Chapter 18 #2
A syllable that hitched. A breath that came in shaking and went out worse. She caught it, held it, pushed through it, but the fracture was audible and she didn’t try to pretend it wasn’t.
“Isaac.”
“I’m here.”
“Don’t hurt her.” The words came out thick, and she wasn’t talking about joints.
Her jaw was trembling behind her glasses and she was staring at him through a phone screen from however many miles away, trusting a man she’d never met with the person she loved most in the world.
“Don’t use what you know against her. Don’t turn her in. Please.”
“I’m not going to hurt her, Cassandra. Not in any way.”
She searched his face through the screen. Looking for the lie, the hedge, the fine print. He gave her nothing but the truth.
“Okay,” she whispered. “I can be reached at this number. Fallon is the only one who has it.”
The call ended. Isaac set the phone on the nightstand and went to the bathroom.
The tub was small. Standard white porcelain. He turned the faucet and held his hand under the stream, adjusting until the temperature was right. Warm. Steady. Cassandra’s instructions replaying on a loop behind his eyes.
He went back to the bedroom.
Fallon hadn’t moved. He crouched beside the bed and touched her cheek. Cool skin. Her eyes opened at the contact, glassy and distant.
“I’m going to get you in the bath,” he said. “Cassandra told me what you need. The warm water is going to help.”
Her lips moved. He took it as consent.
He undressed her. Jacket first, easing the sleeve over the swollen wrist a fraction of an inch at a time, pausing when she flinched, waiting, continuing.
Her shirt, lifting it over her head while supporting her neck.
Her pants, working them down over the knee that had gone rigid and hot.
Clinical. Careful. His hands doing what needed to be done and nothing else.
What he was looking at was damage. The wrist, mottled purple.
The knee, swollen and tracking wrong beneath the skin.
Bruising along her left hip he hadn’t known about.
Her right shoulder sitting lower than her left, the joint not fully seated.
A map of what this night had cost her, drawn across a frame that was too small and too stubborn and too brave for the work it had been asked to do.
He lifted her from the bed, carried her to the bathroom, and lowered her into the water.
The warmth reached her joints and something released.
The sound she made stopped his heart: a raw exhale of relief so complete it was almost a sob, pulled from somewhere below thought or language.
Every rigid line in her frame softened. The locked muscles in her shoulders let go all at once, and her head fell back against the rim of the tub, and she breathed out long and shaking, and the deep grooves of pain around her mouth eased for the first time since he’d pulled her off that wall.
But she couldn’t stay upright. Her torso kept drifting sideways, her core too exhausted to hold her, her arms unable to brace. Her chin dipped toward the surface. He caught her shoulder and eased her back up. She drifted again. And again.
She was going to go under.
Isaac pulled his shirt over his head. Kicked off his shoes, his pants. He left his underwear on and stepped into the tub behind her.
The water rose around them both. He settled against the back wall of the tub, his legs bracketing hers, and pulled her against his chest. Her head once again ended up in the hollow below his collarbone.
Her weight settled into him fully, completely—not because she chose to, but because there was nothing left in her that could hold itself up.
He wrapped one arm across her waist and held her there.
The warm water lapped at the edges of the tub. He could feel her pulse against his chest, fast and thin, the heat slowly bleeding into her joints through the places where their skin met.
His operational composure, the thing that had carried him from the window to the car to the safehouse to this tub, began to come apart.
It went quietly. No dramatic collapse, no crack he could point to and name.
Just a slow dissolution as the full weight of the last hour landed on him without the adrenaline to absorb it.
She’d been two stories up on the outside of a building, and her skeleton had quit on her. And she did this regularly. Had been doing it for years. Wrenching her own joints apart and putting them back together in dark rooms alone.
Fallon stirred against him. Not fully conscious—her eyes stayed closed—but her left hand found his forearm where it rested across her waist. Her fingers closed around it. Weak. Deliberate.
“Isaac.” Barely a sound.
“Yes. I’m here. You’re safe. Cassandra told me what to do.”
She didn’t answer. She pressed closer. Turned her face into his neck, and the whole weight of her trust settled against him in that single, small adjustment.
The magnitude of that sat on his chest like a hand pressing down.
He added warm water from the faucet when the temperature dropped.
Kept the heat steady. Her wrist, submerged and still, began to lose the angry mottled color.
Her knee stopped radiating its own heat.
The tension drained from her frame in stages, one muscle group releasing and then the next, until the woman resting against him bore almost no resemblance to the rigid, locked-up body he’d lowered into this water.
Her grip on his forearm went slack. Her face softened. Her pulse slowed against his chest until it matched his own, and her breathing deepened into something that was no longer survival but rest.
She slept. Actually slept—not a pain blackout, not her nervous system shutting down in self-defense. Real, deep, unguarded sleep, her head heavy against his shoulder, her hand open and loose on his arm.
He stayed until the water cooled past usefulness. Then he eased her forward, climbed out, and lifted her from the tub. He dried her carefully and carried her back to the bed, wrapping her in the blanket. He arranged the pillow under her wrist. Made sure the knee was straight and supported.
He found another blanket in the closet, pulled it over her and stood there.
She didn’t stir.
He pulled the chair from the corner over to the bed and sat down. The bungalow was quiet around them—no traffic, no sirens, just the low hum of the refrigerator in the kitchen and the tick of a clock he couldn’t see.
Her face was slack, emptied of everything. She looked young. There was so much he didn’t know about her. Her age, where she was from, how she’d gotten here. Hell, he still didn’t even know her last name.
All he knew was she’d been waging a war against people who deserved it, with a weapon that was destroying her from the inside out.
Tomorrow would bring questions. The Big Talk—who she was, what exactly was going on, how he’d found her here.
Tomorrow the whole tangled architecture of secrets and half-truths and burner phones would have to be dismantled and rebuilt into something that could bear weight.
But not tonight.
Tonight he held the watch.