Chapter Twenty-Six
Two hours ago, the wordshit on Fallonhad rearranged Isaac’s entire world.
Ian had moved fast. Within thirty minutes he’d pulled a full Rogue Division team off other assignments and put them on this situation. Within an hour, the conference room had filled with analysts and operatives building a case file from scratch.
By the time Isaac sat down at the long table with Fallon beside him, a photo was already on the screen and the room was running hot.
Dominic Kessler was the name of the contract killer. Mid-forties, close-cropped hair, a face built to disappear. Zodiac had been aware of his existence for some time, although they had never truly crossed paths. Kessler and his team tended to work internationally.
The room was tight with people and tension. Ryder sat across from Isaac and Fallon, leaned forward on his elbows, his hands clasped on the table. Ian stood near the door with his arms at his sides, his focus on the screen absolute.
Cassandra’s face filled the left half of a split screen on the wall, lips pressed together, worried eyes behind her glasses. Peter was on the right half, both keyboards going, his eyesflicking between his monitors and the camera. He’d spent the last two hours pulling everything Zodiac and Rogue had on Kessler, and what he’d found had put the edge in his voice that Isaac was hearing now.
“Kessler doesn’t just kill people.” Peter leaned toward his camera. “He enjoys the process. Past targets have been found in conditions that suggest he took his time with them. This isn’t a man who puts a bullet in someone and moves on. He likes the work.”
He let that land. The room didn’t need long.
“And he doesn’t stop. Once he’s contracted, he stays on it until it’s finished. If he can’t find his primary target, he goes after anyone connected to them. Family, friends, acquaintances. He uses them as leverage, or simply as punishment. People around the target start getting hurt until the target surfaces. Collateral damage isn’t a side effect for Kessler. It’s a tool.”
Isaac kept his eyes on Fallon. She was staring at the screen, and her face had gone blank. Not calm. Emptied. Everything pulled inward to a place no one in this room could reach. Her left hand was flat against her thigh. Her right, still wrapped at the wrist, rested on top of it. Neither moved.
“Zodiac has crossed his path twice,” Ian said from the door. His voice was low and hard. “Both times we were working adjacent to something he was involved in. We knew him by reputation and by what he left behind. We’ve never engaged him directly.” He paused. “This would be the first time.”
Peter clicked to a new slide. A list of locations. Cities, dates, apartment addresses.
“This is what he’s already found. Multiple previous apartments of yours, Fallon. Different cities, different aliases. He’s been retracing your path, and he has momentum.”
Fallon’s left hand curled into a fist against her thigh. The movement was small, controlled, and Isaac was the only person close enough to see it.
Cassandra took over from her side of the screen, her keyboard audible in the background.
“I traced the money.” Three new photos replaced Kessler’s. Two men and a woman. “Victor Lindholm, Raymond Caulfield, Margaret Voss. They financed the hit. They’re all former targets of Fallon.”
She didn’t linger on the individual faces.
“Pharma fraud, real estate bribery, insurance claim denial. Different industries, different cities. Three wealthy, disgraced people independently started looking for whoever destroyed them, found each other, and pooled their resources to hire Kessler. Between the three of them, they have more than enough money to keep him and his crew working this indefinitely.”
“They want to make you two pay for making them pay,” Isaac said.
Cassandra’s voice shifted. Tighter. The professional distance she’d been holding cracked at the edges. “Yes. They know I exist. They don’t have my name or my face yet, but they’re getting closer. The probes are sophisticated. Whoever is running them knows what they’re doing.”
Isaac looked at Ryder. Ryder’s hands had separated on the table, his fingers spread flat against the surface. He was watching Cassandra on the screen, and every trace of restlessness had left his body.
“Can you hold them off electronically?” Ryder asked. The casualness he usually carried was gone. “Go to ground. Unplug your computer? Hell, take a fucking sledgehammer to it.”
“I wish it was that simple. I’d be the first person to toss my laptop out the window.” Cassandra met his gaze through the screen. “I didn’t leave much of digital footprint to begin with, sothe fact that I’m being traced means some pretty sophisticated hackers are on my trail. I’m safe for now.”
“But thatfor nowhas an expiration date.” Ryder tossed back.
Cassandra shrugged, trying to seem a lot more casual than she was obviously feeling.
The room kept going. Ian was already talking to one of the Rogue operatives about resource allocation. Peter had pulled up another database on his half of the screen. Cassandra was still on screen too, her fingers moving across her keyboard, running whatever countermeasures she had against the probes. Everybody was working hard to figure out how to keep Fallon alive.
Everybody but Fallon. She hadn’t spoken in the last ten minutes. Hell, hadn’t said much of anything since she’d found out about the hit.
She sat with her hands in her lap, her shoulders drawn in, her whole frame condensed. She looked smaller in that chair than she had any right to. The room was full of people working to protect her, screens lit, voices overlapping, and she was sitting in the middle of all of it like someone who’d wandered into a language she didn’t speak.
A woman who’d operated alone for three years, who’d never had a single person standing between her and danger, and in the space of two hours an entire compound had mobilized around her. Instead of relief, what Isaac saw on her face was the quiet drowning of someone who’d never learned to accept a hand because no one had ever offered one.
