Chapter 5 #2
“I know it’s not. Everybody has limitations. You manage yours. That’s what’s important.”
She looked at me. A beat where something shifted behind her eyes, and then she turned back to her tea.
I wanted her out of my house. Not in the morning. Now. Back in her car, back on the highway, back to whatever life she’d built in Spokane where she was somebody else’s problem and my compound was mine again.
But it was three in the morning, and she’d driven hours to get here, and I wasn’t the kind of man who put a woman on the road in the dark, no matter how badly I needed her gone. The guest room was the compromise. Not hospitality. Containment.
“Look, it’s good to see you and everything. But I’ve got to get to bed. I can’t keep my eyes open,” I said. “Whatever you came here to tell me, you deserve me being awake for it. There’s a guest room down the hall. Get your bag from your car, and we’ll get you settled.”
“Okay.”
I held the door open for her as she ran out to her car. I thought about shutting the door. I could have Maude change the code before Sera even made it around the house. I could pretend like she’d never been here. She’d have no choice but to leave eventually.
I was tempted. I truly was. But it was a shit thing to do. This was Sera for God’s sake.
And her smile was so big as she came back in the house that I hated myself for even considering locking her out.
I led her down the hallway toward the guest room. Stopped at the first door on the right and opened it.
Shit. That was the linen closet. Sheets and towels and nothing else. I closed it and tried the next one, looking like a bumfuck idiot.
“Sorry. I don’t use this part of the house much.”
The second door was the guest room. A bed with a plain comforter. A nightstand with nothing on it. A window with blinds drawn. It looked like a room in a building that had never been occupied, which was essentially what it was.
“I don’t have guest towels in the bathroom. I’m sorry. Let me get some.”
“This is fine. Travis, this is more than fine. I’m okay. I’m the one who showed up unannounced and basically broke into your house.”
I found clean towels in the linen closet, grabbed a couple. Set them on the foot of the bed.
This was the best I could do. I was running out of time. “We’ll talk in the morning.”
“Thank you, Travis.” She stared up at me, all big eyes and gentleness. The way she’d always been. Soft. Kind. Beautiful.
I made myself look away.
“Get some sleep.”
She nodded. I stepped out of the room and closed the door.
I stood in the hallway of my own house and couldn’t locate a single thing that felt like it was where it belonged.
I made it downstairs. Through the control room door, which I locked behind me, and the second the lock engaged I stopped performing.
My hand found the edge of the desk, and I bent over it with my full weight on my arms and stopped holding anything together.
The mission. The drive. The adrenaline. Twenty minutes of performing functionally for a woman in my kitchen.
All of it landed at once, a full-system crash that left me bent over the desk with my forehead almost touching the surface.
“Maude, next time my dead girlfriend’s sister breaks into my house and goes swimming in my pool, you put that at the top of the list of things to tell me. Not item fourteen. Not a notification I’ll get to when it suits me. The top.”
“I tried to tell you. Four times.”
“Try harder.”
“I told you it probably shouldn’t wait. You said, and I’m quoting: Is it a threat? I said it was not technically a threat. You said, and I’m quoting again: Then it waits. You then told me to forget I mentioned it, and I said—”
I could not deal with her shit right now. Especially since she was right.
I closed my eyes. “Lock down the lower level. Control room, gear storage, med bay, everything past the stairwell door. Authorization required for access. My biometric only.”
“Done. Should I also lock the pool?”
“No. Leave the pool.” I paused. “Sera is in the guest room. Upper level. Don’t monitor her unless she comes out of the room for anything other than to use the bathroom or grab something from the kitchen.”
There were cameras in every room of this house. The last thing I needed was for Maude to provide me a feed of Sera sleeping.
“I wasn’t going to.”
“You were thinking about it.”
“I was thinking about telling you that your blood pressure is alarming, but I’ve learned that sharing medical data with you is roughly as productive as sharing it with the desk.”
I didn’t answer. I was already moving toward the east corridor.
I pulled the Glock from my waistband and returned it to its proper location outside the pool door.
The sweatshirt came off next and I dropped it on the floor, which I never did, and I didn’t care.
The tape was next. I peeled it off standing in the doorway and breathed through the white-hot objection my ribs filed on the matter.
The pool was the same as it always was. Warm water. Low blue light. Silence. I lowered myself in and the heat found every damaged place, and I let my head fall back against the edge and waited for the thing that always came.
The reset. The unclenching, layer by layer, my system stepping back from the edge.
It started. My hands went still. My jaw released. The ribs found a frequency of pain I could handle.
The water was the same temperature it always was, and the light was the same blue, and the silence was the same silence.
But none of it felt the same.
She’d been in here an hour ago. I could feel that knowledge sitting in the pool with me, taking up space it had no right to. The image of her climbing out, water running off her shoulders, the towel pressed against skin that was flushed from the heat.
I told myself it was the mission. The adrenaline crash. The sensory system misfiring the way it did when I’d pushed too hard, crossing wires, registering signals that didn’t belong.
That was all this was. Wires crossing. Residual static. The physiological aftermath of a night that had gone from bad to worse to Sera Bolland in my kitchen holding a cup of chamomile tea that I didn’t know why I owned.
I sank lower until the water covered my shoulders, my neck. Let it hold the weight.
The pool had always brought me back to center.
Tonight, I couldn’t find it.