Chapter 11 #2
She cut left through a passage so narrow that the hedge walls brushed both shoulders.
Fifteen feet in, a gap opened at the base of the wall where the boxwood hadn’t filled completely—a space maybe eighteen inches high and two feet wide.
She dropped to her stomach and rolled through it, emerging on the other side in a parallel corridor.
She was on her feet and moving before the dirt had settled.
The maze was tight, intricate, designed for daytime wandering with a map and a glass of wine. In the dark it was something else entirely. Dead ends materialized out of nothing. Corridors doubled back on themselves. The walls were too high to see over and too dense to see through.
She knew where every dead end was. She knew which corridors connected, which ones looped, and which ones led to the four exits—three false ones that doubled back to the entrance and one real one, a cast iron gate in the northeast corner.
Isaac didn’t know any of it.
She could hear him working through it. Multiple curses. A pause at a junction. Choosing, committing, finding a dead end and reversing. He was methodical, systematic, not panicking.
But she was faster here. She knew the shortcuts, the gaps, the places where the hedges thinned enough for a body her size to slip through. She looped behind him twice, passing through a corridor he’d already cleared while he pushed deeper into a section she’d already left.
A flashlight beam cut through the dark from somewhere near the entrance. The guards had heard movement. She pressed herself flat against the hedge wall and held still.
The beam swept past her corridor and kept moving. It found Isaac instead—a man in a jacket, mid-stride, caught in the light.
“Sir! The maze is closed. You need to come back to the entrance.”
She heard Isaac say something calm and measured, buying time, playing the apologetic guest who’d wandered in without realizing. The guards were focused on him now.
The trained operative was the one they’d caught. The thief was invisible.
She moved through the last corridor, around the final turn, and there was the gate.
Cast iron, eight feet high, spiked finials along the top. Two doors that met in the center, held shut by a heavy chain looped through the bars and secured with a padlock. Beyond it, the dark tree line and the service road where she could disappear.
She gripped the bars and pulled. The chain held. The gap where the two doors met was narrow—barely wider than her head. She turned sideways and pressed herself into it. Her left shoulder hit the iron bar first.
Too narrow. Her body wouldn’t compress enough with her shoulder in its socket.
Behind her, a voice. Not the guards.
“Fallon. Stop.”
She turned. Isaac was at the end of the corridor, ten feet away. She didn’t know how he’d slipped the guards, but he had. His jacket had dirt on one sleeve and a thin scratch ran along his jaw from a branch. He wasn’t winded, but he was still. Coiled.
The easy charm stripped completely from his handsome face.
“You’re going to come with me,” he said. “We’re going to walk out of here together, and we’re going to have a real conversation. No vanishing. No more games.”
She looked at him. Then she looked at the gate.
She had the drive on her. If he searched her, if he detained her, if he brought her to anyone, the Asshole walked free and the families with sick children never got justice. Two hundred families. Two hundred.
She wasn’t letting this job die in a hedge maze.
“I can’t do that,” she said.
“I’m afraid you’re going to have to. You’re not getting past me again, and there’s certainly no way you’re fitting through that gap.”
He didn’t understand. How could he? Very few people in the world did.
She turned back to the gate and braced her right hand against the iron bar. She tucked her left arm across her body, found the angle she needed and sucked in a breath.
She pulled.
The dislocation was immediate and total.
Her left shoulder separated with a wet, grinding pop that she felt in her teeth.
Pain exploded through her chest and down her arm—white-hot, blinding, so enormous that her vision went dark at the edges and she heard herself make a sound that was barely human.
A choked gasp ripped out of her before she could clamp her jaw shut.
Worse. So much worse than the other times. The stiffness she’d been tracking all night had made the joint resistant, and forcing it past that resistance would cost her something she’d feel for days.
She didn’t stop.
Her left arm hung dead against her side, the shoulder collapsed inward, and she turned and pressed herself into the gap.
The iron bars dug into her ribs, her spine, the soft tissue below her collarbone.
It was a tight fit but the rest of her body was more narrow than her shoulders, and with the dislocation, she fit.
She pushed through. The bars scraped against her shoulder blade and caught on the silk of her suit and she kept going because there was no choice.
She made it through.
The other side. Open ground. Dark trees.
She caught herself against the gate with her right hand, bent double, breathing in ragged pulls that tasted like iron. Her left arm was still hanging. She had to fix it now. Right now, before the adrenaline dropped any further.
She gripped her left wrist with her right hand. Rotated the arm. Found the angle she’d practiced a hundred times in empty apartments and borrowed rooms.
She shoved the joint home.
The shoulder seated with a deep, meaty thunk that vibrated through her whole skeleton.
The pain didn’t stop. It changed shape, shifting from the screaming white of displacement to a radiating throb that pulsed outward from the joint in waves.
Her eyes flooded. Her teeth were clenched so hard her jaw ached.
She straightened up. One breath. Two.
A sound from the other side of the gate. She looked back through the bars.
Isaac was standing right there, his hands on the iron. She could see his whole face in the faint light from the distant party. She’d expected anger. Frustration. The expression of a man who’d lost a game he thought he was winning.
What she saw was horror.
He’d watched her do it. Watched her wrench her own shoulder out of its socket and force her body through a gap that shouldn’t have been possible. His face was open in a way she’d never seen—no charm, no composure, no confidence. Just a man who’d seen something he couldn’t process.
His mouth opened. He didn’t speak.
Flashlight beams cut through the maze behind him. The guards’ voices, closer now, calling out to each other as they swept the corridors. They’d find him in seconds.
She held his gaze through the iron bars for one more beat. His eyes were dark in the low light, and what she saw in them wasn’t the look of a man who’d lost his quarry.
It was the look of a man who was terrified for her.
She cradled her arm to her body and turned and walked into the dark.