Page 51 of Travis
Chapter 13
Travis
My shoulder with the stitches didn’t like the pull-up bar. It made this known on the first rep with a bright, specific objection that ran from the suture line down through my lat and into the ribs that still hadn’t completely forgiven me for two weeks ago.
I adjusted my grip. Wider. Shifted the load toward the right side and pulled again.
Better. Not good. But the difference between those two things was where I’d been living for eighteen months, and the body that kept me alive on missions didn’t maintain itself. Modified or not, the work had to happen.
I’d been down here since five. The gym was the first room I’d built when I’d designed the underground level, before the control room, before the pool. Concrete floor, ceiling-mounted bar, free weights, the heavy bag. Nothing decorative. Everything functional.
Three sets of pull-ups, modified. Shoulder press with the left side at half the weight of the right. Core work on the mat thatdidn’t require rotation because rotation made the sutures pull in a way that suggested they had opinions about my life choices.
Sera had placed those sutures a little over twenty-four hours ago. Her hands on my skin, steady after the first stitch, her breath against my shoulder while she closed a wound I’d normally have handled alone over the bathroom sink at three in the morning.
And she’d done it with eighteen months of my secrets assembled on the screens behind her.
The thing I hadn’t been prepared for, the thing that had kept me staring at the ceiling until I gave up on sleep and came down here, was how much lighter I felt because she knew.
Eighteen months. More missions than I could keep track of. Every one of them planned alone, executed alone, recovered from alone. And now someone else knew, and the weight of it had shifted in a way I could physically feel, like setting down a bag I’d been carrying so long I’d forgotten it wasn’t part of my body.
The relief sat next to something colder, though. Because knowing made her closer to the operations, closer to the network, closer to the kind of danger that didn’t care how smart you were or how good your data was.
“Your cortisol levels are still thirty-two percent above baseline from last night,” Maude said. “And those sutures are barely twenty-four hours old. I feel compelled to point out that the gym is not where most people go to recover from a wound that required seven stitches.”
“Mind your own business, Maude.”
“I don’t have any other business. You are, quite literally, all I’ve got.”
I grabbed the tape from the shelf by the weight rack and started wrapping my hands. Left hand first, always left hand first, three passes across the knuckles, two around the wrist.
I was halfway through the right hand when Sera appeared in the doorway.
She was dressed in the workout clothes Maude had ordered. Leggings, a fitted top, running shoes that still looked new. Her hair was pulled back. I noticed all of it about two seconds faster than I should have.
Her arms were crossed, but not in the way that meant she was unsure. In the way that meant she’d already decided something and was giving me the courtesy of hearing about it before it happened.
“I want you to train me.”
I pulled the tape tight across my knuckles and tore it with my teeth. “No.”
“That wasn’t a question.”
“And that wasn’t an answer. It was a complete sentence. No. You’re not going in the field. There’s no reason to train you.”
She grit her teeth and took a step closer. “I got chased through alleys two weeks ago by men who wanted to kill me. I couldn’t run two blocks without my lungs shutting down. You had to buy me an inhaler at a drugstore while I sat on a pharmacy bench trying not to pass out.”
“And you were safe because I was there.”
“And what happens when you’re not?” She uncrossed her arms. “What happens if someone breaches this compound while you’re on a mission? What happens if we’re separated and I can’t run and I can’t fight and the only thing between me and a very bad outcome is hoping you show up in time?”
“This compound is secure.”
“This compound has a gate code that I guessed in three tries.”
Well, fuck. Couldn’t exactly argue with that, even if we both knew she’d only guessed it because of insider info. I still needed to change the password.
“I’m not asking you to turn me into a field operative,” she continued. “I’m asking you to give me something other than the sidelines. I’ve been on the sidelines my entire life. At the Bureau, with Pratt, with my parents, with Naomi. I’ve been the woman who sits behind the desk and does the quiet work and gets patted on the head for it.”
