Page 17 of Travis
Chapter 5
Travis
Someone was in my pool.
My pool. Underground. Behind a gate that required a code, inside a house that required a second code, down a stairwell that should have been locked, in the one room in this compound that existed for the sole purpose of putting me back together after nights like this one.
Someone had gotten through all of it. While I was gone. While my system was running full perimeter protocol. While Maude was monitoring every sensor I’d spent three years installing.
And they wereswimming.
The woman in the water had gone vertical the second I spoke. Now she was choking, coughing, grabbing for the edge with her hair plastered across her face. I stood in the doorway with the Glock level and my finger alongside the trigger guard, and every part of me that had been shutting down and relaxing thirty seconds ago was fully, painfully back online.
I stared at the woman as she decided whether to drown or get her shit together. Not a stellar start as far as assassins went.
It was hard to see her exactly in the muted light coming from the pool, but I could see more as she made her way closer.
Dark hair. The line of the jaw. The shape of the face, half-lit by the blue glow from the underwater lights.
For one full second my brain broke. The Glock began shaking in my hand.
Naomi.
The thought went through me like voltage. Then the rest of my brain caught up and started cataloguing the differences with the ruthless precision of a system that couldn’t turn off.
No, not Naomi. This woman was smaller, shoulders narrower. The build softer, rounder, nothing like the lean athletic frame I’d known for years.
Similar features arranged into a different woman. A woman who was very much alive and still coughing in my pool.
Sera Bolland.
“Travis. Travis, it’s me. It’s Sera. Sera Bolland. Naomi’s sister.”
I’d known it for about four seconds, which was three seconds longer than I’d needed and about sixty years short of how long it was going to take me to process it.
I flipped on the overhead lights so I could see her more clearly. Both of us blinked against the sudden harsh light.
I didn’t lower my weapon. “Are you alone?”
“What?”
“Are you alone. Is anyone else in this house?”
“No. It’s just me. Travis, I?—”
“How did you get in?”
“The gate code. I guessed it. Then the front door. Same code.” She was gripping the pool edge with both hands, treading water,shivering despite the heat. “Can you please not point that at me?”
She was in a bra and underwear. No weapon. No place to put one. But a woman in my pool at three in the morning when nobody should have been within a mile of this building wasn’t something I was accepting on instinct alone.
“Maude,” I said. “Scan the property. All signatures.”
“One vehicle in the rear driveway. Registered to Sera Bolland, Spokane, Washington. No other vehicles detected. No additional heat signatures on the property. Gate log shows a single access at 12:47 a.m. using the primary code.”
One person. One car. Alone.
I grabbed the sweatshirt I kept on the hook by the pool door—part of the post-swim routine, always in the same place—and pulled it over my head. The fabric dragged across my ribs, and I locked my jaw until the pain passed. I tucked the Glock into my waistband at the small of my back where the sweatshirt covered it.
