Chapter 28
Chapter Twenty-Eight
The trap had worked. Not perfectly, because Kessler himself hadn’t been among the three men pulled off the rental house floor, but his crew was in custody and Ryder was already en route to the compound with them. A step in the right direction. A big one.
Fallon sat in the control room with her hands in her lap and listened to the comms wind down.
Isaac had checked in fifteen minutes ago.
Heading back, forty-minute ETA. His voice had carried the clipped satisfaction of a man whose plan had executed clean, and she’d let herself exhale for the first time in hours.
Fallon had left the control room after that. Too many people, too much energy, and her body was reminding her that sitting rigid in a chair for six hours had consequences. Her wrist ached. Her knee had stiffened into something she’d have to negotiate with before it would bend properly.
But Isaac was on his way back. That was what mattered. They hadn’t caught Kessler, but by grabbing his men, they were closer.
At least she hoped they were.
She found her way back to the suite she and Isaac had been given in the residential building. It was modest by any standard, a bedroom and a small sitting area with a kitchenette tucked into the corner, but they’d made it theirs in the several days they’d been here.
Isaac’s jacket hung over the back of the desk chair.
Her laptop was open on the kitchen counter where she’d left it after her last call with Cass.
Two coffee mugs sat in the dish rack, washed and drying side by side.
His running shoes by the door, her compression wrap draped over the arm of the couch.
None of it was permanent, but all of it felt like home. More and more, home was becoming wherever Isaac was.
She sat on the edge of the bed and stretched her knee out in front of her, working the joint in slow circles until it tracked without grinding.
He would be back soon. They’d debrief. They’d figure out the next move on Kessler. And for the first time since Chattanooga, the trajectory felt like it was bending in their favor.
Her phone lit up on the nightstand. Isaac’s number.
She picked it up. “Hey. You close?”
There was no voice on the other end. Instead, a video filled the screen, and it took her brain two full seconds to process what she was seeing because nothing about it belonged in the world she’d been sitting in thirty seconds ago.
Isaac was on a concrete floor. His hands were bound behind him with zip ties, and he was gagged.
Blood ran from a gash above his left temple and had streaked down the side of his face in a dark line that pooled at his jaw.
His left eye was swollen nearly shut. His shirt was torn at the shoulder, and the skin beneath it was mottled with bruising that spread across his collarbone and disappeared beneath the fabric.
He was conscious. His one open eye found the camera, and the rage in it was absolute, unblinking, aimed at whoever was holding the phone.
Kessler stepped into the frame. He crouched beside Isaac and looked directly into the camera.
“You’re Fallon. So very nice to see your actual face in person.” His voice was even. Unhurried. A man conducting business.
She made an attempt to not show what it cost to see Isaac in that condition. “Yeah, well, the feeling isn’t mutual.”
Kessler stood. Reached into his pocket and produced a knife. Held it loosely at his side, the blade catching the overhead light.
“Then let me cut straight to the chase. Mr. Baxter here is not who I want. I’m proposing a trade.
You for him. I have an address for you.” He read it aloud.
A street, a number, a city. “You have thirty minutes to get there. For every minute you’re late, I cut him.
I won’t kill him. Not right away. But I will take pieces. ”
Isaac shook his head frantically and jerked against his restraints. The zip ties held.
“I have no issue with the people you’re working with,” Kessler continued. “My contract is for you. You walk in, he walks out. Simple transaction. Clock is ticking. You decide.”
He looked down at Isaac. Then back at the camera.
“Thirty minutes, Fallon.”
The video ended.
The room was silent. The compound was silent. The entire fucking universe was silent. The phone sat in her hand, and the screen had gone dark, and the address was already burned into her memory.
She plugged the address into her map. It would take thirty-five minutes to get there.
And she only had thirty minutes before the knife started.
She thought about finding Ian but she didn’t even know if he was still here at the compound. She didn’t have his number. She didn’t really know anybody here by name. She could run to the main building, find someone, explain the situation. Wait for Ryder to get back?
Every minute she spent looking for help was a minute Kessler had a knife and slicing Isaac up. There was no time to get help. Kessler had designed it that way.
She was already moving.
She grabbed the keys for Isaac’s SUV from the desk. She was through the door and across the compound parking area in under a minute, her knee protesting every stride, the pain a distant signal she processed and dismissed.
The engine turned over. She pulled out of the lot and onto the access road and through the gate. The guard waved her through. She was on the county road heading south before she remembered to breathe.
Her phone was in her lap. She picked it up and called Cass.
It rang. And rang. And rang. Damn it.
Voicemail.
Fallon’s throat closed. She swallowed against it and waited for the tone.
“Cass.” Her voice came out rough. She steadied it. “Kessler has Isaac. He sent me a video. Isaac is hurt, and Kessler is going to kill him if I don’t show up in the next twenty-five minutes. I’m driving there now.”
She recited the address. The highway was dark ahead of her. She pressed the accelerator harder.
“I don’t think I’m coming back from this, Cass. Kessler wants me alive for the handoff, but after that, I don’t know. I don’t care. Isaac is going to die if I don’t go, and I can’t let that happen. I won’t.”
Her eyes burned. She blinked hard and kept them on the road.
“I need you to know something. You are the best thing that ever happened to me. You found me when I was drowning in grief and rage, and you gave me a purpose and a partner and a friendship I didn’t earn and definitely didn’t deserve.
You are my sister, Cass. In every way that matters.
You know everything about me, every ugly, broken, dangerous piece, and you stayed. ”
The address was twelve minutes away. She was driving too fast and not fast enough.
“I love you, Cass. I’m sorry I never said it enough.”
She hung up.
The GPS guided her through streets that narrowed from commercial to industrial. Warehouses. Chain-link fences topped with razor wire. The kind of area that emptied after business hours and stayed empty. Kessler had chosen well.
She found the address. A single-story concrete building set back from the road, loading dock on one side, a rusted metal door on the other. Two vehicles parked outside. Lights visible through a narrow window.
Fallon parked. Killed the engine. Threw open the vehicle door and ran.
She was probably running to her own death but she didn’t care.
A man stood at the front door. Big, armed, the flat expression of someone doing a job. He looked at her, looked at his phone, and stepped aside without a word. Kessler had told them she was coming.
She pushed through the door and into the building.
The interior was a single large room. Concrete floor, exposed ductwork overhead, industrial shelving along two walls.
A metal table against the far wall held tools and supplies.
A workbench near the door had a vise bolted to its surface and loose hardware scattered across its top.
She cataloged all of it in the two seconds it took her eyes to adjust. Every surface, every object, every weight and distance and angle. She couldn’t stop herself. It was who she was.
Then she saw Isaac, and everything else fell away.
The video had been bad. In person was worse.
No more gag, but both eyes were swollen now, the left completely shut, the right narrowed to a slit.
His nose had been broken since the video.
Blood had dried in dark streaks across his mouth and chin.
His shirt was gone, and the bruising across his ribs and stomach told the story of sustained, deliberate damage.
Kessler, that fucking bastard, had taken his time.
The pattern wasn’t random. It was thorough, covering areas that would cause maximum pain without killing the asset. He’d enjoyed this. Peter had warned them in the briefing, and the evidence of it was written across Isaac’s body.
His head came up when she walked in. The one eye that could still open found her, and what she saw in it wasn’t relief. It was anguish. He hadn’t wanted her to come.
“Fallon.” His voice was shredded. “Don’t.”
She rushed toward him but stopped when Kessler stepped out from behind the shelving unit.
A second man flanked him, armed, watching Fallon with the same flat indifference as the one at the door.
Kessler’s gaze swept her once, top to bottom, and the satisfaction on his face was brief and professional.
“Impressive. I thought you weren’t going to make it in time. But I’m a man of my word, so I guess I won’t get to use my fun knife after all. Pity.” He pointed at a chair six feet from Isaac. “Hands.”
She held them out. He zip tied her wrists in front of her body, the plastic biting into skin. Then he pushed her into the chair and secured the zip tie to the metal arm with a second tie, anchoring her in place.
While he worked, her eyes moved. The pipe against the shelving. The hardware on the workbench. The vise. The distance between her chair and the table, the table and Isaac, Isaac and the door. The weight of the pipe. The angle she’d need.