Chapter 17
Chapter Seventeen
The burner phone had seventeen unanswered messages.
Fallon sat on the fire escape landing of a three-story brick building in Chattanooga, her back against the railing, the phone’s glow painting her fingers blue in the dark.
Below her, the street was empty. A single streetlight at the corner threw a yellow circle on the pavement that didn’t reach the building’s face.
She scrolled.
The oldest messages were from six days ago. Three in a row, sent within an hour of each other.
Where are you?
Fallon. Talk to me.
I’m not angry. I just need to know you’re okay.
Then a gap. Twelve hours. Then two more messages.
I don’t care why you left. I care that you’re safe.
Call me. Please.
After that, the frequency dropped. One a day for three days. Then every other day. The last message was two days ago.
Maybe Isaac had given up. It had to happen sometime. She just hadn’t expected it to hurt so much.
She told Cassandra she’d thrown the phone away. She hadn’t. It sat every day in the inside pocket of her jacket like a piece of him she’d kept. A small, stupid, sentimental thing that existed only because she couldn’t make herself let go.
She closed the screen. The landing went dark again.
Chattanooga. New city. New target. Cassandra had been building the file for weeks, and Fallon had just gotten the data she needed off a computer in a third-floor office.
Business as usual.
This was the deal. She finished a job, she moved on, she didn’t look back. She’d done it before. She would do it again.
Except she’d never had anyone worth looking back at before.
Definitely hadn’t had anyone willing to restructure his life for her, and all the while she couldn’t explain why she couldn’t let him. And then left him without a goodbye. Ghosted him.
She put the phone in her jacket pocket and stood.
It didn’t matter now. She was in Chattanooga. He was in Austin or wherever his job had taken him. And she had a building to climb down.
Outside had been a much better option than getting up to the third floor from the inside.
The building was old—brick and limestone, three stories, with decorative molding beneath each window, stone ledges jutting from the facade at every floor, carved corbels anchoring the corners.
All good for climbing. Plus, no cameras. That was key.
Inside, was the opposite. The lobby had a guard and cameras everywhere, impossible to be avoided. So while everyone inside was busy with their party, the guards and cameras focused on them, Fallon had gone the outside route.
She’d mapped every inch section she was climbing. Spent two hours yesterday with binoculars from the parking garage across the street, cataloging handholds and footholds, measuring gaps, calculating angles. There were no cameras out here because no sane person would try to scale this building.
But Fallon wasn’t most people and she’d done more complicated climbs than this before.
She swung her legs over the fire escape railing and lowered herself to the ledge below.
Her left hand found the decorative molding beneath the third-floor window.
Her fingers curled over the lip—not gripping with strength, but settling into it, her joints conforming to the stone’s contour in a way that created suction more than force.
Her wrist extended past the angle where most wrists stopped, the bones rotating in their loose housing until her palm was flat against the vertical face of the brick while her fingers hooked the horizontal ledge. Two planes at once.
A grip that physics and biology shouldn’t have allowed. But that was what made Fallon so good at what she did.
Her right foot found a corbel six inches below her hip. She pressed the ball of her foot against its curved surface and let her ankle roll inward, past neutral, past the point where ligaments should have pulled taut and said stop.
They didn’t stop. They kept going, her ankle folding until the arch of her foot wrapped the stone like a hand. Full contact. Full control.
She released the fire escape entirely. Both hands on the wall now, both feet on stone, her body flattened against the building’s face three stories above the empty street.
She started down.
The descent required her whole body, just like the ascent had. Not just hands and feet—shoulders, hips, spine, every joint working in concert, each one extending past the range that anatomy textbooks said was the limit.
She reached a handhold two feet to her left and her shoulder opened like a door swinging wide, the humeral head gliding forward in its socket until her arm was behind her at an angle that would have torn a rotator cuff in anyone else.
Her fingers closed on the ledge. She pulled, pivoted, and her foot found a crack in the mortar eighteen inches below.
A gap between the second and third floor required her to bridge two architectural features separated by four feet of flat brick.
No handhold between them. She stretched—arms wide, fingers hooked on opposite ledges, her body suspended in a horizontal line across the wall.
Her sternum pressed against the cold brick.
Her torso undulated to shift her center of gravity from left to right without releasing either grip.
Somewhere in Austin, a man was waiting for a phone call she was never going to make.
She crossed the gap faster than she should have. From there, eroded mortar joints offered finger-width cracks every eight inches down to the second floor.
She was pushing harder than usual. Faster. Less careful.
The recklessness had been building all week.
It lived in the same place as the phone in her pocket—a hot, restless energy that made her want to move, to climb, to throw her body at something physical because the alternative was sitting still with the ache behind her sternum and seventeen messages she couldn’t answer.
Isaac was gone. She was never going to see him again.
She took a route she’d normally have assessed more carefully. Moved too quickly along it, but didn’t care.
What did it matter? Who was she being careful for?
The mission used to be enough of a reason. But now she just wasn’t sure.
She swung her weight onto a bracket and felt the first twinge in her right wrist. A small, sharp flare at the base of her thumb—a warning. The joint telling her it was working harder than it wanted to, that the tendon was under load it didn’t like.
She adjusted her grip and kept moving. Faster. Reckless.
She ignored it, found the next handhold, and pulled.
The second-floor ledge was narrower than the third. She eased onto it, her toes curled over the lip, her back pressed against the window behind her. From here she could see the street below—empty, dark, the streetlight throwing its useless circle twenty feet from the building’s base.
Her left knee was stiff. She noticed it when she bent to lower herself toward the next handhold.
The joint resisted for a half second before releasing—a tiny hitch.
She’d been crouching on the fire escape for too long before starting down, reading seventeen messages she should have deleted a week ago, and the cold had settled into the joint.
She filed it. Kept going.
She lowered herself off the ledge, reaching for a narrow lip of stone below the window line. Her right wrist stopped.
The joint that had been sending her small signals for the last two minutes simply quit. The tendons that had been stretching and compensating and holding her weight went slack, and the wrist collapsed inward, and her right hand came off the wall, useless.
Fuck.
She caught herself with her left hand. Her body swung, one-handed, her feet scrambling against the brick. She found a foothold. Braced. Reached up with her right hand to re-grip.
Her fingers wouldn’t close properly. The wrist was wrong—the bones had shifted in their housing, not dislocated but misaligned, and the signals from her brain weren’t reaching her fingertips the way they should.
She could feel her hand trying to grip. She could see her fingers curling toward the stone. But the strength wasn’t there.
She redistributed her weight onto her left hand and her feet. The left hand held, but her left knee buckled.
It wasn’t a full collapse. The kneecap tracked wrong for one second—sliding laterally, the ligaments that should have held it in place stretching past their functional limit—and in that second her leg stopped being a load-bearing structure.
She sagged against the wall, her left hand white-knuckled on the ledge, her right hand clawing uselessly at brick, her left leg folded beneath her at an angle that sent pain radiating from her kneecap to her hip.
She forced the kneecap into alignment with a flex of her quad forcing out a sound she couldn’t hold in—a sharp hiss through clenched teeth as fire roared through her leg. The joint held. Barely. She closed her eyes against the brick and breathed.
Her right hand was still wrong. She tried to flex the wrist and felt the bones grind against each other. Her fingers tingled. The grip strength was maybe thirty percent of normal. Fine if you were trying to hold a pencil. Deadly from twenty feet off the ground.
She was clinging to a building with one good hand and a knee that had just betrayed her. She couldn’t go up. She couldn’t go down.
She couldn’t hold on much longer.
Her left arm was shaking. She could see the tremor in her forearm, the muscle fibers firing in desperate, irregular bursts.
Her fingers ached. The stone under them was cold and her grip was failing one finger at a time—pinkie first, then ring finger, the contact points shrinking as her hand fatigued.