Chapter 21
Travis
Wrong ceiling.
That was my first thought as I opened my eyes. The surface above me was white plaster with a hairline crack running diagonally from the corner, and I didn’t know that crack. I knew every crack in every ceiling I slept under because knowing was how I stayed alive, and this one wasn’t mine.
My side lit up when I tried to sit, and the pain knocked me flat again. A sharp, clean burn along my ribs that told me two things: someone had cleaned the wound, and the wound was worse than I’d told Sera in the car.
Sera.
Fuck.
She was sitting in a chair across the room. Not beside me. Across. A deliberate distance that had nothing to do with giving me space and everything to do with the fact that if she were any closer, one of us would say something we couldn’t take back.
My shirt was gone. A bandage covered my left side along the lower ribs, wrapped tight to hold the gauze in place. She’d done this while I was out. Made decisions about my body without my input, cleaned blood off my skin while I wasn’t conscious to control any of it.
I hated that. And I had no right to hate it because the reason she’d had to do it was entirely my fault.
“How long was I out?” The words came out scraped thin.
“Almost two hours.” She didn’t move from the chair. “There’s water on the table next to you.”
I turned my head. A glass of water, a bottle of ibuprofen, and my phone laid out in a neat row on a side table I didn’t recognize. Everything she thought I’d need when I woke up, arranged with the same precision she brought to her data layouts.
I reached for the water and drank half of it. The wound throbbed when I shifted. Beyond that, hives had spread across both arms and up my neck. The safehouse was doing what any uncontrolled environment did to my system: pressing on every nerve that expected walls I’d built and finding ones I hadn’t. No tremors yet, but my hands weren’t fully steady either.
Street noise pushed through the walls. Cars. A dog somewhere. Sounds I couldn’t catalog or predict, each one landing on a nervous system that had no filters here. No cameras, no feeds, no perimeter alerts. No pool. No routine. No Maude in the walls.
Just Sera, sitting six feet away with my blood dried brown on her shirt, watching me with an expression I could read from across the room.
She was furious.
“The wound needs to be checked again in a few hours,” she said. “The bleeding stopped but it’s deep. Deeper than a graze. You’re going to need real medical attention when we get back.”
“I’ll handle it.”
“The way you handled the mission?”
I put the water down.
“No comms.” Her voice was level, not angry. “No model. A target type you’ve never hit before. In daylight. On a route you didn’t run past anyone. My model would have flagged the security issues in three minutes, Travis. Three damned minutes.”
“I know.”
“You would have known it was a bad target.”
“I know.”
“But you didn’t give me three minutes. You didn’t give me anything. You got up while I was sleeping, and you walked out without a word.”
I had nothing. Every operational justification I could offer was hollow, and we both knew it.I’d been doing this alone for eighteen monthswasn’t a defense when the one mission I’d run with her had been the cleanest of my career. I couldn’t dress it up. I couldn’t wrap the recklessness in tactical language and make it sound like anything other than what it was.
“You’re right,” I said. “It was a bad call.”
“A bad call.” She repeated it back to me, flat. “You almost bled out in the passenger seat. I hit a man in the face and nearly broke my hand. Your vehicle is sitting in a gravel lot fifty miles north of here with God knows what forensic evidence on it. And one of Kindt’s people may have my plates.” She paused. “A bad call.”
“What do you want me to say, Sera?”
