Chapter 29 #2
The fire popped and hissed behind us. A section of ceiling tile fell somewhere down the corridor, trailing sparks. One of Kindt’s men shifted his weight.
“You’re offering a trade,” Kindt said. Now he was a little surprised. No doubt the thought of doing something for someone else’s good was a foreign concept to this asshole.
“That’s right. Take the trade or we can all burn to death together.”
He looked at his men. Looked at the smoke crawling along the ceiling. Looked at me.
“Put your weapon on the ground,” he said. “Slowly.”
I crouched. Set the gun on the floor. Straightened.
“Hands up. Walk forward. If you reach for anything, she dies first.”
I raised my hands and walked toward him. Every step was a commitment I couldn’t take back. My anonymity. My safety. The compound, the systems, the life I’d built in isolation to keep functioning in a world that had tried to destroy me.
None of it mattered more than Sera breathing.
I stopped a few feet from him.
“Turn around.”
I turned. His men moved in. Hands on my shoulders, forcing me to my knees. They took my backup sidearm from its holster at my back, patted me down, found the knife on my ankle and the backup magazines in my vest pocket. Stripped all of it.
I expected a bullet then. Quick and efficient. The way Kindt ran his organization.
“You think I’m going to shoot you right here? I don’t think so,” Kindt said behind me, as though he’d heard the thought. “I don’t need a calculator to know that you’re going to suffer before you die.”
The first blow came from my right. A fist into my kidney that whited out my vision and buckled me forward against the hands holding me up. I clenched my jaw and swallowed the sound that tried to come out. The deal was Sera goes free. Fighting back ended the deal.
The second blow came from the left, a closed fist across my face that snapped my head sideways and filled my mouth with blood. I spat it onto the floor.
The third was a boot to my ribs, the left side, directly into the bullet graze that was still healing.
The pain was so acute and so specific that my vision went gray at the edges, and I heard a sound come out of me that I couldn’t have stopped if I’d tried.
Something animal and raw that didn’t belong to the person I thought I was.
I stayed on my knees. They kept hitting me. Systematic, unhurried, even with the building burning around us. Fists and boots, my face, my ribs, my kidneys. The rhythm of it was the worst part, the patience, because it meant Kindt valued this more than his own escape.
The deal. I held on to the deal. Every blow was a payment, and the currency was my body, and the price was Sera walking away from this alive. I could afford it. I could afford anything as long as she was the return.
My vision was failing. Blood ran from my nose and from a cut above my right eye and from somewhere inside my mouth where my teeth had cut the inside of my cheek.
The ground tilted and spun, and I couldn’t tell which direction was up except for the hands gripping my arms, holding me in place for the next impact.
Through the wreckage of my awareness, I could hear Sera. She was screaming my name, begging Kindt to stop. Raw, desperate, her voice cracking.
The deal was holding. She was alive. That was all that mattered.
Then Kindt’s voice cut through the noise, and everything changed. “Enough.”
The blows stopped. The hands kept holding me. I hung between them, my head down, blood dripping from my face onto the floor.
I heard Kindt moving. Heard the scuffle of her feet as he dragged Sera forward. His men wrenched my head up by my hair and forced me to look at him.
“I’ve changed my mind,” Kindt said.
The words were delivered in the same tone he’d used to discuss replacement costs for stolen children. The same operational calm.
But the words themselves were a knife through everything I’d been holding together.
“Killing you quickly would be wasteful. But killing you while she watches, and then taking my time making her suffer afterward?” He paused, and I could hear the calculation in the silence, the man weighing the pleasure against the logistics. “That’s a much better return on investment.”
He looked down at me. Adjusted his glasses with his free hand.
“She’s going to die very slowly, begging for me to finish it. Just thought you should know that before you die.”
I lunged for him. Everything I had left, every shred of strength that hadn’t been beaten out of me, I threw into reaching him.
It didn’t work.
His men held me. My arms strained against their grip, and my shoulders screamed but I couldn’t close the distance.
I couldn’t reach her. I couldn’t stop what was about to happen, and the helplessness of it was worse than every blow I’d taken combined because the blows had been mine to absorb, and this was Sera and I could not protect her.
Kindt laughed. A short, genuine sound. The kind of laugh that came from a man who found real pleasure in another man’s powerlessness.
He pulled his gun and pressed it against my temple. The metal was warm from his hand.
“Any last words for the woman?”
I had nothing. No plan. No weapon. No angle. I had failed her more completely than I had ever failed Naomi.
Sera made a sound I’d never heard before and drove the heel of her palm into Kindt’s throat.
The strike was fast, committed, delivered with her full body weight behind it. She didn’t hesitate. She didn’t pull it. She hit him exactly where I’d taught her, targeting the soft tissue below the larynx, and she hit him like she meant to end him.
Kindt staggered backward. The gun left my temple. His hand went to his throat, and he made a choking sound, his glasses knocked sideways.
But it wasn’t enough. She couldn’t take the guards, and Kindt held up his hand to stop one of them from coming after her.
“Enough.” He backhanded her once, the sound echoing over the flames licking at our backs. “I’m going to enjoy my time with you.” He shoved her hard into the wall then pointed his gun back at my head. “But first let me make you an actual ghost.”
I heard the gunfire and waited for that last split second of pain before everything turned to nothing.
But it didn’t happen.
Instead Kindt jerked. More shots. His men jerked. Bodies fell.
Through the blur of my vision, through the blood and the smoke and the ringing in my ears, I saw Beckett. Coming down the corridor behind Kindt’s position with his weapon up, Hunter and Coop flanking him, moving in the coordinated formation that Warrior Security had drilled until it was instinct.
They’d come back.
Kindt hit the ground. The gun fell from his hand. His glasses landed beside him on the floor, one lens cracked, reflecting the fire.
Beckett reached me first. He grabbed my shoulder to keep me from falling forward, and I heard his voice, my name, something urgent I couldn’t fully process because the world was narrowing.
Sera was on her knees a few feet from Kindt’s body. She crawled to me.
Her hands found my face. Gentle. So careful. I couldn’t see her clearly, but I felt her palms settle against my jaw, her fingers in my hair, and I reached for her arm and gripped it and held on.
“I’m here,” she said. “I’m here. I’m right here.”
I tried to speak. What came out was her name, broken, wet with blood.
“Don’t talk. Don’t try to talk.” Her hands moved over my face, my neck, around my vest, assessing damage with shaking fingers.
Her voice kept going, low and steady, the same voice that had guided me through missions on comms, except now she was the one shaking, and I was the one who couldn’t respond. “You’re okay. You’re going to be okay.”
I pulled her closer, felt the wetness of her tears. I hurt everywhere, and I didn’t care. My forehead found hers and I stayed there, breathing her air, feeling her pulse through the places where our skin touched.
“I love you, Travis. You’re going to be okay, you hear me.” Not a request, a demand.
“I love you,” I said. It came out thick, slurred through split lips.
“We can spend the rest of our lives telling each other every single day. But right now, you just hang on.”
“We need to move.” Hunter’s voice, cutting through everything. “This building is coming down.”
The team took over. Hunter guided Sera out. Coop and Beckett hauled me up, one on each side, because my legs weren’t working on their own.
“Can you walk?” Beckett asked.
“Fuck no.”
I leaned on both of them—the men who had come back for me even though I’d lied to them for years.
We hit the exterior door, and the cold air was a shock against my swollen face. The perimeter team was there. Lachlan, Lucas, Daniel, Liam. The children were already loaded, safe, accounted for. Everyone was out. Everyone was alive.
Sera appeared beside me. I couldn’t see her clearly, but I could feel her hand locked around my wrist, her fingers pressing into my pulse point, her grip tight enough to leave bruises. I wanted every one of them.
They loaded me into a vehicle. Sera slid in beside me. Her hand found mine and I held it, her fingers laced through my split knuckles, blood mixing between our palms.
The vehicles started moving. Through the back window, I saw Lachlan’s truck pull off from the convoy and stop. He was staying behind with the children.
“Lachlan’s holding position with the kids,” Beckett said from the front seat. “FBI’s inbound on the main access road. He’ll tell them he saw smoke, investigated, pulled the children out. Local sheriff doing his job. Rest of us were never here.”
Lachlan, standing in front of a burning building in his jeans and flannel shirt, presenting himself as a concerned sheriff who’d stumbled onto a fire and rescued six children. Giving the FBI exactly what they needed to close a case and no reason to look any further.
Our convoy turned onto the secondary access road, away from the approaching headlights. Away from the smoke and the bodies and the man who would never traffic another child.
They would never even know we were here. The fire would destroy all evidence.
I rested my head back against the seat and closed my eyes. Sera’s weight settled against my right side, careful, finding a place that didn’t make me hiss with pain. Her breathing steadied slightly. Her hand stayed in mine.
The Ghost was finished.
And I was still here.