Page 101 of Travis
“—there is no way in fucking hell you’re going into Kindt’s den?—”
“—even if you would let me,” she finished, one eyebrow raised since we were both saying the same thing.
Somewhere above us a kitten knocked something off a counter, a distant clatter that neither of us reacted to. The control room hummed. The gap zone sat on the main screen, surrounded by every route that refused to touch it.
Sera reached across the gap between our chairs and laced her fingers through mine.
“You know who we need.”
I did. I’d known since she’d said the words we can’t do this ourselves. Maybe even before that.
Warrior Security. Beckett. Hunter. Coop.
The men who called me to check in and joked about my hermit lifestyle and demanded proof-of-life video calls because they genuinely worried I might disappear into my screensand never come back. The men who believed, completely and without question, that I never left my house.
Beckett’s voice on the Moreno call.The ghost of Garnet Bend, he’d called me, his laughter masking his concern. And I’d sat in this chair with my camera angled three degrees left and lied to his face.
Hunter’s steady authority.Turn the camera on, Travis. The trust in that command, trust I’d been betraying every day for three years. Coop asking if I slept. All of them looking at me through the camera with worry and love they barely bothered to disguise, and me absorbing every bit of it while hiding the most fundamental truth about my life.
“I have to tell them everything,” I said.
“Yes.”
“Not just the Ghost. Three years of lying. Every call, every excuse, every time I said the camera was down or I hit a server rack or I was fine.”
“They’ll understand why you did it.”
“Understanding and forgiving aren’t the same thing.”
She was quiet for a moment. “No. They’re not. But those men love you, Travis. I heard it in one phone call. You’ve had three years of it.”
“Three years of lying to them is what I’ve had.” I pushed back from the desk. “Beckett calls me every week. Every single week, Sera. He makes up reasons half the time. The Moreno account, some question about a firewall, whatever gives him an excuse to check on me. And every time he calls, I perform for him. I give him the version of me that sits at his desk and never leaves and needs to be dragged into turning on his camera.”
“That wasn’t all performance.”
“Enough of it was.”
She let that sit. She didn’t rush to fill the silence with reassurance, which was just one of the things I’d come to rely on about her. She let difficult truths have their weight.
“Hunter built Warrior Security around trust,” I said. “It’s the foundation of everything he does. The team works because they trust each other completely. And I’ve been outside of that for three years, pretending I was inside it.”
“You were protecting them.”
“I was protecting myself. Let’s not dress it up.”
She looked at me for a long time. “Both things can be true.”
I stared at the screens. The gap zone sat in the center of the corridor map, a void surrounded by everything I’d built and everything I’d hidden.
I wasn’t ready for this. I wasn’t anywhere close to ready.
But ready didn’t matter. It had never mattered. I’d walked out the door with hives covering my arms and tremors in my hands because children were in the back of a van and ready was a luxury I couldn’t afford. This was the same thing.
Same fear, different door. People I couldn’t save alone.
I had a phone call to make.
