Chapter 9
Sera
We didn’t talk.
Five hours of driving, and I held every question I had because Travis was barely keeping himself together. His hands hadn’t stopped trembling since Spokane. His breathing caught every few minutes, a small tight sound he probably thought the road noise covered.
I heard it. I heard everything in that silence, and I gave him the only thing I could, which was quiet.
The gate at his house opened without him touching anything. We pulled through, and the change in Travis was immediate. His shoulders eased. His grip loosened.
The compound wasn’t just where he lived. It was the place where his body remembered how to stand down.
He parked, sat with his eyes closed for a moment, and got out. I followed him to the kitchen. Same chairs, same table. Had it really just been earlier this morning that I’d left here?
The main question that had been burning inside me for hundreds of miles bubbled over. “How did you know I was in trouble?”
He’d been reaching for the coffee maker to make coffee. His hand stopped. The tremor was still there, faint, visible only because I was looking for it. “Does it matter?”
In the greater scheme of things, probably not. I was alive; that was most important thing.
But on the other hand, I knew my brain. I wasn’t going to be able to let this go. So yes, it mattered.
“You didn’t just decide you wanted to apologize for being an asshole and beat me back home. Yes, it matters.”
He rubbed his face. “I was an asshole. I’m sorry.”
While I appreciated the apology, it wasn’t enough. “How did you know?”
“You told me you’d accessed Kindt’s communication node from your FBI terminal.
No proxy, no cover, your contractor credentials.
That’s a neon sign, Sera. Anyone monitoring that node would have seen the access and traced it back within hours.
I realized that reporting it to your supervisor might not be enough to keep you safe. ”
He rubbed the back of his neck. The gesture was so human, so unlike the operational precision I’d watched him move with all day, that it almost distracted me from the fact that he was dancing around the actual question.
I narrowed my eyes and studied him. “But it was more than that. You knew they were going to be at my apartment.”
“When I was at the CIA, I had access to certain communication channels related to Kindt’s network.
Monitoring tools. After I left, I didn’t fully shut all of them down.
It wasn’t operational access. Just passive monitoring.
Background noise I kept running because I couldn’t make myself turn it off. ”
“Okay.” That was understandable given that Kindt’s network had cost him the woman he loved.
“After you left, I ran your name against the chatter. On a hunch. Because you’d told me exactly how exposed you were, and I wanted to make sure it was nothing.” He paused. “It wasn’t nothing.”
“What did you find?”
“Your name. Your address. Operational language that meant they weren’t coming to talk.”
“And you drove to Spokane.”
“I tried calling you first. Multiple times.”
“I had my phone off.”
“I noticed. Assumed it was because of my aforementioned assholeness.”
Despite his attempt at humor, the silence between us was different from the one in the car.
This one had weight. Pressure. He was looking at me the way he’d looked at me across the breakfast table that morning, steady and direct, and I was turning every piece of what he’d just told me, testing the joints.
Residual CIA access. Passive monitoring. A hunch.
The architecture held if I didn’t lean on it too hard. Former CIA operative keeps old monitoring tools running out of obsession with the network that killed his partner. Sees a threat. Acts on it.
Plausible.
But passive monitoring didn’t produce real-time tactical intelligence.
A hunch didn’t turn into a five-hour drive through agoraphobic hell.
And the man who’d pulled me into that stairwell and run me through alleys and retrieved his car from a hot zone hadn’t moved like someone whose last field experience was four years in the rearview.
But pushing harder meant pushing him away.
And standing in Travis Hale’s kitchen, close enough to him to see the green of his eyes and the bruise on his jaw—another event still not explained—and the way his hands went still when he was choosing his words, I felt the same thing I’d felt nearly the entire time he’d dated my sister: wanting to get closer, but knowing I couldn’t.
He wasn’t mine. He was Naomi’s. He’d been hers when she was alive. He was hers even though she was dead. The code on his gate and door proved it.
But I still couldn’t help not wanting to push him away. So I let it go.
“You got lucky,” I said.
Something shifted behind his eyes. Relief, maybe. Or recognition that I was giving him a pass and we both knew it.
“I got lucky.”
“Okay.” I backed up and leaned against the counter, arms around my waist. “So what now?”
The relief disappeared. His expression hardened into something operational, the shift so clean it was like watching a door close.
“You can’t go back to Spokane. Your apartment’s burned.
They have your name, your face, your address.
Until we build something strong enough to force a response from the FBI or another agency, you’re a target anywhere that isn’t here. ”
The words landed one at a time. Each one stripped something away. My apartment. My cubicle. The green badge on its lanyard. The commute I could drive blind. The routine I’d built to hold myself upright.
I had spent three years constructing a life that was small and controlled and entirely my own. Not impressive. Not the life Naomi would have built. But it was mine.
And now it was gone, all of it, collapsed in the span of a morning because I’d poked a hornet’s nest from an FBI terminal without covering my tracks.
The tightness in my chest had nothing to do with my lungs.
“How long?”
“As long as it takes.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the only one I have. Your model is good, Sera. Better than good. Combined with the access I have to Kindt’s communications, we can build something undeniable. But it won’t happen in a week.”
I looked at him standing across the kitchen. He looked back.
It had been three years since the funeral. Three years since I’d stood ten feet from him in a black dress and couldn’t look at him because looking would have told everyone in that room how I felt.
And now I was moving into his house for an indefinite stay, would be sleeping down the hall from him, sharing meals at this table, breathing the same recycled air in a house he’d sealed with my sister’s name.
The universe had a vicious sense of humor.
“Fine,” I said. “Tell me what you need from me and let’s get started. The sooner we get this done, the sooner we’re out of each other’s lives.”
I managed to get those words out as if that was what I really wanted. Yay me.
I called Pratt from a secure line Travis set up. Told him I was taking personal leave due to a family emergency and needed to work remotely on my assigned cases. My boss agreed with the efficiency of a man relieved not to have to deal with me on a daily basis for a while.
Next, I contacted my mother and told her I had decided to take a mini vacation and might be out of range more than not, and I’d check in when I could. She didn’t even offer a reaction to the abrupt departure or ask questions.
Not wanted there. Not really wanted here. Story of my life.
“If I’m going to be here for a while,” I said, “can I see the rest of the house?”
Travis studied me for a moment. Then he tilted his head toward the hallway. “Sure.”
We walked toward the stairwell door at the end of the hall, the one I’d used to find the pool last night.
“As you’ve probably figured out, I use the top portion of the house mainly for show. It was the original structure, and I had the underground portion built before I moved in to… meet my needs.”
We walked down the stairs. The corridor ran the full length of the property. Smooth concrete floors. Ceiling-mounted lighting on a dimmer system that Travis adjusted as we walked, and non-residential fixtures. They were the flat-panel LEDs I’d seen in the secure rooms at the Spokane field office.
“How far does this underground area go?”
“About double the full footprint of the house above. About seven thousand square feet of usable space.”
Seven thousand square feet. Underground. Engineered with the kind of infrastructure that didn’t come from a hardware store. Concrete and steel and surveillance equipment.
“This must have cost a lot of money.”
He shrugged. “I’ve made some good investments over the years thanks to my research skills.”
The gym was first. Organized, purposeful. A heavy bag hung from a ceiling mount with the leather worn smooth at sternum height, and the floor mats showed compression patterns from months of the same movements in the same positions. He used this room. Regularly and seriously.
“You built all of this yourself?”
“Designed it. Contracted the excavation and structural work through three different companies, none of which knew what the others were doing. Finished the interior myself.”
“That’s incredibly paranoid.”
Another shrug. “Paranoia is my baseline. I don’t fight it anymore.”
He started walking again. “Maude, what’s the current humidity in this corridor?”
“Sixty-one point three percent.” I blinked as a voice spoke from a speaker I couldn’t locate. Crisp, immediate, with an inflection that sounded less like a computer and more like a woman who’d been interrupted. “Which is within acceptable range, before you ask.”
I looked at Travis with eyebrows raised. “Someone I should know about?”
“This is Maude. She runs the compound.”
“I run everything,” Maude corrected. “The compound is the part he acknowledges.”