was expendable, she was dead.
If I waited for a better angle, his men would shoot me first.
Every scenario I ran ended with her body on the ground.
The fire was getting closer. I could feel the heat building behind me, the smoke thickening at the ceiling, pushing lower. The building groaned. We were all running out of time.
Sera’s eyes found mine through the haze. She was terrified, hurt, and there was nothing I could do to stop it.
But maybe there was.
“I’m the Ghost.”
The words came out steady. Calm. The most important words I’d ever spoken, delivered with a control I did not feel.
Kindt’s expression shifted. Subtle, but I caught it. Interest.
“Yep.” I forced myself to pop the P like it wasn’t taking every bit of my control not to break down. “Every disrupted transport for the past eighteen months? That was me. Every intercepted courier. Every route that went dark. Every child your people lost. Me. One person. Working alone.”
His grip on Sera hadn’t loosened, but his focus had shifted. He was recalculating. I could see it happening behind his glasses, the operational math that had built his pipeline being applied to this new variable.
“The Ghost.” He said it like he was reading a line item on a balance sheet. “Do you have any idea what you’ve cost my organization in replacement inventory alone?”
“I could probably give you a rough estimate. Got a calculator I could borrow?”
His eyes narrowed at my flippancy. Good. Maybe he would make a mistake.
“That’s right. I’m the one who’s been tearing your operation apart, one transport at a time. You’ve been looking for me, haven’t you? But I’ve always kept one step ahead.”
“Until right now when it’s your one weapon versus me and three men. Why are you admitting you’re the Ghost?” Something shifted in his voice. Not surprise. Curiosity. The way a man examines a piece of equipment that performed beyond its specifications.
“Because I want you to let the woman go. Take me instead.”