Chapter 9
Chapter Nine
Isaac closed the office door and sat down at the desk that came with the rental.
Pressboard, wobbly, a scratch across the top that someone had tried to cover with a strip of packing tape.
The whole space had the feel of a place that existed between tenants—functional, temporary, belonging to nobody in particular.
He pulled up the video call. Peter Valbracht’s face filled the screen a few seconds later, the familiar glow of multiple monitors reflected in his glasses. Behind him, the clean lines of Zodiac’s headquarters. Peter’s domain. The place where data went in messy and came out organized.
“I need a favor,” Isaac said. “Off the books, like last time.”
Peter’s typing slowed. “Last time being the Boston woman.”
“Yeah. And actually, this time, too.”
A beat. Peter leaned back in his chair. After Fallon had vanished from that hotel room in Boston, Isaac had gone to Peter. Framed it clean—that he needed more info on a woman he’d noticed at two events who’d caught his attention.
Professional curiosity, nothing more. Didn’t mention the hotel room, the night together, any of it. Just asked Peter to see what he could find.
Peter had found nothing. No last name, no digital trail, no social media footprint. A woman named Fallon who existed at two events and nowhere else. Isaac had thanked him, dropped it, and never brought it up again.
Until now.
“She’s in Austin,” Isaac said. “Showed up at the event we were working.”
Peter’s eyebrows rose. “Same woman, different city. That’s interesting.”
“I need you to pull footage from last night. The charity auction at the Lockwood estate.”
Peter was already typing. Isaac waited. The office was quiet—his team wouldn’t arrive for another hour, and the rental space didn’t have the ambient hum of Zodiac’s headquarters. Just the faint rattle of an air conditioning unit that sounded like it was running on spite.
“Got it,” Peter said. “Feeds are up. What am I looking for?”
“Red dress. Dark hair, curling against her neck. She would have come in through the main entrance somewhere around eight, eight-fifteen.”
Peter scrubbed through the footage. Isaac watched him work. Three screens, fingers moving between keyboard and mouse with the efficiency of someone who’d been doing this since before most people knew what cybersecurity meant.
“There.” Peter froze the frame. “Eight-twelve. This her?”
Isaac leaned toward the screen. The angle was from above, the image grainy but clear enough. Fallon, mid-stride, her head angled down and to the left as she passed the entry camera. “That’s her.”
“Okay, let me track her through the other feeds.” More typing. “Nothing. Just like Boston. She’s looking the other way at exactly the moment she crosses the sight line of the secondary camera near the coat check.”
Isaac sat with that. At the Boston events, Peter had pulled what footage they could get. The coverage hadn’t been great, and Fallon hadn’t appeared clearly in any of it. Isaac had chalked it up to angles and bad luck.
It hadn’t occurred to him to wonder whether the bad luck was engineered on her part. But three events across two cities, where none of the normal security cameras caught her face? Not a coincidence.
“Do you think she’s deliberately hiding her face for some reason?” Peter asked. “Do you suspect her of something?”
Suspect? No.
Actively aware of minor criminal activity? Hell, yes.
“At this point, I’m just trying to figure out what she’s all about. Can you check whether anything unusual was reported at either of the Boston events? Incidents, complaints, anything flagged by venue security or the hosts.”
More typing. “Nothing. Both events came back clean. No reports, no complaints. As far as the record shows, nothing happened at those events at all.”
So either she hadn’t stolen anything at them, or she was good enough that nobody knew.
Peter waited. Isaac could feel the pause—the space where the next logical step was for him to tell Peter what he actually knew. What he’d seen with his own eyes last night, standing thirty feet away.
I watched her lift a money clip out of a man’s pocket.
Peter would do what Peter always did—cross-reference it, flag it, build a file. It would reach Ian. It would reach the broader team. And Fallon would stop being a woman Isaac was trying to understand and become a case number in Zodiac’s system.
He wasn’t ready for that. The reason sat in a place he didn’t want to examine too closely. Some part of him—the same part that had let her walk out with his watch last night—wanted to keep this his. His puzzle. His problem. His to figure out before anyone else got their hands on it.
“See if the Austin footage gives you a clean enough image to run,” he said. “I still don’t have a last name.”
“I’ll work it. Anything else?”
“That’s it for now. And Peter—just between us for now. In case this is nothing.”
Peter studied him through the screen. Whatever he saw, he kept his questions to himself. “You got it.”
The call ended. Isaac sat with the blank screen for a long moment, Fallon’s face springing to his mind.
Four months. He’d woken up in that Boston hotel room reaching for her before his eyes were open. His hand had found cool sheets and an empty pillow, and he’d known before he was fully conscious that she was gone.
Not in the bathroom. Not getting coffee. Gone.
He’d lain there for a while. The room had smelled like hotel soap and sex, and the indent in the pillow beside him was still there, and he’d stared at it like it owed him something.
He’d had one-night stands before. He knew how those felt the morning after—satisfying, uncomplicated, already fading.
This one hadn’t faded. The weight of her against him in the shower.
The sound she’d made when he’d found the right angle.
Her okay when he’d asked her to stay—quick and unguarded, like the word had slipped out before she could catch it. And then she’d left anyway.
He still didn’t know what kept him up at night—the okay or the empty bed.
He closed the laptop.
The outer door banged open hard enough to hit the wall behind it.
“Jesus Christ.” Ryder Sutton’s voice carried from the hallway before the rest of him appeared in the doorframe. He stood there, duffel bag over one shoulder, sunglasses pushed up on his head, looking at the rental office like it owed him money. “This shithole is where we work?”
“Welcome to paradise.”
“This isn’t paradise. This is where paradise comes to die.”
Ryder walked in and did a slow turn. The main room had four desks, none of which matched. A coffee maker that looked like it had survived a fire. A window that faced the alley. Fluorescent lights overhead that buzzed at a frequency designed to erode the human will to live.
“Hell Baxter, I’ve slept in shipping containers that had more charm than this.”
“It’s temporary.”
“So is food poisoning. Doesn’t mean you enjoy it.” Ryder dropped his duffel on the nearest desk and opened a drawer. Stared into it. Closed it. “There’s a dead cockroach in that drawer.”
“Don’t use that drawer.”
“Wasn’t planning on it.” He pulled out the desk chair, inspected the seat, and sat down with the expression of a man lowering himself into a cold bath. “Ian know about this place?”
“Ian approved this place.”
“Ian DeRose has never been to this place. His billionaire self would take one look at it then promptly relocate to the Four Seasons.”
They both knew that wasn’t true about Ian. Yeah, the man may have more money than many small countries, but he didn’t mind getting dirty. “Maybe I’ll invite him so we can get an upgrade.”
Ryder leaned back. The chair groaned under him. “I’m going to need a better coffee maker. And a chair that isn’t trying to kill me. And possibly a tetanus shot.”
Isaac almost smiled. Ryder ran hot on first impressions and cooled down fast. By tomorrow he’d have the coffee maker replaced, the cockroach drawer taped shut, and a system for everything.
That was how he operated—complain first, fix second, never mention it again.
At the end of the day, he was hell of an operative.
“Glad you’re here,” Isaac said. And meant it.
Ryder’s face shifted. The theatrics dropped, and what was underneath was steady and ready. “Brief me.”
Isaac pulled up the case file on his laptop and turned the screen so Ryder could see it.
“David Endicott. Biotech CEO, went public six months ago. We’ve been on the detail five days.
The email threats have been escalating—specifics about his home, his gym, his travel schedule. Each one more detailed than the last.”
“How many total?”
“Seven over three months. The first few were vague. The last three referenced his home address and named specific locations he frequents.”
“Any physical surveillance detected?”
“Not yet. But the pattern’s trending.”
Ryder nodded, processing. “What came in this morning?”
Isaac pulled up the email. This was why Ryder was here. “New message, received at six a.m. Same encrypted routing as the others. But this one referenced Endicott’s wife by name. First time for that.”
Ryder’s jaw tightened. He leaned forward and read the screen. “Laura Endicott.”
“Correct.”
“That’s an escalation.”
“Significant one. The previous emails focused on Endicott himself. Bringing his wife into it changes the threat profile. This isn’t just anger anymore. Someone is researching his personal life, building a picture, and they want him to know it.”
“Is Endicott’s wife aware of the threats?”
“She knows about the security detail. She doesn’t know the specifics of the emails. Endicott wants to keep it that way.”
“That’s his call, but it’s a bad one. If she doesn’t know what to watch for, she can’t protect herself.”
“Agreed. I’ll push him on it.”
Ryder sat back. “What do you need from me?”
“Advance work. I want you running the upcoming event venues before we get there. Sight lines, entry points, camera coverage, staff access. Endicott’s got three events in the next two weeks, and I need every room mapped before he walks into it.”
“You want me doing venue recon while you float the events.”
“I want the best tactical assessment we can get on every space, and you’re the best at reading a room cold. I’ll manage the floor operations during the events themselves.”
Ryder studied him. Isaac held his gaze. The assignment was sound—Ryder’s eye for spatial analysis was sharper than anyone else on the team, and freeing Isaac to move during the events was the right call tactically. Both of those things were true.
What was also true, and what Isaac wasn’t saying, was that he wanted to be free to move at those events for reasons that had nothing to do with David Endicott.
Somewhere in Austin, Fallon was working the same charity circuit, hitting the same rooms. If she showed up at another event, he needed to be relatively unencumbered.
“Sounds good.” Ryder nodded. “Send me the venue list and I’ll start tonight.”
“Should already be in your email.”
“Is Peter running background on the email sender in parallel? If we’re waiting for this guy to escalate past emails, we’re already behind.”
“Peter’s on it. If there’s anything to be cracked electronically, he’ll do it.”
Ryder nodded. He pulled out his phone, opened a notes app, and started building his own task list. Isaac watched him work for a moment, then turned back to his own screen.
They worked through the venue specs for the next event together—the Thornton Foundation dinner, a seated affair at a downtown hotel with a rooftop reception beforehand.
Ryder was talking about elevator access to the rooftop.
Isaac was looking at the floor plan on his screen.
The rooftop layout. The bar placement. The sight lines from the terrace railing to the main entrance below.
A red dress. Gray eyes scanning the crowd.
“You with me?”
Isaac blinked. Ryder was watching him, phone lowered, one eyebrow raised.
“Yeah.” He sat up straighter. “Elevator access. There’s a service elevator on the north side, staff only. I’ll get the key count from hotel management.”
“I asked if Endicott’s wife will be at the Thornton Foundation dinner Thursday.”
Shit. He’d missed that question entirely, caught up in gray eyes. “She will. She’s on the host committee.”
Ryder held his gaze for a beat longer than necessary. Isaac could feel it—the assessment, the quiet cataloging. Ryder was too smart and too observant to miss the drift, and too smart to push.
“All right,” Ryder said, and looked back at his phone. “I’ll factor her into the advance work.”
The moment passed. They moved on. Ryder asked about the team’s rotation schedule, and Isaac walked him through it.
It was easy. Familiar. Two operators building an operation the way they’d built dozens before—piece by piece, detail by detail, the kind of work that left no room for ambiguity.
Isaac leaned into it. The Endicott detail was real. The threat was real. His team needed him focused, and he was focused. This was the work he’d chosen, the life he’d built, and it mattered.
But he’d sat across from Peter a little while ago and chosen his words like a man with something to hide. He’d built Ryder’s assignment around a gap he needed in his own schedule, and the reason for that gap had nothing to do with David Endicott.
Somewhere in this city, a woman who avoided cameras like she’d been doing it her whole life was working the same rooms he was, but for an entirely different purpose. All he could hope was that he’d see her again.
What he was going to do with her if he did, he had no idea.