“You’d fire anyone else for half of what I just described.”
“Maybe. But you’re not anyone else.”
“That’s not a good enough reason, and you know that, too.”
Ian’s hands were folded on the table. Patient. Unhurried. Letting Isaac throw everything he had before he responded.
“Are you done?”
Isaac exhaled. “I resigned to get ahead of being fired. That’s the reality of the situation.”
“Here’s the reality of the situation.” Ian’s voice dropped. Quieter. Harder. “I’ve run Zodiac for a long time. Built it from nothing. Picked every operative on that roster by hand, including you. And in all those years, I have never once had a man I trusted walk away from a detail without a damn good reason.” He held Isaac’s gaze. “You wouldn’t have left Endicott if something serious hadn’t pulled you. I know that because I know who you are.”
Isaac’s jaw ached. He’d been clenching it without realizing.
“The team handled it,” Ian continued. “They handled it because you built a team that could function without you, which is what a good leader does. Endicott’s stalker was caught. Case closed clean. So yeah, I’ll drag you into the sparring ring and beat the hell out of you for leaving your team. But fire you?” He shook his head once. “No.”
The relief didn’t arrive all at once. It came in a slow, crushing wave—days of carrying the weight of that email, of telling himself he’d made the only responsible choice, of staring at the ceiling at two in the morning wondering who he was without the work. The certainty that his career was over. That the life he’d built after walking away from his family’s money, the only identity that was truly his, was gone.
It wasn’t gone.
His throat tightened. He swallowed against it.
“Your resignation is denied,” Ian said. “Now stop falling on your sword and tell me what pulled you away.”
Isaac nodded. Took a breath. “It’s Fallon. The woman you just met.” Isaac rubbed a hand across his jaw. “She’s a criminal,Ian. She steals. Breaks into homes and offices. Operates completely outside the law. And I’m personally involved with her.”
He braced for the reaction. The disappointment, the recalibration. The resignation Ian had just denied landing back on the table between them.
Ian’s expression didn’t change.
“I know,” he said.
What? “What do you mean, you know?”
“The pattern came across my radar about a year ago.” Ian leaned back in his chair. “Wealthy, corrupt targets being systematically dismantled. Financial crimes exposed. Assets stolen. Press tipped simultaneously. Consistent playbook, consistent sophistication. I had Jenna Franklin-Outlawson helping me track it.”
Jenna. Former Zodiac tech expert. Brilliant, meticulous. Retired now, living her best life out in Oak Creek, Wyoming, home of Linear Tactical. Isaac had worked with her for years. As good as Peter was, nobody touched Jenna.
“We didn’t have names,” Ian continued. “Didn’t have faces. But the pattern was real, and we suspected at least two women working together. Someone in the field and someone running the tech side.”
“How long have you known it was Fallon?”
“About a week. Peter flagged the Mansoor takedown in Austin. Around the same time, I found out you were involved with a woman and had gone off the grid.” The corner of Ian’s mouth kicked up. “Wasn’t exactly a difficult puzzle after that.”
His boss had assembled the picture before he’d even opened the front door. Before the resignation email, before Chattanooga, before any of it. Ian had been ahead of him the entire time.
Ian leaned back. “I’ll be honest. When we first started tracking it, I found the whole thing entertaining. Shitty people getting exactly what they deserved. That’s like catnip for me.” His expression shifted. “Then I studied the method behind the takedowns more closely. The consistency. The discipline. The sophistication of the target selection alone—whoever was running these operations had judgment most intelligence agencies would kill for.”
Isaac let that settle. Ian DeRose didn’t hand out praise lightly, and he’d just described Fallon’s work with more professional respect than most Zodiac operatives ever earned.
“You were right about two women,” Isaac said. “Fallon handles the fieldwork—reconnaissance, the break-ins, the signature drops. Her partner is a woman named Cassandra. She’s the tech side. Research, target financials, digital forensics, coordinating the press leaks. Everything you tracked back to a sophisticated operation runs through Cassandra’s work as much as Fallon’s.”
Ian nodded slowly. “That tracks with what Jenna and I mapped. The digital footprint was too clean for one person. Both of these women are damned talented at what they do.”
“That’s the problem, at least for Fallon. What she’s able to do? Physical things that should be impossible, like getting into tiny spaces or scaling a fucking wall nobody but Spiderman would try? It comes from a condition called hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos syndrome. hEDS. It gives her extreme flexibility. She can dislocate and reset her own joints, move in ways that don’t look human.”
“Holy shit. I didn’t even know that was a thing.”
