Page 30 of Travis
Chapter 8
Sera
I had no idea where we were going, how Travis had managed to figure out I would be in this much danger, or how I was going to survive the asthma attack I could feel building.
But I kept running.
Travis had my hand, and he was pulling me through an alley I’d never noticed in three years of living three blocks from here. Past a loading dock. Past a delivery van with its back doors hanging open.
Right turn, then straight, then another right, and every turn was a decision he made without slowing down, and I followed because there was nothing else to do.
My bag was gone. I’d dropped it in the hallway when he’d grabbed me, or maybe I’d dropped it in the service corridor, or maybe somewhere between the two. I couldn’t remember. My phone was in it. My inhaler was in it. My thumb drive with two years of Kindt data was in it. All of it was back in my apartment building with the men who were there to kill me.
Travis pulled me around a corner and my shoe caught on something and I stumbled. He caught me without breaking stride, his hand tightening around mine, and we kept moving. The alley opened onto a cross street and he went right, pulling me with him.
My lungs had started complaining two alleys ago. A tightness across my chest that I recognized the way you recognize an old enemy. Damn it.Not yet. Not now.I breathed through my nose and out through my mouth and told my bronchial tubes that this was not the time for their bullshit.
They disagreed.
Travis turned us down another side street. Narrower. Less foot traffic. He slowed from a run to a fast walk and checked behind us. I checked too. Nobody. Just an empty sidewalk and a row of parked cars and a woman walking a dog on the opposite side.
“Are we—” My sentence dissolved into a cough. A bad one, deep and wet, the kind that pulled my shoulders forward and made my diaphragm spasm. I pressed my free hand against my sternum and tried to breathe through it.
Travis stopped. He looked at me. Really looked, not the quick operational glances he’d been throwing over his shoulder since the hallway but a full, focused assessment that started at my face and moved to my hand on my chest and then back to my face.
“Where’s your inhaler?”
“My bag.” I managed it between breaths. “Dropped it.”
Something passed across his expression. Brief, controlled, immediately replaced by something harder. He looked up the street, then down it. His eyes landed on a small drugstore on the corner half a block ahead.
“We’ll get you an over-the-counter inhaler there. We can’t go back to the apartment.”
I nodded because I didn’t have enough air to say yes.
He put his arm around me and we walked. Not running anymore. Walking, which was good, because I wasn’t sure my lungs would have allowed anything faster. Each breath was a little shallower than the last. I could feel the familiar tightening, the airways narrowing, the air having to push harder to get in and out.
I’d managed my asthma my entire life. I knew the stages. I knew how long I had before shallow became difficult and difficult became dangerous. Right now, I was at shallow and heading south.
Travis held the drugstore door open and walked me inside. Fluorescent lights and aisle after aisle of organized products. The normalcy of it was disorienting.
Two minutes ago someone had been chasing us through alleys with a hand inside his jacket, and now I was standing next to a display of seasonal allergy products under lights that hummed the same flat frequency as my cubicle at the FBI.
“Sit down.” Travis guided me to the bench by the pharmacy counter in the back. “Don’t move.”
He disappeared down an aisle. I sat on the bench and focused on breathing. In through my nose, slow as I could manage. Out through pursed lips. The wheeze was audible now, a thin whistle on each exhale that I hated because it made the invisible thing visible. Made people stare. Made people worry.
Nobody in the drugstore was staring. A woman in the next aisle was comparing shampoo bottles. The pharmacist was typing something behind the counter. The world was going about its business four blocks from where men with guns were waiting in my apartment and actively searching for us.
Travis came back with an over-the-counter inhaler box and had it open before he reached me. He pulled the inhaler out of the packaging and handed it to me. “I already paid for it.”
I took two puffs. Held each one as long as I could. The epinephrine was rougher than my albuterol, with a jittery chemical edge that my prescription didn’t have, but the airways responded. I could feel them loosening. Not all the way, but enough.
I took a third puff. Sat there on the pharmacy bench with my hands on my knees and waited for my chest to unlock.
Travis stood beside me. He wasn’t watching me. He was watching the front of the store, the entrance, the windows. His body was angled so that he was between me and the door.
“Better?” he asked without turning around.
