Chapter 27 #2
We found the kittens in stages. The gray one was asleep on the chair it had claimed from the first day.
The black one was wedged behind the couch cushions in a position that defied anatomy.
The white one took the longest. It had gotten into the pantry somehow and was sitting on a shelf between cans of tomato sauce, grooming itself with absolute indifference to everything, as usual.
Lark gathered them into the carrier with practiced hands, murmuring to each one while she did so.
“They look great,” she said. “Thank you for taking care of them. How are you hanging in there with all this?”
“I’m tired. And nervous. And trying very hard not to think about everything that could go wrong.”
“That sounds about right.” She leaned against the counter. “It’s a lot of people down there.”
“Eight men. All here because of something I found in a dataset.”
“Actually, they’re all here because Travis finally let them in on what’s really going on in his life.”
“Yes, true.” I pulled the sandwiches out of the bag and started arranging them on a plate, mostly so my hands had somewhere to be. “This is going to be something really dangerous.”
“These men know danger. They’re not afraid of it.”
“But it’s my intel that’s putting them in harm’s way.”
“No, it’s the fact that not a single one of them is capable of sitting by and letting innocents suffer if they can do something about whatever it is that’s putting them in harm’s way.”
I shook my head. “You don’t even know exactly who’s down there.”
“I don’t have to. My answer would still be the same. I know the guys at Warrior Security and Resting Warrior. Every single one of them would do what is needed, regardless of personal risk.”
“There’s just so many things that could go wrong. And what if it’s my fault? They’re trusting me. Travis is trusting me.”
She picked up a sandwich half and bit into it. “I’ve been coming to this compound off and on for almost three years. Dropping off animals, picking them up—sometimes because I needed help, sometimes because I thought the animals might help Travis.”
“I think they have helped.”
“In my experience, animals always help. That’s why I started Pawsitive Connections.” Her face got dark just for a second, but she wiped away whatever memory had tried to overtake her. “Anyway, before you arrived, Travis wasn’t exactly welcoming.”
She looked around the kitchen. At my inhaler on the counter. At the legal pad with my handwriting on it. At the chair where the gray kitten had been sleeping, the one I always sat in, pulled out from the table at the angle I liked.
“And now I’m standing in his kitchen, and he’s got a full team downstairs to support him because you’re here,” she said. “He let you in. Not just through the door. Into the whole thing. His house, his mission, his life. So, hell yeah, he trusts you. But it’s more than just that.”
I focused very intently on the sandwiches. “He cares about me. I know that.”
“Honey, dogs care about squirrels. That man rebuilt his entire world to make room for you.” She set her sandwich down, picked up the bag, folded it. “You don’t believe it.”
“I’m working on believing it.”
“Well, work faster. Because I know that brain of yours can.” There was no edge in it.
Just warmth. She stuffed the bag under her arm, picked up her sandwich with one hand, carrier with the other.
The kittens shifted inside, small sounds of protest and readjustment.
“In the meantime, you do what you do and trust those men downstairs to do what they do.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Call me,” she said. “Every day. I want to know you’re okay.”
We’d communicated multiple times over the past couple of weeks about the kittens, but this was very definitely moving into friendship territory. I liked it. “I will.”
She put the carrier down at the door, hugged me, picked it back up and walked to her truck. I stood there until she pulled away, the weight of the kittens’ absence already settling into the room. Their leaving marked something I didn’t want to look at too closely.
I picked up the sandwich plate and headed back downstairs.
On the stairs, I nearly ran into Beckett coming up. He caught the plate before it tipped.
“Food,” I said. “Lark brought it.”
“Of course she did. That woman operates on some kind of caretaking frequency the rest of us can’t hear.” He took the plate from me. Then he didn’t move, just stood on the step below me, holding a plate of sandwiches.
“I owe you something,” he said.
“I don’t understand.”
“I called him every week for three years. And every time I hung up, I’d sit there and wonder if he was okay.
If he was eating. If he’d be alive the next time I called.
” His jaw worked. “And I couldn’t do a damn thing about any of it from the other end of a phone and rarely could get him to let me inside. ”
He looked down at the sandwiches. Looked back at me.
“You showed up, and in a few weeks you did what I couldn’t do in three years. You got him to stop carrying it alone. I don’t care what else happens from here. That’s enough. Whether we take down Kindt or not, you’ve changed Travis’s life. For good.”
He turned and went back downstairs with the food without another word. I stayed on the step for a moment, and pressed my hand against the wall, and breathed.
When I walked back into the command center, the room had changed.
Maps were spread across the table alongside tablets and laptops.
The wall monitors showed satellite imagery beside my corridor model.
The men had broken into smaller conversations, each cluster working a different piece of the problem.
Liam was making Daniel laugh, which seemed like from the look on Coop’s face, he didn’t do enough around the other guys.
Lucas and Lachlan were studying the topographic data together, their heads close, voices low.
Hunter was at the main display marking something on the property overlay.
Beckett set the sandwiches on the side table without ceremony and slid back into the tactical discussion as if the conversation on the stairs had never happened.
Travis stood at the secondary monitors. He looked up when I came in, and something in his posture eased. Just a fraction, just enough to notice. Relief. Like something he’d been holding tight had loosened the moment I walked through the door.
That man rebuilt his entire world to make room for you.
Maybe Lark was right. Maybe the evidence had been in front of me for weeks, and I’d been too busy bracing for the other shoe to drop to see it clearly.
Because the look on his face right now wasn’t complicated. It wasn’t guilt or obligation or proximity or any of the explanations I’d been constructing to keep myself safe. It was just the look of a man who had been in a room without me and was glad I was back in it.
And now he had a support network.
I looked around the table at these men. Every one of them was risking something real to be here.
Lachlan, his badge and everything it represented.
The Resting Warrior men, their safety, their families, the ranch they’d built.
Beckett, Coop, Hunter, the careers and lives they’d spent years constructing.
They’d heard the FBI risk, and nobody had flinched. They’d looked at the scope of what Travis had been hiding and chosen loyalty.
They might well still kick his ass for hiding such important work from them, but right now they were here working the problem. Having his back.
My model was on those screens. My analysis had brought them here. If something went wrong, if someone got hurt on a mission that existed because I’d found a hole in a dataset, that weight would be mine to carry.
But they’d chosen it. Every one of them, eyes open, knowing the cost.
I pulled a chair up to the table and sat down beside Travis and got back to work.