Chapter 13
Chapter Thirteen
Isaac wrapped his hands and started warming up.
Shadowboxing, loose and easy, working the rust out of his shoulders while Ryder stretched on the other side of the mat.
The training facility Zodiac was renting in Austin was smaller than headquarters, a converted warehouse space with mats on the floor and bags along the wall.
It was just as crappy as the temporary office, but it had everything they needed.
Isaac’s mind drifted while his body moved through the warm up patterns. Last night. That phone. His watch.
I was wrong, you are good at your job.
He’d stood in that emptying ballroom for a full minute staring at it. Then he’d typed back something about how she wasn’t so bad herself, given she’d managed to plant a phone on him without him feeling it.
He’d wanted to say more. Wanted to demand to know what the fuck had actually happened at the gate in that maze. Why she’d done that to her shoulder. But that would’ve done nothing but spook her. The phone was a tether. He didn’t want to sever it. So he’d kept it light.
They’d gone back and forth a little longer, neither saying anything of substance, before he closed with Goodnight, Fallon. We’ll talk tomorrow. She hadn’t replied to that. A thread pulled taut and then set down carefully by both of them.
The burner phone was sitting on top of his gear bag on the bench along the wall. He’d brought it to training even though there was no operational reason to have it on him.
It buzzed.
He stopped mid-warmup and crossed to the bench to check it.
So, how’s your morning going?
She was continuing the conversation. Not a taunt, not a clue, not a chess move. A woman asking about his morning.
About to get punched in the face. Yours?
The reply came fast.
Already had coffee. Already winning.
That’s a low bar.
Says the man about to get punched. What kind of punching?
Training. Sparring with a friend.
Are you any good?
I’m excellent.
Humble, too.
It’s not arrogance if it’s accurate.
He caught himself smiling at the screen and put the phone back on the bag. Ryder had finished stretching and was standing at the center of the mat, gloves on, bouncing lightly on his toes.
“You ready, or do you need another minute with whatever has you grinning like an idiot?”
“I’m ready.”
They squared up and got to work. Ryder was fast and aggressive, always pressing forward, always looking for the angle. Isaac was more patient. He let Ryder come to him, read the patterns, and made him pay for the ones that repeated.
They’d been doing this long enough together that the competition was real but the trust was absolute. Ryder wouldn’t cheap-shot him. Isaac wouldn’t escalate past the point.
Ryder threw a jab that Isaac slipped without thinking, followed by a cross that Isaac picked off with his rear hand. They reset. Circled.
“You’re telegraphing,” Isaac said.
“I’m setting you up. There’s a difference.”
“Is the setup the part where I see it coming from a mile away, or the part where it doesn’t land?”
Ryder feinted low and came over the top with a hook. Isaac rolled under it and popped back up with a straight right that stopped an inch from Ryder’s jaw.
“Point,” Isaac said.
“That was a love tap.”
“It was a love tap that would have put you on the mat if we were full contact.”
“Would have. Didn’t.” Ryder reset his stance. “Big difference between almost and actually.”
The phone buzzed from the bench.
Isaac heard it. His focus cracked for a fraction of a second, just long enough for his guard to drop an inch, and Ryder’s left hook caught him clean on the jaw.
Not hard enough to do damage, but hard enough to matter.
Isaac’s head snapped right. He stepped back, reset, and touched his jaw with the back of his glove. Ryder stood there with a grin wide enough to land a plane on.
“And there it is.”
“Lucky shot.”
“Lucky? You dropped your focus because your phone buzzed. That’s not luck, Baxter. That’s you being somewhere else mentally.”
Isaac rolled his jaw. It was fine. The shot had been clean but controlled, Ryder pulling his power the way they always did in sparring. The sting was more to his pride than his face.
“Again,” Isaac said.
They went two more rounds. Isaac kept his focus where it belonged, on Ryder’s hands, his hips, the micro-movements that preceded every combination. The phone stayed quiet, or if it did buzz again, he didn’t hear it over the sound of leather on leather and Ryder’s steady trash talk.
When they broke, both of them breathing hard, Ryder grabbed his water bottle and dropped onto one of the folding chairs along the far wall. Isaac toweled off and crossed to the bench where his gear was.
Who was he kidding? He didn’t give a shit about his gear. Where the phone was.
He picked up the phone.
So, on a scale of one to wish-you-had-another-job, how’s training going?
He wiped his face with the towel and typed back.
I just took a punch I shouldn’t have because someone was texting me.
That sounds like a personal problem.
He huffed a breath through his nose.
You’re dangerous from any distance, aren’t you.
You have no idea.
He set the phone down. When he looked up, Ryder was watching him over the top of his water bottle. His eyes moved from Isaac’s face to the phone and back. The look held a beat longer than casual before Ryder glanced away. He didn’t push. Didn’t comment. Just tossed his towel into his bag and stood.
“I’m going to hit the heavy bag for a few rounds.”
Isaac nodded. Ryder crossed the gym, and a few seconds later the steady thud of gloves on canvas filled the space.
Isaac put the phone away and went to join him. He couldn’t spend his life like some pathetic asshole waiting for a text from the girl he had a crush on.
They finished the session with bag work and cooldown stretches, the easy silence of two guys who’d beaten the hell out of each other and were better for it.
Ryder headed out after to handle advance work on the next Endicott event, a gallery opening Thursday that needed full sight lines and entry-point mapping before the team could plan coverage.
Isaac headed back to the temporary office space. He had stuff to do.
He opened the email from Peter first. The intruder Isaac had put against the column last night at the event, had been identified from the police report. Thomas Maddock, twenty-eight, former employee of a manufacturing firm that Endicott’s biotech had acquired and gutted during the IPO process.
Legitimate grievance. No criminal record. No connection to the email threats.
Isaac read through Peter’s analysis twice.
Maddock’s profile didn’t match the email sender.
Too young, too reactive, too disorganized.
The emails were patient, methodical, escalating with precision.
Maddock had lunged at the first opportunity and gotten himself arrested.
Two completely different threat signatures.
The real sender was still out there. Still watching. Still building toward something.
Isaac typed up his notes and flagged next steps for Peter: dig deeper into whether Maddock had any connection to the email sender, or whether he’d been hired or manipulated into creating a distraction.
Cross-reference Maddock’s known associates with the metadata from the emails. Leave no thread unpulled.
He sent the email and turned to the rest of his case notes. He was halfway through updating the threat assessment when the burner phone buzzed on the desk beside him.
So what made you want to do what you do? And don’t say the tuxedo.
He stared at the screen. She was pushing past the banter. Asking something real.
He thought about what to say. Thought about what to leave out.
I was living a life that didn’t fit. Someone else’s version of what I was supposed to be. The military was the first thing that felt like mine. Zodiac was the second.
What was the life that didn’t fit?
His thumbs hovered over the screen. The honest answer was a world he’d left behind on purpose.
The family money. The rooms full of people whose names opened doors and whose expectations closed them.
He’d walked away from all of it, and he liked who he was on the other side.
He wasn’t ready to let her see the version of him that came before.
Let’s just say I was expected to be a certain kind of person, and I wasn’t that person. So I left and built something that was actually mine.
That I understand.
Yeah?
More than you know.
He told her about Zodiac itself. Not the tactics or the training, but the part that mattered to him, the part where someone was afraid and his job was to stand between them and the thing they were afraid of.
She asked good questions. Sharp ones that told him she was listening to what he said and what he didn’t say.
Then he turned it around.
Your turn. How does a person end up doing what you do?
The reply took longer this time. Nearly five minutes. He thought she wasn’t going to answer at all.
Carefully.
He almost laughed.
That’s not an answer.
It’s accurate, though.
I’m serious. I want to understand.
A long pause. He watched the screen and waited.
I have my reasons. Good ones. That’s all I can give you right now.
You want to know if I’m going to push.
Are you?
No. But I want you to know I’m asking because I think the answer matters. Not because I’m building some sort of case against you or something.
She didn’t respond to that for a while either. Once again, he thought he’d lost her. Then the screen lit up.
The people I choose have earned it. Every single one of them.
He sat with that. It wasn’t much. But it was more than she’d given him before.
Fair enough.
Not going to push?
You’ll tell me the rest when you’re ready.