Chapter 10
Chapter Ten
This place was a damned circus.
Almost literally. The fundraiser sprawled across the grounds of a limestone estate on the edge of the hill country, three hundred guests in black tie and masquerade masks milling between open-air bars and cocktail tables scattered across a lawn manicured to within an inch of its life.
Acrobats spun on silks between the trees.
Fire dancers traced bright arcs against the dark.
Thousands of lights were woven through the hedgerows and draped across the pergolas and strung between iron posts driven into the grass, turning the whole property into something between a carnival and a fever dream.
At the far south end, a tall boxwood hedge maze rose dark and dense against the tree line, its entrance marked by iron posts with unlit lanterns.
The masks made everything easier.
Fallon moved through the crowd and let the masquerade do half her work for her. Every face around her was already altered—feathered, gilded, beaded, obscured. No need to reshape her own with contouring and prosthetic adhesive when the dress code required concealment.
She’d chosen a simple mask, black with silver threading at the edges, fitted close enough that it wouldn’t shift if she had to move fast. Her hair was pinned tight under a dark headpiece.
Her black silk pantsuit was elegant enough not to draw attention for being too casual, but gave her freedom to move.
She loved the freedom of not having to worry about cameras but hated every other single thing about this event.
All of it—the lights, the acrobats, the masks, the grotesque beauty of the evening—was paid for with money that was supposed to help families whose children were dying.
Chemo Money Asshole’s foundation at its finest. Fallon was so looking forward to taking this bastard down. The money clip had been just a taste.
She rotated her right shoulder as she walked. A low-grade stiffness had settled into the joint sometime in the last hour, the kind of deep tightness that meant the tissue was unhappy but not yet in revolt. She noted it, filed it, and kept moving.
Cassandra had confirmed no Zodiac Tactical presence tonight. Endicott wasn’t invited—the biotech crowd and the charity circuit overlapped, but not here, not at this event. Isaac’s team had no reason to be anywhere near this property.
She’d forced herself not to think about him on the drive over, and she’d mostly succeeded. Mostly.
The building at the center of the estate was a stone and glass structure that served as the Asshole’s foundation headquarters.
Guests were kept outside, but what Fallon needed was inside.
Two guards flanked the main entrance, and she’d clocked a third at the service door on the east side.
All three wore the same black polo with the foundation logo, all three had radios, and none of them looked like they’d been hired for their critical thinking skills.
This was a big play. Not a wallet lift, not a watch off a wrist. What she needed was inside that building, on the Asshole’s office computer—financial records that would prove the donations raised at events exactly like this one went straight into his accounts.
Cassandra needed the data to build the exposure case. Without it, he was just another rich man with a charity. With it, he was a criminal who’d stolen from families with dying children and bought himself a lifestyle with their grief.
Her shoulder twinged again. She rolled it once more and let it go.
Worth it. All of it would be worth it when Chemo Money Asshole’s face was on every news outlet in the state.
She circulated for another twenty minutes, tracking the guards’ patterns.
The two at the main entrance stayed put.
The one at the service door was the weak link.
He kept drifting toward the fire dancers on the east lawn, turning his body away from the door for ten or fifteen seconds at a stretch before remembering he had a job and snapping back.
Fallon waited. She positioned herself near a cluster of guests watching an acrobat descend from a silk cord in a slow spiral, close enough to the east side of the building that the move would take less than eight seconds.
The fire dancer on the lawn launched into something dramatic. Twin poi, both lit, spinning in wide arcs that drew gasps from the nearest guests. The guard at the service door took a few steps away and turned to watch.
Fallon moved.
She crossed the gap between the crowd and the building in six seconds.
The service door had a keypad lock, but the code was the foundation’s EIN number reversed—Cassandra had pulled it from a vendor invoice that the Asshole’s event coordinator had been careless enough to email on an unsecured server. Four digits, green light, door open.
She slipped inside and eased it shut behind her.
The interior was dim. Emergency lighting only.
Pale strips along the baseboards cast just enough glow to navigate.
She stood still for a five count, letting her eyes adjust, listening.
The building was quiet. Climate control hummed somewhere overhead.
Through the walls came the muffled thump of music and the distant roar of the crowd.
She moved down the corridor. The Asshole’s office was on the second floor, northeast corner. Cassandra had pulled the floor plan from a permit filing with the county. The stairs sat at the end of the hall, second door on the right.
The stairwell was dark. Fallon took the steps by feel, her hand trailing the railing, her weight distributed to avoid any creak from the treads. At the top, she paused again. Listened. Nothing.
The office door was unlocked.
She almost hesitated at that. Unlocked meant either confidence or carelessness, and with this man it was probably both. He didn’t think anyone would get past his guards. He didn’t think anyone would try.
She crossed to the desk. The computer was in sleep mode, the monitor dark.
She touched the mouse and the screen lit up—password prompt, as expected.
She typed in the string Cassandra had pulled from a breached credential database three days ago.
The man ran a multimillion-dollar fraud and reused the same password across six accounts.
He deserved to be taken down for that alone.
As the desktop loaded she plugged in the USB drive she’d brought, opened the file manager, and navigated to the directory Cassandra had identified from the metadata in the vendor invoices.
Financial records. Donor databases. Transfer logs.
All of it was there, organized in folders with names like Q3 Disbursements and Foundation Operations, as if what he was doing was legitimate.
The progress bar crawled. Fallon watched it, counting seconds, her pulse steady and her breathing controlled. Thirty percent. Fifty. The files were larger than expected—spreadsheets with years of data, PDFs of bank statements, scanned documents she hadn’t anticipated.
A radio crackled somewhere below her. Close—down the hallway. A guard’s voice came through, muffled by the floor between them. “Just doing a walk-through. Back in five.”
She looked at the progress bar. Seventy-two percent.
She couldn’t pull the drive. An incomplete transfer meant corrupted files, and leaving signs she’d been here. She pressed her thumbnail into the pad of her index finger hard enough to leave a mark and watched the bar crawl.
Eighty-one percent.
A door opened in the hallway. Shit. The guard was checking each room.
Ninety percent.
She scanned the office. There weren’t many places to hide. No curtains, the opening under the desk didn’t have a modesty panel so she couldn’t go there.
But there was built-in cabinetry that ran along the wall beneath the windows—a low mahogany credenza with brass-handled doors, the kind meant for storing files and supplies.
She killed the monitor. The transfer would continue without it. She rushed over to the credenza. The interior was maybe two feet wide, eighteen inches deep, and two feet tall. Half the shelves had been removed, leaving office supplies stacked on the bottom.
No normal person could fit inside it. Fortunately, that didn’t apply to Fallon.
She swept the supplies to one side, then backed into the cabinet feet first. Her hips fit. Barely. She drew her knees to her chest and folded forward over them, compressing her torso against her thighs until her ribs ached and her right shoulder sent a sharp flare of protest through the joint.
Her spine curved into a shape that would have been impossible. She reached out and closed the cabinet door.
Total darkness. The brass handle clicked shut against her fingertips. She stopped breathing.
A few seconds later, the office door opened.
A flashlight beam swept the room. She could see thin lines of light moving through the seams of the cabinet doors—across the ceiling, down the walls, across the desk. The light paused on the desk. Held there. She heard him take a step into the room.
Shit. If he went over and messed with the computer there was no way he wouldn’t see that files were being downloaded onto the USB drive. She pressed her hand against the cabin door. Her only chance to get away would be right as the guard figured out what was going on.
She replayed the layout of the building in her head—windows she could go through, other possible exits. This was why Cassandra made sure Fallon always knew as much as possible about the locations she was hitting. There were always unknown factors that could cause a situation to go south.
The guard finding that USB drive was south-pole south.
But the light swept once more, then the door closed.
She didn’t move. She listened to him check the room across the hall, then another. Then the stairwell creaked again, heading down. A radio crackle, muffled now. He was gone.
She pushed the cabinet door open and unfolded herself one joint at a time. Her right shoulder had stiffened further in the compressed position, and her left knee buckled for a half second when she stood. She caught herself on the edge of the desk and waited for the joint to hold.
She knew her body. It could do almost unnatural things when asked, but there was always a price.
She turned the monitor back on. Transfer complete.
She pulled the drive and crossed to the office door.
Down the stairwell in the dark, every step careful on a knee that was still deciding whether to cooperate.
The ground floor was empty. She reached the service door, eased it open, checked the gap.
The fire dancer was still performing. The guard was back at his post, but his attention was on the crowd.
She slipped out behind him. Blended into the edge of the audience before the next rotation of the poi was complete.
The drive was in the hidden pocket she’d sewn into the lining of her outfit, pressed flat against her hip. She picked up a glass of champagne from a passing tray and took a sip she didn’t want.
Done. The job was done, and no one had seen a thing.
She gave herself thirty seconds of satisfaction. Let it sit in her chest, warm and sharp. They were now one huge step closer to taking Chemo Money Asshole down.
She started moving toward the front of the property, mapping her exit route through the crowd. Once she was out, she’d be home in forty minutes, and have the drive uploaded to Cassandra’s server by midnight. All in all, a good day’s work.
She started wandering toward the exit, scooting past a couple and bumping into someone behind her she hadn’t even realized was there. A hand grasped her elbow to steady her.
“So sorry,” she muttered, gently trying to disengage her arm without making a big deal about it. Blending in was always the most important thing.
But the fingers didn’t let go. Instead, the masked man behind her leaned his head toward her ear.
“You owe me a watch.”