Travis (Warrior Security #4)

Chapter 1

Travis Hale

I’d been watching both. The cat had commitment issues. Kept approaching the dumpster, losing its nerve, circling back. I respected the strategy even if the execution was flawed.

“Travis.” Maude’s voice cut through the silence, crisp and faintly disapproving.

The voice she used when she’d decided I was being inefficient.

“Your heart rate has been elevated for forty-seven minutes. You haven’t consumed anything in six hours.

Shall I add basic self-preservation to your task queue, or would you prefer to continue ignoring it? ”

“I’m busy.”

“You’re staring at a cat.”

I reached for the energy drink without looking. Found it by feel. Same spot, always the same spot, two inches right of the second keyboard. Half-empty. Warm. I drank it anyway and it tasted like regret and artificial watermelon, which was roughly what I deserved.

“That’s your fourth today,” Maude said.

“Are you counting my drinks now?”

“Someone has to. You certainly aren’t counting your meals.”

The control room was underground, carved into the hillside beneath what looked, from the road, like a forgettable ranch house with peeling paint and a sagging porch. I’d spent three days getting the exterior paint to peel in a convincing pattern.

Deliberately neglected. Aggressively uninteresting. The kind of place people drove past and immediately forgot.

But down here was different. A hidden fortress that I’d spent three years designing the internal structure for. Cameras in every room, motion detectors in all the hallways, biometric locks on doors, electromagnetic field disruptors.

Then there was the control room, where I spent most of my time.

Six monitors across the main wall. Two more on the secondary desk.

Server racks humming behind a glass partition.

Temperature held at sixty-eight degrees.

Lighting at forty percent because anything brighter made my skin crawl after a few hours.

Everything where it belonged. Everything accounted for.

The only thing in my life that was.

“Incoming call,” Maude announced. “Beckett. Audio.”

I glanced at the clock on the center screen.

9:47 p.m. Beckett Sinclair was on a job tonight—surveillance for a Warrior Security client, a corporate whistleblower who’d been getting death threats.

Babysitting work, but the kind that paid well and kept Beckett out of trouble, which was a full-time job in itself.

I tapped the comm. “Yeah.”

“I’m so pissed at Aiden right now. I’m stuck out here on surveillance, and he’s off on international duty in Scotland. That is completely unfair.”

I rolled my eyes. “If I recall, you turned down that assignment because you didn’t want to be away from Audra for weeks at a time.”

“Yeah, but I’m losing my mind out here, Trav.

This guy I’m surveilling has been watching Netflix for two hours straight.

I can see the glow through his curtains.

Pretty sure he’s on season three of something with subtitles because he hasn’t moved.

Not even for a bathroom break. The man has a bladder like a camel. ”

“Riveting.”

“It is the opposite of riveting. It is the anti-rivet. I need you to pull the camera feed from the north side of his building. Exterior, facing the parking garage. Mine keeps cutting to static every few minutes.”

I pulled it up on monitor four. Took about ten seconds. “You’re up. Northwest corner, second level. Your angle’s better from this one anyway.”

“Beautiful. Thank you. See, this is why you’re my favorite hermit.” He paused. “You doing okay? You sound a little off.”

“I sound the same as always.”

“Exactly. You always sound off. But tonight you sound off-er.”

“Off-er is not a word.”

“More off. Increasingly off. I have a degree in criminal justice, not English. Are you getting sick? Because you have that voice. The voice where you’re trying to sound normal and it’s making you sound less normal.”

That’s because I was fucking talking through my teeth. My left side was taped from hip to armpit—ribs bruised from last Tuesday that lit up every time I reached above shoulder height. Like right now, when I’d stretched for the energy drink. I let the breath out carefully, where he couldn’t hear it.

“I’m fine. Your feed’s live.”

“Uh-huh.” The particular brand of skepticism that only a decade of friendship could produce. “Hey, let me switch to video real quick. I want to show you something on the south side. There’s been a car sitting in the same spot for—”

“Can’t. My camera’s down.” Because I hadn’t turned on the on switch, but still.

“Are you fucking serious? It’s been—”

“Three months. I know. It’s a driver issue.” And also that I refused to turn it on. If I turned it on there would be all sorts of questions from my friends all the damn time.

Why the fuck do you have another black eye? Why are you holding yourself like your shoulder’s out of socket? Is your lip split or did you decide to start wearing lipstick?

“It’s a webcam, Travis. You’re a fucking tech guru. My thirteen-year-old niece could fix it.”

“Your thirteen-year-old niece also got locked out of her own TikTok account twice, so maybe she’s not the technological benchmark you think she is.”

He laughed. I almost smiled. Almost.

On the second monitor, the one Beckett would never see, I had a topographic map pulled up.

A stretch of rural road outside Polson, about ninety miles north.

A cluster of buildings I’d been watching for six days.

Maude had flagged movement there this morning.

A van registered to a shell company that connected, through four layers of paperwork, to people I knew well.

Not personally. Never personally. But I’d been studying their operation for three years, and I knew their patterns the way I knew the layout of this room—every route, every rotation, every vulnerability.

I minimized the map as Beckett kept talking and picked up the tablet I kept off network. Pulled up a gear checklist. Started running through it while his voice filled the room.

“So, Hunter’s doing the team dinner next week. At Resting Warrior. Lark’s in charge this month and has been planning the menu for three days already. Last I heard, she was brining something. I don’t know what brining means but she was very intense about it.”

“Good for Lark.”

“You should come.”

“No.”

“It’s been three months since any of us have seen you at all, Trav. Coop’s convinced you’ve been replaced by a very convincing chatbot.”

“Tell Coop my personality has always been indistinguishable from a chatbot. He just never noticed.”

“See, that’s funny. That’s a funny thing you just said. You could say funny things in person, at dinner, around other humans. It’s a concept.”

I set the tablet face-down on the desk. “I appreciate the invitation. I’m not coming. You know I’m not coming.”

I never did. In three years of living in Garnet Bend, Montana, home of Resting Warrior Ranch and Warrior Security, I had not once attended the “family” dinners.

I’d never strolled down the street and had coffee at Deja Brew.

I’d never gone over to Pawsitive Connections to let Al Pacachino spit aggressively at me.

I had no idea why anybody would do the last even if they went outside like normal people.

The pause that followed was the Beckett pause. The one that meant he was deciding how hard to push. I waited, because there was no rushing this part. He’d either let it go or he wouldn’t, and nothing I said would determine which way it went.

“When’s the last time you got outside?”

Evidently not letting it go today.

When did I get outside? Every six to twelve days, depending on the intel. So, last Tuesday. The time before that, nine days earlier. Before that, a three-week stretch that had almost killed a girl because I waited too long to move.

“I don’t keep track,” I said. “But I’m pretty sure it was 1997.”

“Okay.” He let out a breath. “Okay, Trav. If you don’t want to go outside, that’s fine. We get it, man. Just—you know the door swings both ways, right? We can come to you. Bring the brined whatever-it-is to the compound. Hunter’s idea, not mine, before you think I’m getting sentimental.”

Hunter Everett, our Warrior Security boss, was the least sentimental man either of us had ever met except for when it came to his wife Jada.

“It was absolutely your idea.”

“Of course it was absolutely my idea. Is that a yes?”

“It’s an I’ll think about it.”

“That’s a no.”

“Goodnight, Beck.”

“Eat something. Something that didn’t come in a can or have a shelf life longer than your last relationship.”

“Goodbye.”

“Something with a vegetable in it, Travis. One vegetable. I’m setting the bar so low it’s underground.”

“The bar is right where I live. I’ll see what I can do.”

He laughed again. Warmer this time. “Night, Trav.”

The connection dropped.

The control room went quiet. Just the servers and the soft, cycling rhythm of Maude running through her feeds. The rest stop parking lot. The highway. The cluster of buildings outside Polson where a van sat in a gravel lot and the thermal signatures inside hadn’t moved in forty minutes.

I didn’t stand up right away.

This was the part no one saw. The gap between the man on the phone and the man who was about to walk out the door. In between those two people was a space I didn’t have a name for—a kind of silence that was louder than anything Beckett or Maude or the servers could produce.

Beckett thought I was dying slowly in this house. Rotting in place. He pictured me sitting in front of my screens twenty hours a day, eating canned soup and slowly losing whatever social skills I’d had to begin with. Everybody who knew me thought of me that way.

They weren’t entirely wrong.

But they didn’t know about the other part. The part where the rotting stopped and something worse started.