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.
