Chapter 21
Chapter Twenty-One
The safehouse was quiet again.
Ryder had left twenty minutes ago, his duffel over his shoulder and a nod to Isaac that carried more than the words that came with it. Fallon had watched them from the couch—the shorthand, the trust, the way Ryder squeezed Isaac’s shoulder on the way out and Isaac let him.
Now it was just the two of them. The kitchen smelled like the eggs Ryder had scrambled before he’d gone, and weak afternoon light fell through the blinds in thin bars across the carpet. Fallon sat with her legs tucked beneath her, her wrapped wrist resting on a pillow in her lap.
She could walk without assistance now. The knee was stiff and unhappy, but it tracked. The wrist still throbbed when she moved it wrong, which was often, but the swelling had come down enough that her fingers closed when she told them to. Functional. A long way from healed, but functional.
Isaac dropped onto the other end of the couch. He looked tired. The stubble was thicker than yesterday, and the lines around his eyes had deepened in a way that had nothing to do with sleep.
“I want to talk to you about something,” he said.
“That’s never a good opening.”
The corner of his mouth kicked up just the slightest bit. “Your Chattanooga target. I think you should put it aside.”
Her jaw tightened. “Isaac—”
“Not forever. Just for right now. Your body needs time. You can barely close your right hand.”
“I can close my right hand fine.”
“Show me.”
She made a fist. It took longer than it should have, the fingers curling in sequence rather than all at once, the tendons in her wrist pulling against damage that hadn’t finished repairing. She held it for three seconds before the grip faltered, and her ring finger drifted open.
He didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to.
Her wrist pulsed. A dull, deep ache that radiated from the joint into the bones of her forearm.
“Your body’s making the argument better than I can.” Quiet. No pressure.
She hated that he was right. Hated more that she couldn’t manufacture a counterargument that didn’t sound delusional given that she’d nearly fallen off a building four days ago.
Cass had been saying the same thing for months.
You need to give your body a break, Fallon.
You need to rest. They’d had this discussion more than once.
Fallon’s reply had always been the same: after this target.
She’d said it so many times the words had lost their meaning.
A promise she kept making and kept breaking, and both of them knew it.
“Fine,” she said. “I’ll put it aside. For now.”
“Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me. I’m not happy about it.”
“I know.” A pause. “I’m probably about to be fired from Zodiac anyway, so maybe we can figure out our next steps together. Two unemployed people with a lot of free time.”
She turned to look at him. “That’s not funny.”
“It’s a little funny.”
“You could lose your career over this, Isaac.” The guilt of that pressed against her sternum. “You’re here instead of doing your job. You left your team for me.”
“Yeah. I did.”
“And now you might lose everything. Because of me.”
“That was my choice.”
“A choice you shouldn’t have had to make.” She pulled her knee tighter against her chest. “Go back. Call your boss. Make things right. I’ll be fine on my own. I’ve always been fine on my own.”
He looked at her with an expression she couldn’t argue with. Patient, certain, immovable.
“I’m not going anywhere, Fallon.”
The guilt didn’t leave. She was the reason he’d left his team. The work mattered to him—she’d seen it in the way he moved through a room, the way his whole body sharpened when he was on the job. And he’d walked away from it for her.
She couldn’t fix that. She couldn’t undo it. And the worst part was that if their positions were reversed, she’d have done the same thing.
“I want to take you somewhere,” he said. “A place I go when I need to get away from everything. A…fishing cabin, up in the mountains.”
“A fishing cabin.”
“It’s quiet. Remote. Good place to let your body rest without anyone bothering you.”
Something in the way he said it—a careful vagueness, a slight hesitation before fishing cabin—told her there was more to the story. She filed it.
“Okay,” she said.
His eyebrows went up. He’d been ready for a fight. She could see the prepared arguments stacking up behind his eyes, and she’d short-circuited all of them with a single word.
“Okay?”
“I don’t have a better plan. My body needs rest. You’ve been saying it, Cass has been saying it, and my wrist has been screaming it.” She looked at her hand on the pillow. “And I want to go somewhere with you.”
She hadn’t meant to say that last part. It came out before the filter caught it, honest and unguarded, and once it was in the air she didn’t take it back.
Isaac held her gaze. The tiredness in his face shifted into something warmer.
“But first,” she said, “I need to go to my apartment. Clothes, laptop, essentials. I can’t leave town with nothing.”
“I’ll go. You stay here.”
“I’m going with you. I know where everything is and I know what I need. Plus, I’ve been cooped up in this safehouse for days, and I can walk fine.”
He opened his mouth. Closed it. Recognized the futility and let it go.
“Quick in-and-out,” he said. “Ten minutes, max.”
“Ten minutes.”
The closest parking spot was two blocks from the apartment she’d rented.
Isaac pulled into it and killed the engine. The street was residential, quiet in the mid-afternoon. A dog barked somewhere behind a fence. A woman pushed a stroller on the opposite sidewalk without looking at them.
“Are you sure you don’t want to stay in the car?” Isaac asked. “I can grab your stuff. Just tell me what you need and where it is.”
She reached for the door. She wasn’t going to live like an invalid. “No, I can come. I know exactly what to grab and where it all is. You’d be opening every drawer in the place.”
He didn’t like it. She could see that. But he got out, and she got out, and her knee protested the transition from sitting to standing with a grinding objection that she absorbed and overruled. She shut the door and fell into step beside him.
Her gait was careful but steady. Isaac matched her pace without making it obvious, which she appreciated. They covered a block. Turned the corner toward her building.
Something was wrong.
She registered it before she could name it—a disruption in the rhythm of the area. People near the entrance of the apartment building, just standing around watching.
Then the details sharpened. Uniforms. Two officers near the front door of her place, evidence bags in hand. A third on the sidewalk, radio in hand. A patrol car parked with its lights off.
Fallon stopped. Isaac stopped beside her.
“That’s my building,” she said.
His hand settled on her lower back. He turned them both, smooth and unhurried, two people who’d changed their minds about where they were walking. They moved back the way they’d come and ducked around the corner of a cross street.
“That doesn’t make sense.” Fallon pressed her back against the brick wall. Her mind was already working. “Even if the building I climbed filed a report, there’s no way they connected it to me and found my address. Not this fast. There’s no way. That’s not how investigations work.”
“It’s not,” Isaac agreed. His voice had gone flat. Operational.
Fallon pulled out her phone and called Cassandra.
Cass picked up on the first ring. “What’s wrong?”
“There are cops at my apartment. At least three uniforms and one patrol car I could see. We haven’t approached. I don’t know how they found me, Cass, but they’re pulling stuff out of my apartment.”
“Shit.” The sound of Cassandra’s keyboard was immediate. Fast, aggressive. “Give me a minute.”
Fallon waited. Isaac stood at the corner, his body angled so he could see back toward her building without exposing more than a sliver of his profile. Calm. Controlled. In his element.
The keyboard sounds stopped.
“It’s bad.” Cassandra’s voice was clinical and precise.
It was the tone she used when the data was ugly and sugarcoating would waste time.
“They entered your apartment under a destruction of evidence clause. Someone gave law enforcement a specific reason to believe evidence was being destroyed inside the residence, which let them bypass the warrant process entirely.”
“That’s not something cops generate on their own.”
“No. It’s not. Someone fed them that.”
Isaac had moved closer. He could hear Cassandra through the phone speaker, and his jaw was tight.
“It gets worse from there,” Cassandra said. “You’re flagged in the system, no name but a picture and vague description. And you’re listed as extremely dangerous.”
“Extremely dangerous?” Fallon’s free hand pressed flat against the brick. “I’ve never hurt anyone. Even if they knew everything I’ve done, I’d be a nonviolent property crime suspect.”
“Agreed but that’s your classification. Extremely dangerous, approach with caution. That flag changes everything about how law enforcement interacts with you. They won’t ask questions first.”
“What else?”
“The photo they have of you is partial. Not a full face. Enough to potentially match against, not enough for a positive ID.”
“From where?”
“I don’t know yet. It’s not from Chattanooga—the timestamp predates your arrival here. It’s from an earlier job. Someone’s been building a file, Fallon. And it’s not the Chattanooga PD.”
Fallon’s grip on the phone had tightened until her knuckles ached. Three years of being invisible. No name, no face, no trail. And someone had a photo. Someone had her address.
“Shit.” Cassandra paused.
“What? Just say it.”
“They’re also looking for a computer expert who may or may not be traveling with the suspect.”
Fallon’s back came off the wall. She stood straight, her body rigid, the phone pressed hard against her ear.