Chapter 18
Chapter Eighteen
Isaac was driving too fast, but he couldn’t make himself slow down.
Beside him, Fallon was reclined against the passenger seat with her eyes closed, her right wrist cradled against her chest. She’d surface for a few seconds—a sharp inhale, her jaw clenching, her left hand gripping the armrest hard enough to whiten her knuckles—and then the pain would pull her back down.
Each time, it took longer for her to come back up.
Every instinct he had said hospital. An ER with imaging equipment and IV pain management and people who understood what was happening inside her, because he sure as hell didn’t.
Her wrist was swollen to nearly twice its normal size.
Her left knee hadn’t borne weight since he’d pulled her through that window.
She’d told him she had some sort of condition, and then every joint she owned had proven it in the most brutal way possible.
But she’d been adamant: no hospital. Her voice may have been thin and cracked as she said it but it had left no room for argument. Unless her pulse went sideways or she stopped responding entirely, he’d honor it.
He pulled out his phone and called Peter.
“I need a safehouse.” No preamble. “Chattanooga. As fast as you can, man.”
Peter didn’t ask unnecessary questions. Isaac heard the keys start immediately, the rapid-fire staccato of a man who understood the difference between a request and an emergency.
“Give me two minutes.”
Isaac kept driving. In the passenger seat, Fallon’s head turned toward the window. A low sound escaped through her clenched teeth—involuntary, animal—and her breath fogged the glass.
His grip tightened on the wheel.
Thirty seconds. His mind kept circling back to it.
He’d been inside that building for hours, working the event, scanning every face in every room, looking for Fallon.
She hadn’t been there. He’d given up, accepted that tonight was another dead end in the trail that had brought him to Chattanooga, and walked out.
Then he’d happened to look up from his car.
A figure on the exterior wall, two stories above the sidewalk.
Moving down the facade in a way that shouldn’t have been possible—hands finding holds in the stone that didn’t look like holds, feet gripping the brick at angles that defied what he understood about how a human body was supposed to work.
He’d known it was Fallon. Instantly, completely, before the recognition even reached his conscious brain. Something in his nervous system had identified her from sixty feet away in the dark.
He hadn’t known she was in trouble. Hadn’t known her wrist was about to give out, that her knee was one bad step from buckling, that she was seconds from a fall that would have ended everything. He’d just known she was there, and that he couldn’t let her vanish again.
So he’d gotten back inside the building, past the lobby guard, up to the second floor. He’d been working the window open when her hand slipped.
Thirty seconds. If he’d left the event thirty seconds earlier, he might not have seen her at all. Wouldn’t have been there to grab her through that window. He would have driven away, and she would have been lying on a sidewalk in the dark.
Alone.
“Got one.” Peter’s voice cut through. “Rental property, short-term listing. Booking it now under a clean alias. Sending you the address and the lockbox code.”
“Thank you.”
“Isaac. Do you need backup?”
“No. Just the safehouse.”
Peter let it go. The address came through ten seconds later. Twelve minutes away.
Isaac made it in eight.
The safehouse was a single-story bungalow on a quiet residential street. Porch light off, driveway empty. Isaac pulled in, killed the engine, and was around to the passenger side before the ticking of the cooling engine had started.
He opened her door. Fallon’s eyes were half open, glassy, tracking his face without quite landing on it.
“We’re at a safehouse. We’re secure here,” he said. “I’m going to get you inside.”
She didn’t argue. He wasn’t sure she could.
He got one arm under her shoulders, the other beneath her knees, and drew her out of the car and against his chest. Her right arm stayed cradled against her own ribs. Her head dropped against his collarbone, heavy and still.
The lockbox code worked. The front door opened into a small living room.
A hallway led to a single bedroom. He carried her through and eased her onto the mattress, lowering her by inches and stopping when she flinched to wait, then lower again.
The last few inches cost her a sound he wished he hadn’t caused: tight, bitten-off, trapped behind her teeth.
He pulled the blanket over her and stepped back.
Her eyes opened. Closed. Opened again, her gaze unfocused, searching for something to anchor to. Then the pain won, and she went still.
Isaac stood over the bed. He had no idea what was wrong with her.
Injury? Illness? Something structural? He didn’t have the vocabulary for what he’d witnessed tonight.
Her wrist wouldn’t take weight. Her knee had buckled every time she’d tried to stand.
He’d felt things shifting in her shoulders and hips when he’d held her.
Whatever was happening wasn’t a single injury. It was systemic. And he was standing in a rented bedroom with no medical supplies, no training for whatever this was, and no idea how to help.
A phone buzzed.
The sound came from her jacket. He found it. The screen showed an incoming call from a contact listed as one letter: C.
He answered.
“Fallon?” A woman’s voice. Quick, sharp, already running hot. “You missed your check-in. Are you out? Tell me you’re out.”
“This isn’t Fallon.”
The line went silent. He could feel the calculation happening on the other end—who he was, how he had this phone, what it meant that Fallon wasn’t the one holding it.
“Who is this?” Cold now. One sentence from hanging up.
“Isaac Baxter. Zodiac Tactical.” He talked fast because he had maybe three seconds before she disconnected. “Fallon is hurt. Badly. She’s in a lot of pain. Her wrist is useless, her knee won’t hold, and she keeps losing consciousness. She refused a hospital. I need you not to hang up.”
The silence held. He could hear her breathing on the other end—rapid, controlled, the tight rhythm of someone whose worst-case scenario had just introduced itself.
“Where is she?” The coldness had cracked. Something raw bled through underneath.
“I’m with her in a safehouse in Chattanooga.”
“Which joints? Be specific.”
“Right wrist is the worst. Left knee won’t bear weight. Her shoulders and hips were doing some sort of weird shifting when I carried her. It’s not one thing. It’s everything.”
A sharp inhale. “I need to see her. Switch to video.”
He tapped the icon. The screen filled with a woman’s face—mid-twenties, dark-framed glasses, red hair pulled back. She was close to the camera, her jaw set, her eyes already moving before the image fully resolved.
Isaac turned the phone toward the bed.
The woman’s composure fractured. Her mouth opened, her eyes widened, and something crossed her face that had nothing to do with professional concern.
It was grief and fear and the particular anguish of watching someone you loved pay a price you couldn’t stop them from paying.
She sealed it up fast, but he’d seen it.
“Fallon.” Firm, clear. “Fallon, can you hear me? Talk to me. I need you to open your eyes and talk to me.”
Fallon’s eyes opened. She blinked twice, and her gaze found the screen.
“Cassandra.” A whisper scraped thin.
“I’m here. Can you tell me what hurts most?”
“Everywhere.” A breath. “Wrist. Knee. Everything locked up on the wall.”
“I know, honey. Isaac’s got you. You need to let him take care of you. I’m going to tell him what to do.”
Fallon’s eyes drifted shut. Her hand opened against the sheet and went still.
Isaac turned the phone back to himself. Cassandra’s eyes were wet behind her glasses. She blinked it away with the efficiency of someone who’d had practice.
“Tell me what to do,” he said.
“I told her not to climb, that her body needed a break, but she wouldn’t listen.”
“What’s wrong with her?”
“The climbing, the way she fits through impossible spaces, the dislocations—that’s not just talent.
She has a condition called hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos syndrome.
hEDS.” Cassandra paused. Steadied herself.
“Her joints don’t have normal limits. They move past where they’re supposed to stop.
Way past. That’s what lets her do what she does. ”
“The gate,” Isaac said. “The shoulder.”
“Yes. All of it. But every time she uses it, she’s doing damage that doesn’t repair the way it should.
I’ve watched her come back from jobs where she couldn’t close her hands for two days.
I’ve talked her through nights where her hip dislocated in her sleep and she had to put it back herself at three in the morning.
” Cassandra’s voice thinned. “The dislocations get easier over time, and that’s the cruelest part.
It doesn’t mean she’s getting better. It means the joints are getting looser.
Less stable. She’s been spending what she can’t afford to spend for years, and tonight her account hit zero. ”
Isaac sank onto the edge of the bed.
“What does she need right now?”
“Warmth. That’s the most important thing.
Her joints seize after trauma and cold. A warm bath: not super hot, just warm.
The heat will help the tissue relax and let things find their own alignment.
Gentle compression on the wrist if you can, but don’t force anything back into place.
And absolutely no ice. I know that sounds wrong, but ice makes it worse.
It locks everything up tighter. Warmth opens it. ”
“Warm water. No ice. Don’t force the joints.”
“That’s it. Her body will do the rest if you give it time and heat.”
Cassandra’s voice broke.