Chapter 17 #2
There was a window two feet to her left.
A second-floor office window, dark behind its glass.
She shuffled toward it. Inches at a time, her left hand cramping around the ledge, her feet barely holding the brick.
Sweat ran into her eyes and she couldn’t wipe it.
Her right arm was dead weight pulling her off the wall.
Every inch was a negotiation with gravity she was losing. If she couldn’t get in this window, she was going to fall.
She reached the window frame. Got her right hand on the sill—the wrist screamed but the flat surface let her use her palm instead of her fingers.
She pushed.
Locked. Locked from the inside, the latch visible through the glass.
She let out a sob.
Her left arm shook harder. Her right knee started to go—the same lateral slide the left had done, the kneecap drifting, the joint losing its architecture. She locked it straight and pressed her thigh against the wall to brace it in place.
Her body was done. For three years she’d been asking it to do things no body with her condition should do, three years of dislocations and subluxations and joints pushed past their limits and forced back into place.
Every credit she’d ever borrowed against her own skeleton, every promise she’d made to her joints that she’d rest after this one, every night she’d iced and wrapped and swallowed ibuprofen and told herself the math still worked?
Her body had decided it was done paying. Right here. Right now.
Her left hand slipped.
She caught herself. Barely. Two fingers on the ledge, her body swinging, her feet losing purchase on the brick. She got her right palm flat against the wall and pushed herself back into contact. The effort took everything she had left.
This was it.
Twenty feet. Concrete sidewalk. The fall wouldn’t kill her. It would break things. Paralyze her. Definitely get her caught. And there was nothing she could do. Her grip slid another half inch.
Then the window beside her opened from the inside.
Hands grabbed her. Both arms, just below the shoulders—strong, sure, immediate. She was hauled sideways through the window frame, across the sill, and onto the floor of a dark room.
The motion wrenched her right wrist and she heard herself cry out, a ragged sound she couldn’t suppress, and then she was on the floor, gasping, her back against a solid body, every joint in her body screaming at frequencies she didn’t know pain came in.
She tried to think of what she could say to the guard who’d just saved her. Any excuse she could give. But the pain erased functional thought and her ability to talk.
She hadn’t fallen, but she was still going down.
“Fallon, are you okay? Talk to me.”
She could barely hear the words through the haze of pain. Knew she was hallucinating. Knew there was no way Isaac could be here holding her.
But he was.
“How—” Her voice cracked. Her throat was dry, her lungs still working too hard. “How are you here?”
“Can you stand?” He was already reaching for her, his voice clipped and controlled. Operational mode. “We need to move. Right now.”
“Isaac. How are you—”
“Later. Can you stand?”
She tried. Got her left hand flat on the floor and pushed. Her right wrist wouldn’t take weight at all—it folded under her the moment she pressed down, and the pain that shot through the joint pulled a sound from her teeth that she hated.
Her left knee refused next. She pushed and the kneecap slid and her leg went out from under her and she was back on the floor, breathing hard, staring at the ceiling of a room she didn’t recognize.
“I can’t.” The words were glass in her mouth. “My body isn’t—I can’t walk. My joints aren’t working. I…have a condition.”
She had never said those words to anyone. Never let another person see her at the point where her body simply stopped cooperating, where all the flexibility and range and impossible angles that made her what she was turned against her and left her stranded.
Something passed across his face. Fast—a fracture line that appeared and sealed in the same breath. He looked at her right wrist, swelling visibly now, and her left leg at the angle that said the knee wasn’t tracking.
He didn’t hesitate.
He crouched beside her and got his right arm under her shoulders. His left arm hooked beneath her knees. He lifted her off the floor in one motion, pulling her against his chest, and she leaned into him because she had no choice.
He carried her to the door.
“Wait. There are cameras all over the place.”
“I looped the feeds on my way in.”
He’d looped the feeds. That meant something about planning, about backup but the pain wouldn’t let her make sense of it.
He opened the door, checked the hallway.
It was dark, empty. He moved into it without breaking stride.
She was pressed against him, her right arm cradled against her own chest, her left hand gripping the front of his jacket because it was the only part of her that still worked the way it was supposed to.
“There’s a security desk near the main lobby,” she managed. Her voice was thin. “One guard. Maybe two.”
“I know. I came in past them.”
He carried her down a corridor she hadn’t mapped because she hadn’t thought she needed to. They reached a stairwell. He adjusted his grip and took the stairs down, one flight.
She felt every step like a detonation—her wrist grinding bone on bone, her knee sending white bolts of pain up her thigh with each jostle—but she bit the inside of her cheek and didn’t make a sound.
The ground floor opened into the back of a large atrium where the event was still running.
Music and conversation spilled down the corridor toward them.
Guests were drifting toward the exits in the loose, unhurried way people left parties that had peaked an hour ago—couples with their coats over their arms, small groups still laughing, a few people on their phones calling for rides.
Isaac stopped at the edge of the corridor. The noise of the event was just ahead. He looked down at her.
“I need to put you on your feet. Carrying you through a crowd draws too much attention.” His voice was low, careful. “Can you do that?”
She didn’t know. “Yes.”
“Just lean into me. I’ll take most of your weight.”
He set her down. She almost buckled. His arm locked around her waist, pulling her tight against his side. Her left leg screamed with every step but she made it move, blackness circling her vision. She somehow made it look like walking.
Isaac transformed. The tension drained from his face and what arrived in its place was effortless—warm, slightly embarrassed, the easy smile of a man who belonged in whatever room he happened to be standing in.
She realized he was wearing a tux. Of course he was wearing a tux.
He guided them straight into the thinning crowd.
A woman in a silver dress glanced over. Isaac caught her eye and gave a rueful shrug. “Third martini,” he said. “I told her.”
The woman laughed. “We’ve all been there.”
He kept moving. Past a cluster of guests waiting for the elevator, past the security guard who looked up and nodded, past a couple arguing quietly about parking.
Nobody stopped him. Nobody questioned a man half-carrying a woman out of a party at the end of the night.
It was the oldest scene in the world, and Isaac played it like he’d been rehearsing it his whole life.
Fallon leaned into him and kept her eyes down. The pain made the performance easy. She didn’t have to pretend to be out of it.
The night air hit her face. The moment they cleared the doors, Isaac picked her up again and the performance fell away from him like something physical being shed.
His arms tightened around her. His breathing went ragged through his nose: controlled pulls, deliberate, a man keeping himself in one piece through sheer force of will.
He reached a dark sedan parked halfway down the block. Then he shifted her weight to one arm, opened the passenger door, and lowered her into the seat. The gentleness of it was almost as devastating as the pain.
He buckled her in. His hands were shaking. He stood in the open door for a moment, his hand on the frame, and looked at her.
Her voice was barely there. “How did you find me?”
He didn’t answer. Instead, he closed the door gently and walked around the car. He got in the driver’s side and put both hands on the wheel, staring through the windshield at the empty street.
“I know, Fallon.” His voice was quiet. Stripped of everything—the charm, the humor, the easy warmth that made him Isaac. What was left was raw, and close to the surface, and barely held. “I know about all of it.”
He knew. She had no idea how to wrap her head around that.
She had so many questions. So many things she wanted to explain.
The pain wouldn’t let her. It had swallowed her whole body—her wrist, her knee, her shoulders, her spine, all of it fused into a single roaring frequency that drowned out language and thought and everything except the animal need to stop moving and stop being touched and stop existing in a body that had turned on her completely.
He looked over at her. “I’m taking you to a hospital.”
“No, not a hospital,” she said. The words came out slurred, her teeth clenched against the pain. “I’ll be okay, I promise. Plus, there isn’t much they can do.”
His eyes closed for one second. Two. When they opened, whatever argument he wanted to make stayed behind his teeth.
“Okay.” He started the car.
He pulled away from the curb. His left hand was on the wheel. His other hand found hers but his fingers barely closed around her hand. Hovering. Afraid of hurting her. She gripped him first. Held on hard enough that he’d know it was okay.
She watched the city lights slide past the window. She had no idea where he was taking her. She wasn’t capable of remembering her new address anyway, so it didn’t matter.
The car moved through the streets. The lights kept sliding. His hand stayed on her.
Then the dark came in, and she let it.