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“Yes,” Carter grumbles.
“What a shame. I planned on cuddles, but…”
Cuddles? Carter whips around to face sir, forgetting why he was grumpy. “I want cuddles.”
Sir grins at him and opens his arms. “Then come here, silly boy.”
Carter practically dives at him. The man laughs but doesn’t stop him as he wraps himself around him like a damn octopus. It’s like Carter can’t get close enough. He’s just so fucking happy.
“So, how was our first date?” sir – no, Travis now, this is Travis, and Carter loves him so fucking much – asks. “Did I do okay?”
“Best first date ever,” Carter promises.
He can hear Travis’s smile when he says, “And your last. I’m not letting you go. You’re fucking stuck with me, sweetheart.”
“Fine by me.” Carter yawns, then nuzzles Travis’s chest and sighs happily. “I’m not going anywhere.”
Chapter Eleven
Saying goodbye is harder than Travis thought possible, despite being temporary. He lingers near the door of Carter’s apartment the morning after their first date, taking his time putting his shoes on, backing the boy against the wall and kissing him breathless, pretending to struggle with his jacket zipper, hiking Carter up by the backs of his thighs and kissing him some more, nearly coming in his fucking pants, gently putting Carter back down on his feet and brushing his hair off his forehead before pressing a kiss to the center of it, triple checking that they’ll see each other again in a few days when Carter comes to visit the safehouse, then kissing him a little more before finally - miserably - forcing himself to walk out the door.
Suffice to say, Travis is in a shit mood when he gets back to the safehouse. He ignores anyone he passes on his way to Ace's office and barely grunts at the man when he asks how his time away was. "How's the Elliot case coming?"
Ace frowns at him but accepts the obvious shift in topic. "Nothing yet. He hasn't shown up in any event pictures we've found in personal files of computers I hacked, nor video footage."
"Has someone gone over all of it yet?" Travis asks, since that's what he was doing before getting sidetracked with Carter. He was pouring over everything himself just in case their facial recognition software didn't pick up on half of a face or a face full of bruises like it should.
"Trav, I told you how pointless that is. It's thousands of-"
"Give them to me," Travis says, cutting him off. "Are they printed? If not, send them to my tablet."
"If you're determined to spend your time doing unnecessary manual labor, at least do something that doesn't insult the very technology I created myself." Ace huffs, then grabs a stack of files off his desk and offers them to Travis.
The files are thick, nearly overflowing, and fucking heavy. Travis refuses to frown. "What are these?"
"It's a list of names that booked private European flight plans or logged European road hours in the timeframe we believe Elliot was sold. We pulled them from all of Quinton’s known associates, as well as anyone we had flagged for child trafficking interests. The names highlighted in yellow are those whose travels lined up with actual Quinton auctions. We know Quinton would never be bold enough to sell kids openly, but back room deals would be easy to facilitate while hosting an open adult sale. Start with them."
"And you want me to start… how?"
"By going into the data server and pulling everything we have on them. Use your profiling skills to try to narrow down the list to the 10 most likely to have bought him. 20, if necessary. If nothing comes from that, we'll broaden the search, but my program can only turn out so much at a time. It'll be smarter if we feed it data from the most likely sources first."
"Okay." Travis nods, feeling much better knowing he has something he can be doing other than sitting around pining like a pathetic love-sick idiot. He'll still be doing that, of course, but… at least now he'll be productive too. "Thanks. And, hey, do you know if Maison heard from the director yet? About my idea?"
Ace's lips twist and he looks away. "Not that I know of."
"It'd be the easiest way to find him," Travis nearly growls. He had the idea just before leaving for his date with Carter. It's a brilliant idea. The kind of idea that made him want to jump off a damn cliff for being the kind of idiot who hadn't thought of it sooner.
No one else likes the idea.
Maison said Quinton is too valuable of a player still, and that other operations might falter if someone like him is taken out so soon after the Roarke empire fell.
Jake said Travis doesn't need to lower himself to that level anymore. That he's done playing the monster. That it's time to let that part of him go.
Ace quoted statistics on torture methods and accuracy of information.
Travis doesn't give a fuck what any of them think. He just hopes that the director sees that it's the smartest plan if they want to find Elliot. Probably the only plan, if they're being honest with themselves.
"It's not our decision," Ace reminds him - and fucking hell, Travis is really fucking sick of that being his life. "For now, look at those names."
