Page 75 of Travis
What if he’d opened them and seen the wrong sister?
What if he’d woken up beside me in the dark and the morning had brought clarity, and clarity had sent him running?
I’d spent my whole life being the other Bolland. The quiet one. The one who stayed behind the desk while Naomi walked into rooms and owned them. I’d made peace with it, or I’d told myself I had, and then Travis had put his hands on me and said my name and I’d believed him.
Maybe that was what I was struggling with. Not that he’d left. That I’d let myself believe it was real in the first place.
I don’t know how long I sat there. Long enough for the coffee I’d carried from the kitchen to go cold beside the keyboard. Long enough for the screens to blur and sharpen and blur again. The hurt kept circling, and I let it, because fighting it off would have taken energy I didn’t have and I wasn’t sure I wanted to spend.
But eventually my brain started processing what I was actually seeing. It happened the way it always happened with me. Not a decision, not a choice to push the feelings aside and get to work. Just the patterns on the screen pulling at the part of me that couldn’t leave anything unexamined. The analyst waking up inside the woman, whether the woman wanted her to or not.
If he was an hour north on the route I was looking at, and he’d left around five, the timing put him near the intercept window now. Maybe already engaged. I pulled the corridor data and started running it against my model, the one he hadn’t used, the one that would have taken twelve minutes to validate this route.
The model flagged a problem in under three.
The transport he was targeting had more chatter around it than a standard supply run warranted. More security.
Damn it.
My model would have caught this. I would have told him the security profile was wrong, that this wasn’t a soft target, that the resistance would be heavier than what he’d planned for. That he shouldn’t hit it.
He hadn’t given me the chance.
“Maude.” I kept my voice even. “I figured out what he’s doing myself. You didn’t help me, and you didn’t violate any of his instructions. Travis’s biometric relay is part of the comms partner system he set up when he brought me into operations. He never deactivated it. Put it on my screen.”
A pause. Then his vitals appeared on the secondary monitor. Heart rate, respiration, stress indicators. The numbers were elevated but not critical. He was alive. He was functioning.
The comms feed gave me fragments. Static, ambient sound, the occasional shift in audio that might have been movement. Nothing I could interpret. Nothing I could act on. I was sitting in his chair doing the one thing I was worst at in the world, which was nothing.
Minutes passed. His heart rate held steady. Elevated, but stable. I bit the inside of my cheek and watched the numbers, and I waited.
Then the spike.
One forty-two. One fifty-one. The kind of jump that meant contact, meant violence, meant something had gone wrong fast. His breathing pattern fractured into short, ragged bursts.
Through the comms feed, sounds that were worse than silence. A crash, maybe metal. A voice that wasn’t his. Then a sound that was him, a short, bitten-off grunt that I recognized because I’d heard it when I’d stitched his shoulder. Pain—controlled, swallowed before it could become anything louder.
His heart rate held above one-forty. It didn’t come back down.
He was in trouble.
I stood up from his chair. “Maude, where exactly is he?”
She gave me the coordinates. Fifty-three miles north.
“Fastest route. I’m going after him.”
“Sera. You are not equipped for?—”
“Fastest route, Maude.”
She gave it to me.
The smart thing was to stay. Monitor from here. Trust that Travis had survived eighteen months of this alone and could survive one more. The analytical, rational, data-driven thing was to sit in this chair and wait.
But he was in trouble. I knew it. And I damned well wasn’t going to let him die without giving him a piece of my mind.
I ran to my room first, pulled on some workout clothes and slipped on shoes. Then hurried to the gear room.
