Chapter 21 #2
“They know about you, Cass.” Her voice was barely above a whisper. “They don’t have your name or your face, but they know you exist.”
“Seems that way.” She was steady on the surface. But the keyboard had gone silent, and Cassandra’s breathing had changed—shorter, shallower. Fear. Real fear, from a woman who didn’t scare easily.
“This isn’t cops being cops, Fallon. Police don’t work this fast. They don’t get this kind of intel from a break-in report, and they don’t flag nonviolent theft suspects as extremely dangerous.
Someone with money and serious technical resources fed all of this to law enforcement.
The address, the photo, the destruction of evidence pretext, the knowledge of a tech partner.
Someone handed them a package and pointed them to your door. ”
Isaac spoke for the first time. “They weaponized the cops.”
“Yes.”
He nodded. “It’s smart. Let law enforcement do the blunt work. If Fallon gets arrested, she’s in the system—full photo, fingerprints, real name. If she runs, there’s a police report with more data for the file. Either way, whoever is behind this gets more intel.”
“Do we know where this is coming from, Cass?”
“Not yet. But this isn’t reactive from your break in the other night.
The partial photo is from a previous job.
The address, the knowledge of me—none of this came from Chattanooga.
Someone’s been assembling this for a while, and they have resources I’m not sure I even understand. We’ve always been so careful.”
The three of them sat with that. Isaac’s hand was on her shoulder, warm and steady, and she leaned into it.
“My apartment is burned,” Fallon said. “Everything in it.”
“Yes. Don’t go back. I’ll wipe the laptop remotely. Anything in that apartment has to be treated as compromised.”
Clothes, computer, supplies, the accumulated pieces of a life she’d assembled in a city she was about to abandon. All of it gone. Again.
“We need to go,” Isaac said. Low, direct. “The longer we stand here, the more dangerous this gets.”
“He’s right,” Cassandra said. “Get away from there. Get anywhere but there. Call me when you’re safe. I’ll keep digging.”
Fallon hung up. She looked at Isaac. He was already moving, his hand shifting from her shoulder to the small of her back, steering them toward the car.
They walked. Unhurried on the surface. A couple heading somewhere with no particular urgency, and if Fallon’s stride was a little stiff, a little careful, that was nobody’s business.
They’d made it a block and a half when the cop came around a corner.
He was alone. Uniform, radio on his belt, the wide stance of a man doing a perimeter sweep of the surrounding blocks. His eyes swept the street and found Fallon.
She watched the recognition happen. His eyes went to his phone, then back up to her face. Down again. Up again. His spine straightened. His weight shifted from casual to alert.
“Excuse me, ma’am? Could you stop for a moment?”
Isaac’s hand pressed against her back. They kept walking.
“Ma’am. I need you to stop.”
The tone changed. The professional courtesy dropped away and something harder took its place. She heard his squawk as he hit the button.
Both she and Isaac took off running.
Isaac could have left her behind in three strides. But he stayed right beside her, matching her pace, his head on a swivel, reading the streets ahead and checking details behind.
His hand caught her arm and directed her left down a residential side street. Then right through an alley behind a row of duplexes. She let him lead, allowing her to focus on the only thing she could manage: keeping her legs moving.
Her body had agreed to walk today. It had not agreed to this.
Her knee registered its objection with every stride and her wrist sent jolts up her arm from the impact of her own feet hitting pavement.
Three blocks in and she could feel the margins shrinking, the difference between running and not running getting thinner with every step.
Behind them, the cop’s radio crackled. She couldn’t hear the words, but she heard the tone. Backup was coming. More units. More eyes.
They couldn’t outrun a radio.
Isaac pulled her around another corner. Ahead, between two buildings, a gap. A narrow passage where a chain-link fence met a brick wall, the space between them maybe fourteen inches wide.
Barbed wire coiled along the top of the fence. A utility conduit ran along the ground, and an overgrown shrub pressed against the fence, narrowing the passage further at the midpoint.
“Fuck,” he muttered. “We’ve got to go back.”
She couldn’t keep running. Doubling back brought them closer to the cops, not away from them. Isaac and the cop couldn’t fit through that gap in the fence.
But Fallon could.
“I can’t keep running. Let’s split up,” she said. Her breathing was ragged. “I’ll go through the opening in the fence. You double back, get the car, pick me up on the other side.”
“No.”
“Isaac. Look at it. You guys can’t fit, but I can.”
She could see the war behind his face—the memory of a gate in a hedge maze, the sound of her shoulder separating. And now she was asking to do it again.
But the sirens were closer. And she was right.
“The other side of that fence line comes out on Maple,” he said. His voice was rough. “I’ll be there in three minutes.”
“Go. I’ll meet you.”
He went. Fast, controlled, doubling back with the confidence of a man who’d spent his career losing surveillance in urban environments. A single patrol cop in a neighborhood he didn’t know was well within Isaac’s capabilities.
Fallon turned to the gap. She’d fit through narrower—but not on a body running on fumes and a wrist that couldn’t grip.
She turned sideways and pressed herself into the space, ignoring the yelling behind her, hoping Isaac made it past that cop.
The chain-link dug into her chest through her shirt. The brick scraped her spine. She forced the air out of her lungs, pulled her core tight, and began to shuffle.
The passage was tight enough that each inch forward required her to compress.
Ribs against metal, shoulder blades against stone, the narrowing geometry of two surfaces that didn’t care what she needed.
Her wrist caught the utility conduit and pain flared bright and instant up her arm, and she bit down on the sound that tried to escape and kept going.
The shrub at the midpoint was the worst of it.
The branches pushed the fence closer to the wall, squeezing the gap down to something barely wider than her pelvis.
She turned her hips, dropped one shoulder, and forced herself through sideways.
Bark scraped her stomach through the thin fabric of her shirt. A branch caught her hair.
Then she was through. The other side of the fence opened onto a strip of grass behind a row of houses. Maple Street was visible at the end of it, quiet, afternoon light falling across empty asphalt.
Fallon leaned against the wall. Her wrist was cradled against her chest. Her knee was trembling. Her lungs burned and her ribs ached where the chain-link had pressed.
She walked to the street. Each step was deliberate, her weight distributed to spare the knee. She reached the sidewalk and waited, praying he’d made it.
Isaac’s car came around the corner thirty seconds later. He pulled to the curb and she opened the door and lowered herself into the passenger seat. Her wrist pulled with the motion and she bit down on the inside of her cheek.
He was already driving before her door was fully closed. His eyes checked the mirrors twice, then turned to her.
“You okay?”
“I’m okay.”
His hand found hers across the center console. She gripped it.
The streets slid past. Isaac drove with focused calm, taking turns that put distance between them and her apartment without drawing attention. No speeding. No sudden moves. Just a car moving through a city like all the rest.
Fallon stared through the windshield. The adrenaline was draining, and what it left behind was cold and vast.
Three years of being invisible. She’d moved through cities and events and rooms full of powerful people, and none of them had ever seen her coming or known she’d been there.
Now someone had a partial picture of her face. They knew about Cassandra.
The cops were the least of her problems. Whoever had fed law enforcement that package—the photo, the pretext, the dangerous flag—that was the real threat.
She didn’t know who they were. She didn’t know how long they’d been watching. And for the first time since she’d started this, she couldn’t see the edges of what she was up against.
Isaac merged onto a highway heading north. The city thinned around them. Residential streets gave way to open road, and Fallon watched Chattanooga shrink in the side mirror until it was just a skyline, then a smudge, then nothing.
She didn’t know where this fishing cabin was, but it had stopped being a nice place to rest. Now it was the only safe ground she had left.
She looked down at her hand in Isaac’s. Her wrapped wrist. Her fingers that couldn’t make a proper fist. An hour ago she’d agreed to stop pushing her body, and then she’d squeezed herself through a fourteen-inch gap between a fence and a wall because the alternative was handcuffs and the end of everything she’d built.
Isaac drove. His thumb moved once across her knuckles. He didn’t speak.
Neither did she. There was nothing to say that the silence between them wasn’t already holding.