Chapter 19
Sera
I reached for Travis before I was fully awake.
My hand found cold sheets. The pillow beside mine still held the dent of his head, but the warmth was gone. I lay there for a moment with my palm flat against the empty mattress and told myself it didn’t mean anything.
Travis didn’t sleep well. I knew that. The pool at two in the morning, the kitchen table in the dark, the restless pacing of a man whose brain didn’t come with an off switch. He was somewhere in the compound. Making coffee, probably. Or swimming laps until the quiet in his head matched the quiet in the water.
The black kitten was curled against my hip. The other two were wedged together at the foot of the bed, a small pile of fur and warmth that hadn’t registered the absence of a six-foot-two man from the mattress.
I sat up. My body was sore in places I hadn’t expected and a few I had. The T-shirt I’d pulled on at some point in the nightwas his, soft and too big, and it smelled like him, and I let myself have that for about five seconds before I got up.
The kitchen was empty. The coffee pot was full, which was wrong. Travis set the timer every night. Six a.m., black, no sugar. By quarter to seven he’d normally be on his second cup. A full pot with no mug on the counter meant he’d never come up to pour it.
I poured myself a cup from his untouched pot and took it with me down the hall. He could be anywhere in seven thousand square feet of underground facility. The gym, the pool, one of the rooms he never talked about. A man with that much space could disappear inside his own house without trying.
The pool corridor was dark. Water still, undisturbed. No sound from the gym.
“Maude, where’s Travis?”
The pause before she answered was too long. Not the dramatic beat she deployed before a punchline or the processing delay that preceded a data dump. A careful, measured silence.
“He’s not in the compound.”
Her words were flat. No elaboration, no humor, no dry editorial. The same voice I’d heard the night I’d sat in his chair and asked where he’d gone, and she’d saidI can’t discuss that with you.
“When did he leave?”
“I can’t provide operational details without his authorization.”
I froze. Operational details. “He went on a mission?”
No response from Maude. That told me everything I needed to know.
He’d gone on a goddamned mission.
I rushed to the control room trying to wrap my head around it. It had to have been something urgent, right? Something that came through on the feeds that couldn’t wait. Something whereevery minute mattered and waking me up would have cost him time he didn’t have.
But that didn’t fit. He could’ve easily had Maude wake me up, even if he was literally sprinting out the door.
I sat down and started digging. It took me a few minutes. I found the comms feed, live, his unit active. And the mission log, unencrypted. He’d been in too much of a hurry to lock it down.
He’d gone after a supply transport in the northern corridor. Product and cash moving between two of Kindt’s waypoints. No children. No victims. A route I didn’t recognize from any of our work together. No intercept plan logged. No tiered positioning, no fallback options.
He’d gone out alone. On a target type he’d never bothered with before. On a route he hadn’t run through my model. Without telling me. Without waking me up.
I sat there staring at the screen and let it hit me.
He’d been inside me six hours ago. He’d said my name like it was the only word left in him. I’d fallen asleep with his arm around me and his breath in my hair, and I’d felt, for the first time in longer than I could remember, like I was exactly where I was supposed to be.
He’d waited until I was asleep and left. Hadn’t woken me. Hadn’t left a note. Hadn’t done any of the things a man does when a night meant something.
I stared longer at the screens without really seeing them.
I kept coming back to the same place. He’d touched me last night and it had felt real. It had felt like mine. But sitting here, I couldn’t stop the thought from forming.
He’d closed his eyes when he kissed me.
