Chapter 9
Sera
We didn’t talk.
Five hours of driving, and I held every question I had because Travis was barely keeping himself together. His hands hadn’t stopped trembling since Spokane. His breathing caught every few minutes, a small tight sound he probably thought the road noise covered.
I heard it. I heard everything in that silence, and I gave him the only thing I could, which was quiet.
The gate at his house opened without him touching anything. We pulled through, and the change in Travis was immediate. His shoulders eased. His grip loosened.
The compound wasn’t just where he lived. It was the place where his body remembered how to stand down.
He parked, sat with his eyes closed for a moment, and got out. I followed him to the kitchen. Same chairs, same table. Had it really just been earlier this morning that I’d left here?
The main question that had been burning inside me for hundreds of miles bubbled over. “How did you know I was in trouble?”
He’d been reaching for the coffee maker to make coffee. His hand stopped. The tremor was still there, faint, visible only because I was looking for it. “Does it matter?”
In the greater scheme of things, probably not. I was alive; that was most important thing.
But on the other hand, I knew my brain. I wasn’t going to be able to let this go. So yes, it mattered.
“You didn’t just decide you wanted to apologize for being an asshole and beat me back home. Yes, it matters.”
He rubbed his face. “I was an asshole. I’m sorry.”
While I appreciated the apology, it wasn’t enough. “How did you know?”
“You told me you’d accessed Kindt’s communication node from your FBI terminal. No proxy, no cover, your contractor credentials. That’s a neon sign, Sera. Anyone monitoring that node would have seen the access and traced it back within hours. I realized that reporting it to your supervisor might not be enough to keep you safe.”
He rubbed the back of his neck. The gesture was so human, so unlike the operational precision I’d watched him move with all day, that it almost distracted me from the fact that he was dancing around the actual question.
I narrowed my eyes and studied him. “But it was more than that. You knew they were going to be at my apartment.”
“When I was at the CIA, I had access to certain communication channels related to Kindt’s network. Monitoring tools. After I left, I didn’t fully shut all of them down. It wasn’t operational access. Just passive monitoring. Background noise I kept running because I couldn’t make myself turn it off.”
“Okay.” That was understandable given that Kindt’s network had cost him the woman he loved.
“After you left, I ran your name against the chatter. On a hunch. Because you’d told me exactly how exposed you were, and I wanted to make sure it was nothing.” He paused. “It wasn’t nothing.”
“What did you find?”
“Your name. Your address. Operational language that meant they weren’t coming to talk.”
“And you drove to Spokane.”
“I tried calling you first. Multiple times.”
“I had my phone off.”
“I noticed. Assumed it was because of my aforementioned assholeness.”
Despite his attempt at humor, the silence between us was different from the one in the car. This one had weight. Pressure. He was looking at me the way he’d looked at me across the breakfast table that morning, steady and direct, and I was turning every piece of what he’d just told me, testing the joints.
Residual CIA access. Passive monitoring. A hunch.
The architecture held if I didn’t lean on it too hard. Former CIA operative keeps old monitoring tools running out of obsession with the network that killed his partner. Sees a threat. Acts on it.
