Chapter 23
Sera
Four days back at the compound, and the truth hadn't broken us.
I kept expecting it to. Every morning I woke beside him, I'd lie there for a few seconds, waiting for the weight to settle back in. The guilt. The shame.
But they hadn't. If anything, the honesty had stripped something away that had been standing between us since I'd arrived. Some invisible barrier that neither of us had known how to name until we'd torn it down.
Travis had seen a doctor. A contact of his own who made house calls and didn't ask questions.
The bullet graze along his ribs had been cleaned, properly sutured, and wrapped with the kind of materials that came from someone who knew what they were doing rather than from a woman with shaking hands and a first aid kit in a Missoula safehouse.
He was on two weeks minimum of restricted activity. No missions. No heavy training. He’d given no arguments about it, either, which told me more about how badly he'd scared himself than any wound assessment could.
He’d also pointed out that lovemaking hadn’t been on the restricted list. I probably could’ve argued that he hadn’t actually asked about that specifically, but I wasn’t a complete idiot.
So, no sexual gymnastics, but definitely lots of slow, lengthy lovemaking sessions that had left us both unable to move. Nothing to do with wounds.
When we weren’t in bed, we were in the control room. Travis had given me full access to his systems. Not the partitioned view he'd engineered when I first arrived, with its expertly carved gaps and strategic blind spots.
Everything. Every feed, every intercept log, every operational archive. No filters. No walls carved into the information to keep me from seeing what he didn't want me to see.
We'd work until one of us got hungry, and then we'd cook together, bumping elbows at the counter while he showed me how to deglaze a pan and I showed him how to make the cornbread my grandmother had taught me.
"You're stirring too fast," he said one evening while I attacked a pot of risotto with more enthusiasm than technique. "It's not a race. The rice will tell you when it's ready."
"The rice is not speaking to me."
"That's because you're not listening." He put his hand over mine on the spoon and slowed the motion, and I forgot about the risotto entirely.
I caught myself memorizing things. The way he held his coffee mug with both hands in the morning, fingers laced around it like he was keeping it safe rather than warming his hands.
The specific angle of his head when he was reading data he disagreed with.
The way he'd reach across my workstation to point at something on my screen and leave his arm there a beat too long, close enough that I could feel the heat of his skin without actual contact.
I cataloged all of it. Filed it away in some greedy internal archive I couldn't stop building. As if I needed proof this had happened, in case I woke up one morning and it turned out I'd invented the whole thing.
"His resting heart rate has improved by nine beats per minute since you returned from Missoula," Maude announced on the third morning, unprompted. "I have charted this against every variable I can identify, and the only new input is you. Draw your own conclusions. I've drawn mine."
"Maude," Travis said.
"I'm also noting that he slept six consecutive hours last night. That hasn't happened since I began monitoring. I want that on the record."
He just rolled his eyes, but Maude wasn't wrong. He was sleeping better, eating more, spending less time staring at his screens in the dark.
Even the kittens seemed to register the shift.
The gray one had claimed Travis's lap during evening work sessions with a possessiveness that bordered on territorial, and he let it stay there while he worked, one hand on the keyboard and the other absently scratching behind its ears.
The white one had figured out how to launch from the floor to the kitchen counter in a single bound.
The black one had staked out the warm vent grate near the control room door and refused to share it with anyone.
This was what I'd wanted. All of it. The access, the partnership, the quiet mornings and the shared meals and the man beside me who had stopped performing normal because he no longer needed to.
I was at my workstation running a corridor analysis when my laptop pinged with an incoming request. Not the compound systems. My FBI laptop, the one I kept charged and connected for the remote contract work that justified my continued employment with the Bureau.
Pratt, my boss, wanted a video call.
I stared at the notification. Pratt didn't do video calls, not with me.
He barely did phone calls. Even when I'd been in the office, our interactions had been brief.
Three-minute stops at my cubicle where he'd confirm he'd received my analysis and walk away before I could ask if he'd actually read it.
Since I'd been working remotely, we'd downgraded to emails with attachments and the occasional phone call that lasted even less than three minutes.
The request gave no subject line. No context. Just a time, thirty minutes from now, and a link.
I found Travis in the kitchen pouring coffee with his good arm. The left side was still stiff, his movements compensating around the wound without quite hiding it.
"Pratt wants a video call." I set my laptop on the counter. "No subject line. No context. He never does video calls."
Travis set the coffee pot down. "When?"
"Half an hour."
"What's your read?"
"Something changed on their end. He wouldn't break pattern without a reason, and he wouldn't leave the subject blank unless he didn't want a paper trail of the topic before we spoke."
Or, he could’ve also have forgotten. That had happened before. But my gut was saying otherwise.
“Could it be about Kindt?” Travis asked.
“Definitely possible.”
“Okay. We need to get you set up somewhere that is so nondescript he won’t even think about it.” He led me down the corridor to a small storage room with a plain white wall on one side. Unremarkable. Could be any apartment in any city.
Travis disappeared and came back with a desk lamp. He set it on a shelf to my left, angled it toward the wall, and turned off the overhead. The lamp threw a soft, neutral glow that made the background look like a bedroom wall or a home office. Anonymous.
I held up my laptop camera and checked the frame. "Perfect."
He moved a chair into position and adjusted the height. Then he stepped behind the laptop and looked at the screen from my side.
"Your shirt."
I looked down. I was wearing one of his T-shirts. Oversized, dark gray, with a faded logo from a brand I didn't recognize.
"I'll change."
I put on a blouse Maude had ordered for me when I first got here, buttoned it to the collar, smoothed my hair. When I came back, Travis had set up a second screen behind the laptop's sightline where he could monitor the call without being visible.
"I'll be right here," he said, and stepped out of frame.
I sat down, opened the link, and waited.
Pratt's face filled the screen twelve seconds after the scheduled time. He looked the same as always: thinning hair, reading glasses pushed up on his forehead, the fluorescent wash of the Bureau's open-plan office behind him.
Except he'd closed his office door. I could see it in the background, shut, which he never did for our calls because our calls had never warranted privacy.
"Bolland.” Pratt nodded at me. “Thanks for making time."
Two years. Two years I'd been feeding this man analysis that he skimmed on his way to lunch, and now he was thanking me for making time. Something had put the fear of God into Martin Pratt, and I needed to figure out what before I said a single word wrong.
"Of course. What can I help you with?"
He took his glasses off his forehead and set them on the desk. Picked them up again. Put them back.
"I'm going to cut straight to it. The brass is asking questions I don't have answers to, and your name keeps coming up."
"My name in what context?"
"Your Kindt model. The pipeline analysis you submitted eight months ago."
"What about it?"
"When you submitted that analysis, it mapped Kindt's courier network across the northern corridor. Potential routes, possible timing patterns, logistics nodes. Detailed work. I'll be honest, I didn't give it the attention it deserved at the time."
This was the closest Martin Pratt had ever come to admitting he'd dropped something I'd handed him. Eight months ago, I would have savored that sentence. Probably would’ve gotten it tattooed on my forehead.
Now it landed in my stomach like a stone, because whatever had made Pratt wake up and pay attention was about to become my problem.
"In the last several months, Kindt's operation has been hit. Repeatedly. Not by us. Not by DEA. Not by any agency that's claiming the activity." He leaned forward. "Someone is disrupting his pipeline from the outside, and nobody can figure out who."
I kept my face still. Interested but not invested. A woman hearing something new, not a woman who had stitched the answer's shoulder wound and fallen asleep in his bed. "How significant are the disruptions?"
"Significant enough that Kindt's people are scrambling.
We're picking up chatter through our own channels.
Route changes, courier reassignments, increased security on transfers.
The pattern of disruptions is too precise to be a competitor.
Too targeted. Whoever's doing this understands the pipeline's architecture. "
"And nobody's taking credit."
"Nobody. No interagency reports, no classified operations we've been read into. I've checked with every contact I have, and the answer keeps coming back the same. It's not us." He paused. "The disruptions cluster geographically. Montana. Northern corridor. The same territory your model mapped."