Chapter 5
Chapter Five
He could feel her deciding.
Not in any dramatic way—no trembling lip, no torn expression, nothing that would play well in a movie.
It was smaller than that. The slight shift of weight in her stance, the way her fingers pressed flat against his chest and then softened, like she’d caught herself bracing and forced herself to stop.
She was going to say no. Her body was still angled toward him, her hand still warm through his shirt, but her focus had already drifted behind her own walls. Building the exit.
“You’re thinking too hard,” he said.
“I’m thinking the right amount.”
“You’re constructing a reason to say no.”
“I don’t need to construct one. I have plenty.”
“Name one.”
Her mouth opened. Closed. Three answers cycled across her face and she discarded all of them, which told him more than any of them would have.
“See?” he said. “They’re not reasons. They’re reflexes.”
“Reflexes exist for a reason.”
“Sure. But not every situation is the one that taught you the reflex.”
Her expression tightened. He’d hit a nerve, and they both knew it. She didn’t step back, but her chin lifted a fraction. Holding ground.
“One dinner,” he said again. Quieter this time. “That’s it. No pressure, no expectations. Just food and conversation with someone who already knows you drink wine you don’t like and dance to music you can’t identify.”
“You can’t identify it, either.”
“Nobody can identify it. Which means we’ll have something to talk about.”
The song shifted underneath them. Something with more pulse, the bass rising. A few more people had drifted onto the floor, and the space around them was getting smaller. Her hand was still on his chest.
“What do you actually do?” she asked. “For work.”
The question landed differently than it had the first time, at the gala. Last week she’d asked, and he’d deflected, and she’d let him. Tonight she wasn’t letting him.
Fine. Time to get honest. “I work for a—”
The fire alarm cut him off, hitting like a wall. A single sustained tone, ear-splitting and industrial, followed half a second later by the strobes kicking on along the ceiling in staggered white bursts.
The room froze. The music cut out. Conversations stopped mid-sentence, replaced by the disoriented silence of three hundred people trying to figure out whether this was real.
A woman near the bar grabbed her husband’s arm.
The DJ reached for his equipment. Someone on the dance floor beside them laughed nervously, still trying to figure out if it was a mistake.
Then the sprinklers opened up.
The water came down hard and cold. Not a mist, not a trickle. A full-pressure deluge that soaked everyone in under three seconds.
Fallon pulled back from him, her hand leaving his chest as she looked up at the ceiling.
Cold water hit her face and she flinched, blinking hard against it.
Around them, the room erupted. Glasses hit the floor.
The DJ’s system shorted with a loud pop and the music died, leaving nothing but the alarm and the hiss of water and three hundred people trying to move in every direction at once.
Isaac’s body made the switch before his mind finished processing the sound. Party over. Work now.
He took Fallon’s arm and pulled her close enough to be heard over the alarm. “Get outside. Main entrance, straight ahead, don’t stop.” He pointed toward the front of the venue where the doors were already propped open, people flooding through.
“What about—”
“I’ll find you. Go.” He knew chances were likely she would slip through his hands again, but he couldn’t worry about that now. He had to find out what was going on.
She hesitated for a half second—he saw her eyes sweep the room, cataloging something he didn’t have time to read—and then she turned and moved toward the entrance. Fast, controlled. Not panicking, despite the fact that almost everyone else was.
He turned away and pulled his phone out of his jacket pocket and hit the speed dial for Peter Valbracht, Zodiac’s computer guru. The call connected on the second ring.
“Hey, Isaac. What’s—”
“I need a fast answer. I’m at the Boston Arts Alliance fundraiser, South Street warehouse district. Fire alarm and full sprinkler activation. Is this real?”
Peter was already typing. Isaac could hear it through the phone—the rapid click of keys that meant Peter had at least two screens up and was pulling data faster than most people could read it.
“Give me ten seconds.”
Isaac used those ten seconds. A woman in heels had gone down near the auction tables, her ankle turned on the wet floor. He crossed to her in four strides, took her arm, and helped her up. She was shaking, mascara running, clutching a handbag to her chest like a life preserver.
“Straight ahead. Follow the crowd to the front doors.”
She nodded and went. A man was trying to go back toward the bar—his wife’s coat, his phone, something he’d left—and Isaac caught his shoulder and turned him around.
“Everything stays. You go out.”
Peter’s voice came back. “Boston FD dispatch shows an active fire call at your address. Engine company en route, ETA three minutes. Looks like it originated in the basement level—mechanical or electrical, but it’s real. Not a drill, not a false alarm. Get out of the building.”
“Copy.” Isaac hung up.
The crowd was thinning. Most people had funneled through the front entrance by now, but the back half of the room was still a mess—overturned chairs, shattered glasses, water coming down in sheets. The lighting had gone to emergency backup, casting everything in a flat, institutional glow.
He moved through it methodically. This was the part of his brain that worked best: clear objective, real stakes, no ambiguity.
No cocktail napkins, no small talk, no pretending to be less than he was.
He checked the bar area, found it empty.
Checked the alcove near the windows where he’d first seen Fallon tonight.
Empty. The DJ had abandoned his setup, cables and equipment sitting in an inch of water.
He was heading toward the main exit when he saw her.
She was in the hallway near the private gallery rooms. Standing just outside the second door—the one that led to the small exhibition space—half-turned toward it, her hand on the frame.
She was soaked. Her hair had come loose from the twist and hung against her neck. The dark dress clung to her shoulders and arms, and the water on her skin caught the emergency lights. She looked disoriented. Lost.
“Fallon.”
She turned. A flash of calculation crossed her face—quick, controlled, before disappearing. Then she was just a wet, cold woman standing in a hallway she shouldn’t be in.
“I, uh, got turned around,” she said.
“It’s this way. Come on.”
He took her arm again, the same way he had on the dance floor but with zero romance in it now. Her skin was cold and slick under his hand. He guided her back through the main room, around the overturned furniture and the standing water, and out through the front doors into the night air.
The street was chaos in a different key.
Two fire trucks had already arrived, lights strobing red and white against the brick facades of the surrounding buildings. A police cruiser was angled across the intersection, blocking traffic in both directions.
The crowd from the fundraiser had spilled onto the sidewalk and into the street—three hundred people in cocktail attire, soaked to the bone, some of them still holding drinks they’d somehow carried out.
Everyone was on their phone. A woman was crying near the curb.
Two men in suits were arguing about whose car was blocked in.
Fallon hugged her arms across her chest. She was shivering. Her makeup had washed away almost completely—the sculpted brows, the dark lip, all of it dissolved in the sprinkler water.
What was left was a face he hadn’t seen before. Younger. Her eyes were brighter without the dark liner framing them, and the angles of her cheekbones and jaw were more pronounced. He liked this version better.
“What?” she asked.
Your face is different,” he said. “The makeup. It’s gone.”
She touched her cheek with the back of her hand, a reflex, then dropped it. “I probably look like a drowned raccoon.”
“Not at all. You look different, but it’s good.”
Her eyes stayed on his for a beat. Then she looked away, back at the crowd, at the fire trucks, at the cops now pushing people further from the building. A paramedic was checking the woman who’d been crying.
“I need to get out of here,” she said. Not to him specifically. More like a decision being made out loud.
Isaac looked at the street. Traffic was gridlocked in both directions. The crowd had swallowed the sidewalk for a full block. He pulled out his phone, checked the rideshare apps—surge pricing through the roof and nothing available within forty minutes.
“Nothing’s moving,” he said. “It’s going to be like this for a while.”
She was scanning the street too, her jaw tight. She had to be freezing. The dress she was wearing wasn’t made for standing outside in fifty-degree air soaking wet.
“My hotel is a couple blocks from here,” he said. “You can dry off, get warm. I’ll wait in the hall if you want. Or the lobby. Or the sidewalk. I’ll stand wherever makes you comfortable.”
“No.”
He hadn’t expected anything less, to be honest. “Okay.”
“I don’t go to hotel rooms with men I’ve danced with twice.”
“That’s a reasonable policy.”
A uniformed cop was moving down the sidewalk toward them, herding the crowd further back. “Folks, I need everyone to move to the other side of the street. We’ve got more units coming through.”