Chapter 8
Chapter Eight
Fallon’s hands shook against the lock of her apartment door.
It took three tries to get the key in, and the shaking bothered her more than the reason for it. She got the door open, shut it behind her, turned the deadbolt, and stood with her back to it for a count of ten before she trusted her legs to carry her any further.
The apartment was dark and quiet, exactly the way she had left it. She crossed to the kitchen counter and emptied her clutch onto it.
Money clip. Cocktail napkin. Phone. A receipt she didn’t remember picking up.
And Isaac’s watch.
She stared at it.
Four months she had spent putting him away, and he had been right where she’d left him until tonight. A man from Boston with old money in his accent and the kind of suite at the kind of hotel that confirmed every assumption she had let herself make about him.
She’d interpreted working as code for the soft obligations of inherited money. Galas. Charity boards. The polite version of a job that had no actual duties.
He had been kind, and he had been funny, and he had been good in bed, and she had let herself have one night she shouldn’t have because she would be gone the next morning and he would never be anything but a story she didn’t tell.
Then tonight happened.
She almost jumped when the phone lit up on the counter beside the watch. Shit. Cassandra. Fallon was nearly an hour late on her check-in.
She answered. “Hey.”
“You didn’t call.” Cassandra’s voice was calm, which meant she’d been worried for at least thirty minutes and had already cycled through the worst of it into forced composure. “How’d it go? Anything unexpected?”
Fallon bit back a slightly hysterical laugh. “Unexpected. Yeah, you could say that.”
“What? Oh my God. Did someone see you? Was it cops? Tell me.”
Fallon braced her palms against the counter on either side of the watch and made herself say it. “The man from Boston was there tonight.”
A beat of silence on the other end. Fallon could picture Cassandra at her desk, both hands lifting off the keyboards, eyes going wide behind her glasses.
“The dance-floor man,” Cassandra said carefully. That was all Fallon had told her about Isaac.
“Yes.”
“He’s in Austin.”
“Yes. He’s in Austin.”
“Did he see you?”
“Worse. He saw me work.”
The calm evaporated.
“He saw you. He saw you work. Define work. What exactly did he see? Did he see the approach? Did he see the lift? Did he see you leave? How close was he? Was he recording? Does he have photos? Has he told anyone? Why was he at your event? How did he find you in Austin? How did he know where you’d be?
Is he investigating you? Is he working with someone? Is this a coordinated—”
“Cass. Stop. Slow down.”
“Don’t tell me to slow down. Someone saw you steal, Fallon. That’s not a slow-down situation. That is the opposite of a slow-down situation.”
“He’s not what I thought he was.”
“What? What does that mean?”
“In Boston, I assumed he was old money attending events. He’s not.” She paused. Cassandra was going to absolutely freak out, but there was no way around telling her. “He’s private security. He had an earpiece, a team, everything.”
The silence that followed was worse than the rapid-fire questions. Fallon could hear Cassandra processing, the particular quiet of a mind running scenarios faster than language could keep up.
“Private security,” Cassandra said. “At a charity auction. With a team and comms.”
“Yes.”
“And he saw you lift something.”
“The money clip from the target. He was across the room, and he saw the whole thing.”
Cassandra sucked in a breath. They had planned the money clip theft carefully, particularly selecting that since it was something the target liked to flash around.
“And then what? Dance man detained you? Called it in? Confronted you? Why are you not in handcuffs right now?”
Sigh. “He asked me to dance.”
Another silence. Longer this time.
“Dance man asked you to dance.”
“Well, he cut me off before I could get to the exit, and then he asked me to dance. We talked. He told me he saw what I did. He said he works for a firm called Zodiac Tactical and that petty theft isn’t his problem.
He said as long as I stay away from his client, what I do in the room isn’t his concern. ”
“And you believed him?”
“He let me leave.”
“That doesn’t mean he’s not building a case.
That doesn’t mean he hasn’t flagged you.
That doesn’t mean there isn’t a file with your face in it sitting on someone’s desk right now.
Letting you leave could be strategy. Let the target think she’s clear, watch where she goes, build the pattern before—”
This wasn’t going to go over well. “I took his watch. Lifted it.”
Dead silence.
“You. Lifted. His. Watch.” The words came out flat, each one dropped like a stone into still water.
“On the way out. He’d just told me I wasn’t very good at my job. So I lifted his watch off his wrist while we were dancing and held it up from across the room.”
“You stole from the security operative.” Fallon could almost picture Cassandra pulling at her own hair. “The security operative who just caught you stealing.”
“Yes.”
“Just to make sure I understand: the professional, trained, private-security operative with a team and comms and everything. You stole from that person.”
“Seemed like the right move at the time.” Because he’d pissed her off. Worse, he’d underestimated her. Bad at her job.
“Why? Why, Fallon? Why would you do that?”
Fallon stared at the kitchen table. The laminate had a scratch near the edge that she’d been meaning to cover with something. “I don’t know. It was playful.”
“Playful.” Cassandra’s voice went up half an octave.
“Playful is how people describe things right before they get arrested. There is nothing playful about stealing from someone who works in private security. Nothing. There is no playful column in any spreadsheet I have ever made for you. I do not have a playful tab.”
Fallon opened her mouth and closed it.
“You had a clean exit. He told you he wasn’t going to pursue it. All you had to do was walk out the door. Instead you showed off? Proved a point? To the man with the earpiece and the tactical team? Why?”
Fallon’s chest tightened. She could feel the corner she’d backed herself into.
The word playful made zero sense in any operational context, and Cassandra knew it.
There was no way to explain why she’d stayed on that dance floor, why she’d taken the watch, why none of her normal instincts had kicked in, without telling the truth.
She pressed her thumb against the edge of the table and exhaled through her nose.
“We slept together,” she said. “In Boston. After the fundraiser with the fire. I went back to his hotel room, and we spent the night together. I left before he woke up.”
The quiet on the other end of the line was different this time. Not the rapid-calculation silence of threat assessment. This was Cassandra recalibrating everything.
“That’s all you’re getting,” Fallon added. “No details.”
“I don’t need details.” Another beat. “But was it good?”
“Cass.” Fallon had to laugh. “That is the opposite of no details. But yes.” Way too good.
“And tonight was the first time you’ve seen him since.”
“Yes.”
“You didn’t mention any of this in Boston.”
“No.”
Cassandra let that sit. When she spoke again, the questions were still sharp, still operational, but filtered through a completely different understanding of the situation.
“So this isn’t a security professional who caught a thief and chose not to act.
This is a man you slept with who caught you stealing and chose not to act. ”
“Yes.”
“That’s worse in some ways.”
“I know.”
“And less dangerous in others.”
“I know that, too.”
“Okay.” A pause, gentler. “Are you okay?”
The question was so unexpected, and so kind, that Fallon’s throat tightened. “I’m fine.”
“Liar.”
“I will be fine. Just work, Cass. I need you to work.”
“I’m working. I’m working, look, listen, I’m typing. What’s the firm’s name, again?”
Fallon stretched trying to eliminate aches that never fully went away. “Zodiac Tactical.”
The keys started up again, slower this time. “Sit down somewhere. Or don’t. Whatever you need.”
“I’m leaning on the counter.”
“You’re not on the floor?”
“Not on the floor.”
“Wow,” Cassandra said. “Character growth.”
A breath of laughter escaped Fallon despite herself. “Shut up.”
“Never. Hush, I’m digging.”
Fallon hushed. She listened to Cassandra’s two keyboards going at once and watched the under-cabinet light catch the leather of the watchband, and waited.
A long minute passed. Then another. Cassandra muttered something to herself that sounded like oh, that’s clever, and then that’s annoying, and then went quiet again.
“Their cybersecurity is annoyingly good,” she said finally.
“Whose.”
“Zodiac Tactical. He’s wearing their colors and running their playbook, and they have a network architecture I genuinely respect, which is upsetting.
” More keys. “Anything I access from here gets silently logged. The data on the perimeter is almost certainly a honeypot. I could break it if I wanted to, but I would burn six months of operational silence to do it, and the data on the other side is probably manufactured anyway. Whoever set this up has done it before. I am backing out without leaving fingerprints. There. Done.”
“You can’t get in.”
“I can get in. I’m choosing not to. Don’t insult me.”
“Sorry.”
“Forgiven.” Cassandra’s voice had warmed by a degree.
The work was steadying her. “Public information instead. Zodiac Tactical. Founded by a man named Ian DeRose, ex-Navy SEAL. Legitimate firm. Serious clients. They do executive protection, threat assessment, tactical security for people who can afford not to be killed. Not a rent-a-cop operation, Fal. These are the real ones.”
“Define real.”