Chapter 27
Sera
I’d gotten used to the compound as a space for two people. Three if you counted Maude, and Maude absolutely counted herself.
Now eight men filled the leather chairs around the conference table, and the underground room that had always felt oversized suddenly didn’t.
Voices overlapped. Coffee mugs multiplied.
The wall monitors that usually cycled Travis’s feeds were displaying my model, blown up across three screens, and every set of eyes in the room kept returning to it.
I stood near the main display because sitting felt wrong. These men had driven out here within hours of Travis asking, rearranging their lives without being asked twice, and the least I could do was stand up while I explained why.
“The gap zone is here.” I traced the void on the screen. “Every courier route in Kindt’s network bends around it. Eighteen months of data, and not a single path crosses through.”
“And nobody noticed this before?” That was Lachlan, Garnet Bend’s sheriff, though he’d come in jeans and a flannel shirt instead of his uniform.
“The routes themselves aren’t unusual individually,” I said. “The deviation only becomes visible when you overlay the full dataset and look at the negative space. The pattern is in what’s missing, not what’s there.”
“She found it in an afternoon.” Travis said it from his chair at the far end of the table. Quiet. Matter-of-fact. Like he was reporting a data point and not handing me the kind of professional recognition I’d spent three years begging the FBI to give me.
“The property at the center of the zone sold twenty-two months ago to a shell company out of Delaware,” I continued. “Forty-seven acres, listed as agricultural, hay to be exact. But the power consumption is consistent with a commercial operation running around the clock.”
“Hay doesn’t need air conditioning,” said a man I’d been introduced to as Liam.
He was one of the partners from Resting Warrior, and there was a friendliness about him that automatically put me at ease.
He’d arrived with a six-pack of energy drinks for Travis and a grin that hadn’t quit since he walked in.
“Unless we’re talking about some really high-maintenance hay. ”
A few low laughs. The tension in the room loosened by a fraction.
Hunter leaned forward at the head of the table. He hadn’t said much since the briefing started, but I’d noticed that every time he did speak, the room reorganized around his words. He had a slightly darker, more dangerous air around him that the others. “What’s the confirmation status on the site?”
“Unconfirmed,” Travis said. “We haven’t been anywhere near it. The data is strong, but we need eyes on the ground before we can plan anything operational.”
“Reconnaissance first.” Hunter nodded once. “Small team, long-range observation. We confirm what’s there before we discuss how to take it.”
“Can you pull historical satellite imagery?” That was Lucas Everett, Hunter’s cousin, and another Resting Warrior Ranch partner.
He was very easily the largest man in the room, but I sensed a gentle nature underneath that was more soothing than threatening.
“If we can see what the property looked like before the sale versus after, that tells us what they built.”
“Already in process,” Travis said. “Maude’s pulling county GIS records and tasking a commercial satellite for recent captures. Resolution won’t be military grade, but it’ll show us buildings, vehicles, activity patterns.”
“How many people are we looking at on site?” Daniel Clark, also a Resting Warrior guy, sat with his arms crossed, spine straight.
He had a similar air of authority around him to Hunter, but lighter.
He seemed like the kind of man people followed without being asked to.
Every question he’d asked had been precise and humorless and exactly the right question.
“Unknown,” I said. “Kindt’s total organization is estimated at twenty to thirty people. How many are stationed at the hub versus distributed across the courier network is something we can’t determine from the data I have.”
“So somewhere between a handful and a small army,” Liam said. “Sounds about like the odds we’re used to.”
“The odds improve significantly if we know what we’re walking into before we walk into it,” Hunter said, and Liam raised his mug in concession.
Beckett had been quiet through most of the briefing.
He sat two chairs from Travis, close enough to be near him and far enough to make a point.
I’d watched the two of them navigate the space between those chairs for the past hour.
Travis kept glancing at Beckett when he thought nobody was looking. Beckett kept not looking back.
But he was here. That was the thing. He was angry and hurt but here, and every few minutes he’d ask a question or make a comment that made it clear he’d been listening to every word, processing every detail, already thinking three steps ahead about how to keep Travis alive through whatever came next.
That was love. The kind that showed up even when it was furious.
“I need to raise an important point.” I looked around the table. “Something that complicates all of this. Something that Travis probably didn’t share.”
The room settled.
“My supervisor at the FBI contacted me last week. The Bureau is after the Ghost. They want him almost as much as they want to shut down Kindt.” I kept my voice level. “I’ve been stalling, but…”
Silence. The particular kind where everyone processes the same ugly math at the same time.
“So the FBI is hunting Travis,” Beckett said.
“They don’t know it’s Travis. Not yet. But the shelf life on that is limited. If I don’t produce credible results, they’ll assign someone else. Someone who won’t have any reason to protect the source.”
“How long?” Hunter asked.
“Weeks. Probably less.” Pratt had been contacting me every day, wanting updates. He was getting pressure from higher ups. “They consider him a threat to law enforcement.”
All eyes drifted to Lachlan, since he was officially law enforcement.
He shrugged. “I’m not here as the sheriff of Garnet Bend. I’m here as a man who has spent years watching what trafficking does to communities and families. I’ve seen kids pulled out of situations that I can’t talk about without wanting to put my fist through a wall.”
He looked at Travis. “What you’ve been doing is illegal. I’m not going to pretend it isn’t. You’ve operated outside every boundary that exists, and if the FBI figures out who you are, I can’t protect you from that.”
The room was very still.
“But I’m also not going to sit in this chair and tell you that stopping Kindt isn’t worth the risk.
Because I’ve been on the other side. I’ve been the one who finds the kids too late, and I’ve stood in rooms where people talked about jurisdictions and warrants while victims disappeared into the system.
” He paused. “So I’m here. Take that for what it is. ”
Nobody spoke for a moment. Then Hunter nodded once, and the conversation moved forward, and just like that, the full weight of what everyone was choosing settled into the room and stayed.
They were all risking something. If this went sideways, they could go to prison. Or worse.
They kept working. Hunter started outlining reconnaissance parameters. Travis and Lucas discussed satellite options. Daniel had questions about the property’s access road, sight lines, terrain. Coop pulled up topographic data on a tablet and started marking approach vectors.
I watched them fall into it, the rhythm of men who had done this kind of work before multiple times.
They built on each other’s observations without ego, deferred to expertise without ceremony, and moved through the tactical questions with a practiced efficiency that came from years of shared operations.
A team.
No, more than a team. A family.
Travis was in the center of it. Not performing, not hiding, not managing how much of himself he let show. He was working with men he trusted and now knew the truth, and the difference between this and every phone call I’d overheard was visible in his whole body.
His shoulders were lower. His voice was easier. The rigid control he maintained when he was operating alone had loosened into something collaborative.
“Incoming vehicle on the access road,” Maude announced from the ceiling speakers. “Identified as Lark Monroe.”
“Lark’s here for the kittens,” I told the room. “They need somewhere to stay while all of this is happening.”
Beckett looked up from the reconnaissance discussion. “Kittens? First the Christmas puppies, then finding out you’re Batman, and now kittens?”
“The kittens were imposed on me. I had very little say in the matter.”
Coop leaned back in his chair. “That’s what you said about the puppies.”
“It was true then, too.” He looked at me. “You good to handle it?”
“I’ve got it.” I was already standing. The tactical discussion didn’t need me for this part, and honestly, a few minutes out of the testosterone pressure cooker sounded like exactly what my nervous system was asking for.
Lark was already at the front door when I opened it, carrier in one hand and a canvas bag in the other. She hugged me immediately, and it didn’t bother me. No preamble, no awkwardness, just arms around me and a squeeze that said everything a greeting was supposed to say.
“I brought food,” she said, holding up the bag. “Sandwiches, fruit, some of those brownies from Deja Brew. You’ve got a small army down there, and I guarantee none of them thought to eat.”
We’d told her what was happening when we asked her to come get the kittens, so she knew the truth. Honestly, she hadn’t seemed very surprised. “You didn’t have to do that.”
“I wanted to.” She set the bag on the kitchen counter and looked around. “Where are the babies?”