Chapter 29
Chapter Twenty-Nine
The ceiling of the Rogue Division medical facility was white acoustic tile. Fluorescent panels dimmed to something the staff probably thought was soothing.
It wasn’t.
Fallon pushed herself upright. The motion sent a deep, sick throb through both wrists and up into her elbows, and her left shoulder seized hard enough that she had to stop halfway and breathe through it before she could finish sitting up.
Her thumbs were splinted and taped, immobilized in positions that felt foreign against her palms. The rest of her hands were swollen, the knuckles tight and hot, her fingers thick and clumsy when she tried to close them.
She swung her legs off the bed. Her knee protested but held.
The nurse appeared in the doorway before Fallon’s feet hit the floor.
“Ms. Hemingway. Back in bed, please.”
“I need to see him.”
“Mr. Baxter is stable. His team has been updated, you’ve been updated, and the doctor will—”
“I need to see him myself.” It had been nearly twenty-four hours since she and Isaac had been rescued in that warehouse.
“Ms. Hemingway.” The nurse stepped fully into the room and positioned herself between Fallon and the door. She was a compact woman with short gray hair and the kind of calm that came from years of difficult patients. “You have bilateral thumb dislocations, a partially torn scapholunate ligament—”
Fallon stood up. She didn’t need a list of what was happening in her body. She was getting updates in real-time.
She didn’t care. She was going to see Isaac.
The room tilted. She grabbed the bed rail with her forearm and steadied herself until it passed, then took a step toward the door. The nurse didn’t move.
“I need you to get back in bed.”
“I need you to get out of my way.”
“I understand you’re worried about him. But you are my patient, and I have a responsibility to—”
“The last time I saw Isaac, he was on a concrete floor, unconscious.” Fallon’s voice came out low and hard, and she didn’t try to soften it.
“He dragged himself across that floor to reach me. He wrapped his body around mine while a tactical team crashed through the door because even half-conscious and bleeding from a dozen places, his instinct was to put himself between me and harm.”
“Be that as it may…”
“So when you tell me he’s stable, that word means nothing. I am going to see him with my own eyes or you are going to have to sedate me, and I promise you that will be harder than you think.”
The nurse’s expression shifted. She didn’t step aside, but her weight changed, the certainty leaving her posture one degree at a time. She was recalculating.
Fallon took another step. The space between them shrank to two feet. Her hands were useless, her wrists were wrecked, and her knee was grinding with every step, and none of that was going to stop her from going through this woman if she had to.
“Hey there, slugger. You sure you want to do this?” Ryder filled the doorway behind the nurse, still in the same clothes from the warehouse, his sleeves pushed to his elbows, his face carrying the weight of a man who hadn’t slept.
“I’m going. I need to see him.” She glared at the nurse in front of her. If she had to, she would take this woman down. It wouldn’t be pretty, and it would definitely hurt, but she didn’t care.
She was going to Isaac.
Ryder’s eyes moved from the nurse to Fallon and back. “Okay. I’ll take you to him.”
Fallon exhaled. Her shoulders dropped by an inch. But somewhere much deeper her core fear eased. If Ryder was willing to take her to Isaac, then he was still alive. Ryder would’ve stalled too, tried to talk her out of it, if he wasn’t.
Ryder looked at the nurse. “I’ve got her. She’s going to see him one way or another, and I’d rather she not rip out her IV and fight her way down the hall to do it.”
The nurse shook her head. “If she tears that ligament the rest of the way, it’s surgical.”
“Understood,” Ryder said.
He stepped into the room and positioned himself at Fallon’s left side. Someone behind him in the hallway rolled a wheelchair forward. Ryder glanced at it, then at her.
“No.” She wasn’t getting in a wheelchair.
“Didn’t think so.” He offered his arm. She gripped it above the elbow, her splinted hands awkward against his sleeve. Ryder waited while she steadied. He didn’t rush her, didn’t adjust her grip, didn’t do anything except stand there and let her find her balance on her own terms.
They started down the corridor. Her knee tracked but it tracked ugly, each step a negotiation between the joint and the muscles. Ryder matched her pace without comment.
“How did you find us?” she asked.
“Cass got your voicemail,” he said.
Fallon’s chest tightened. The voicemail. The goodbye she’d left on Cass’s phone while driving ninety miles an hour toward a building she didn’t expect to walk out of.
“She called me about forty seconds after she listened to it. I’ve never heard anyone sound the way she sounded on that call.”
Terrified. Fallon would’ve been the same if the roles had been reversed. As soon as she got her phone back she needed to call Cass immediately.
“How did she have your number?”
“I’d given it to her. Told her if she ever needed anything to call me.” He kept his eyes forward. “She needed something.”
Fallon’s throat closed. She swallowed against it and kept walking.
“I mobilized the team. Cass had the address from your voicemail, so we knew exactly where you were headed. We were minutes behind you.”
She’d been inside that warehouse less than half an hour. It had felt like an eternity.
“Kessler?”
“In custody. Alive. He’s not going anywhere.”
She nodded. The hallway stretched ahead of them, doors on both sides, the quiet hum of medical equipment behind the walls.
“How did Kessler get Isaac? He was in a vehicle heading back to the compound with another operative.”
Ryder didn’t answer immediately. His jaw worked once before he spoke.
“Kessler rammed the vehicle. Hit the driver’s side at full speed.” A beat. “The driver, Ryan Cafferty, didn’t survive the impact. Kessler pulled Isaac from the wreck.”
Fallon stopped walking. Her grip tightened on Ryder’s arm. A man she’d never met had died driving a route back from an operation built to protect her.
“I—”
“Don’t.” Ryder’s voice was quiet but it left no room for argument. “I can see where you’re headed, and I’m shutting it down. Cafferty was doing his job. He knew the risks of this work every single day he showed up. His death is on Kessler, not on you.”
She held his gaze. The guilt didn’t dissolve but it settled into a place where she could carry it without drowning in it.
“Rogue’s building the case against your former targets who hired Kessler,” he continued.
“Conspiracy to commit murder, financing a contract killing. The evidence Cassie already had, plus what Peter and the Rogue analysts have pulled in the last twenty-four hours is more than enough. Those three are done.”
Cassie. If she didn’t want to see Isaac so damned much she would stop Ryder right now and ask him his plan for dating her friend. She had no doubt he had one.
They reached the end of the corridor. A door on the right, slightly ajar. Ryder stopped.
“Listen.” Ryder paused. “I’ve already seen him. He’s in and out of consciousness. Four broken ribs, two cracked. Broken nose, orbital fracture, dislocated shoulder they reduced under sedation. But he’s going to heal. All of it.”
Fallon pushed the door open.
The monitors registered first. Steady beeping, the green trace of a heart rhythm moving across a screen. An IV line running from a pole into the back of Isaac’s right hand. Then the bed, and Isaac in it, and the air left her lungs.
She’d seen him in the warehouse. She’d seen him tied to a chair with his face opened up and his ribs caved in and blood dried in dark lines from his temple to his jaw. She’d watched Kessler hit him, and she’d watched him get back up.
She’d watched him put himself between her and a man with a knife when his own body was barely holding together, fueled by nothing but refusal to let her be hurt.
Twenty-four hours of medical care had cleaned the blood away, and without it, the damage was starker.
Both eyes swollen shut, the left side of his face a deep, mottled purple that spread from his brow to his jaw.
The bridge of his nose taped beneath bandaging.
Compression wrapping from his sternum to his waist, and above it, bruising that climbed his neck and fanned across his collarbone.
This was what protecting her had cost him.
She crossed the room. Each step was deliberate, the last reserves of what her body had left spent on the act of closing the distance between the door and his bed.
She lowered the rail with her forearm because her hands couldn’t grip it.
She eased onto the mattress beside him, careful of the IV line and his wounds.
But she had to be with him. She had to.
She put her head on his chest, not letting her weight sink on to him any more than it had to. His heart beat under her ear. The same pulse she’d pressed her fingers against on the warehouse floor while the darkness took her.
His heartbeat was here. He was here.
Isaac stirred. His right arm moved, heavy and slow, and settled across her shoulders. His left hand found her hip. The grip had no coordination, the pull of a man surfacing from somewhere deep.
The door clicked shut behind her. Ryder, giving them space.
She didn’t move. Isaac’s chest rose and fell beneath her. The monitors kept their rhythm. His arm stayed across her shoulders, warm and heavy.
She might have slept. She wasn’t sure. Time had gone soft and unreliable, measured only in the steady push of Isaac’s breathing and the quiet beeping of the machines beside the bed.
A knock brought her back. The door opened. Ryder’s voice, low and close.
“Cass wants to talk to you.”
Fallon lifted her head. He was holding a phone toward the bed, the screen lit, a call already connected. She took it with both hands, cradling it between her palms, and brought it to her ear.
“Cass.”
“You absolute reckless lunatic.” Cassandra’s voice broke wide open on the third word. “You left me a goodbye voicemail. A voicemail, Fallon. While driving to a warehouse to trade yourself for a man you’ve known for a short period of time.”
“I know.”
“I was in the bathroom. Three minutes. I was in the bathroom for three minutes and you almost died because I didn’t pick up the phone.”
“I almost died because I chose to go. You’re the reason I didn’t.”
Silence on the other end. Ragged breathing. The sound of someone held together by nothing but stubbornness and fury.
“You called Ryder,” Fallon said. “You turned a goodbye into a rescue, Cass. That was you.”
“Don’t.” Cass’s voice was thick. “Don’t make me the hero of this. I sat in my apartment and cried and dialed a phone number. That’s all I did.”
“Well, it was everything.”
A shaky exhale. Then, quieter: “Is Isaac okay?”
“He’s going to be.”
“Good.” A pause. “I love you, too. You said it in the voicemail, and I need you to know that. I love you, too.”
“I know, Cass.”
“Okay.” Her voice steadied by one degree. “Go be with your man. I’ll be here when you need me.”
The call ended. Fallon held the phone against her chest for a moment before handing it back to Ryder.
“Thank you,” she said. “For everything.”
For the phone. For the rescue. For giving Cass his number before any of this had happened.
He nodded once. Then he pulled the door shut behind him, and the room was still.
Fallon settled back against Isaac’s chest. His arm tightened around her, a small pull, and his fingers curled against her shoulder. Not the unconscious grip from before. His fingers found the edge of her sleeve and held on.
“Fallon.” Barely a whisper. Rough, broken, dragged up from somewhere deep.
She lifted her head. His right eye had opened, just barely, a sliver of hazel beneath the swelling. He was looking at her.
“I’m here,” she said. “I’m not going anywhere. You and me.”
His eye closed. His fingers didn’t let go.
She put her head back on his chest, his heartbeat once again solid and reassuring under her ear. The only sound that mattered.
She stayed.