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 tothe main building, find someone, explain the situation. Wait for Ryder to get back?
