Bonus Epilogue
Travis Hale
Four monitors. Six energy drinks. Two weeks since I’d seen another human face in person.
I was fine with that. Really.
The code scrolling across my main display was a decryption algorithm I’d been building for three weeks.
Warrior Security had a new client—some tech CEO who thought his competitors were hacking his emails.
They probably were. Everyone hacked everyone these days.
The only question was whether you were good enough to catch them.
I was good enough.
My fingers flew across the keyboard, the rhythm as familiar as breathing. This was what I did now. Sat in my bunker and solved other people’s problems from a safe distance. No fieldwork. No assets to run. No partners to trust.
No one to lose.
The thought snagged somewhere it shouldn’t, and I pushed it down. Buried it under lines of code and the hum of cooling fans and the fourth energy drink of the night.
A notification pinged. Hunter, checking in.
Status?
I typed back without slowing my work. Algorithm’s almost done. Should have results by morning.
Get some sleep.
I didn’t bother responding to that. Hunter knew I didn’t sleep.
Not really. Not the way normal people did.
I caught a few hours here and there, usually when my body finally overrode my brain, and I woke up with my face on the keyboard and a string of random characters filling whatever document I’d been working on.
The CIA had trained me to go days without rest. Funny how some lessons stuck long after you stopped wanting them.
I worked for another hour. Two. The compound was silent around me—seven thousand square feet of concrete and steel and surveillance equipment, all of it designed to keep the world out.
I’d built this place myself, spent three years turning a Montana hillside into a fortress.
Pressure sensors at the gate. Thermal imaging on the perimeter.
Motion detectors in every room. Biometric locks.
Electromagnetic field disruptors. Backup systems for the backup systems.
The CIA had taught me paranoia. I’d perfected it.
My hand reached for the energy drink and found empty air. I glanced at the can—drained. The other five on my desk were the same. I should eat something. The refrigerator probably had leftovers from whenever I’d last ordered delivery. Two days ago? Three?
I didn’t get up. Food required leaving this room, and leaving this room meant walking past the door I kept closed.
The one at the end of the hall with the lock I’d never removed, even though I was the only person in this entire compound.
Even though I’d been the only person who’d lived here for two years.
Some doors stayed closed for a reason.
The algorithm finished compiling at 1:43 a.m. I ran the diagnostic, watched it spit out clean results, and felt nothing. Another problem solved. Another client satisfied. Another night of proving I was still useful even if I couldn’t leave my own house.
I pushed back from the desk, and that’s when I noticed my hands were shaking.
Not from the caffeine. I was long past caffeine affecting me. This was something else. The thing that crept up at night when I ran out of distractions. The memories I couldn’t encrypt or delete or bury in a folder I never opened.
Blood on concrete. A face I’d trusted. A bullet that found the wrong target.
Her face. The one I didn’t let myself picture anymore.
I stood abruptly, the chair rolling back and hitting the wall. I needed to move. Needed to do something physical before my brain ate itself alive.
The pool was my best bet. It always had been. I’d swim until my muscles screamed and my lungs burned and there wasn’t room for anything except the next stroke, the next breath.
I grabbed the shorts I kept by the door and headed for the stairs.
The compound was dark, but I didn’t need lights. I knew every inch of this place by feel, by the way the air moved, by the subtle hum of electronics embedded in walls that looked like ordinary drywall. Down one level. Then another. The temperature dropping as I descended into the hillside.
I was halfway to the pool when I stopped.
Something was wrong.
I couldn’t say what. Nothing had triggered—no alarms, no alerts, no red lights flashing on any of the panels I passed. My phone was silent in my pocket. Every system showed green.
But the air felt different. Displaced. Like something had moved through it recently.
Like I wasn’t alone.
I pressed my back against the wall, heart rate spiking, every sense straining. Listened for footsteps. Breathing. Anything.
Nothing.
Just my own paranoia, probably. The same paranoia that kept me up at night and made me install backup systems for backup systems and turned a normal Montana ranch house into a bunker that could survive a siege.
I was alone. I was always alone. That was the whole point.
I forced myself to keep moving. Down the last flight of stairs. Through the hallway that led to the pool level. The air was cooler here, carrying that faint chlorine bite that meant the filtration system was doing its job.
I pushed through the door, already pulling my shirt over my head—
And stopped.
Someone was in my pool.
My body went cold. Then hot. Then cold again, adrenaline slamming through my system so hard my vision tunneled.
Impossible.
The word ricocheted through my skull while I stood frozen in the doorway, shirt halfway over my head like an idiot.
This was fucking impossible. The gate had pressure sensors that could detect a raccoon.
The perimeter had thermal imaging that tracked body heat from two hundred yards out.
Motion detectors covered every square inch of the property.
Biometric locks on every entrance. Electromagnetic field disruptors that scrambled any signal I hadn’t personally authorized.
I’d designed this place to keep out governments. Militaries. The kind of people who’d trained me and then tried to bury what I knew.
And someone was doing the backstroke in my goddamn pool.
A figure cutting through the water with clean, efficient strokes. Dark hair slicked back. Arms pulling, legs kicking, the rhythm steady and unhurried.
Like she belonged there.
Female.
That detail snagged somewhere in my chest. The list of people capable of breaching my system was already impossibly short. Women on that list? I could count them on one hand, and most of them were dead.
One of them by my own hand.
My hand found the weapon I kept mounted inside the doorframe—a Glock 19, because I kept weapons mounted inside every doorframe—and the familiar weight of it finally unlocked my body. I had it aimed center mass before my next heartbeat.
“Get out of the pool. Slowly. Hands where I can see them.”
The swimming stopped.
She surfaced at the shallow end, water streaming down her face, and turned toward me.
The gun nearly slipped from my fingers.
No. No. That face. Those eyes. The way she tilted her head slightly to the left when she was sizing someone up.
It wasn’t possible. I’d verified it myself. Death certificate. Autopsy report. Closed casket funeral I’d watched via satellite from three thousand miles away because I couldn’t—because I was the reason she—
She was dead. She’d been dead for two years.
I’d built this bunker because she was dead.
“Hello, Travis.” Her voice. God, her voice. Low and steady, like she wasn’t standing in my pool with a gun pointed at her chest. Like this was normal. Like she hadn’t just walked out of a grave I’d been visiting in my nightmares every single night.
My mouth opened. Nothing came out.
She moved toward the ladder, pulling herself out of the water with easy grace. She was wearing my clothes—one of my black t-shirts clinging wet to her body, a pair of my boxer briefs. She’d gone through my fucking dresser. Made herself at home in my space like she had every right to be here.
“We need to talk about what really happened in Prague.” She grabbed a towel from the bench—my towel, from my bench—and wrapped it around her shoulders without taking her eyes off me. “And before you decide whether to pull that trigger—you should know I’m not the one you need to be afraid of.”
Her eyes held mine. The same pale gray I’d never been able to forget, no matter how hard I tried.
“They’re coming for both of us.”