She hesitated for a half second—he saw her eyes sweep the room, cataloging something he didn’t have time to read—and then she turned and moved toward the entrance. Fast, controlled. Not panicking, despite the fact that almost everyone else was.
He turned away and pulled his phone out of his jacket pocket and hit the speed dial for Peter Valbracht, Zodiac’s computer guru. The call connected on the second ring.
“Hey, Isaac. What’s?—”
“I need a fast answer. I’m at the Boston Arts Alliance fundraiser, South Street warehouse district. Fire alarm and full sprinkler activation. Is this real?”
Peter was already typing. Isaac could hear it through the phone—the rapid click of keys that meant Peter had at least two screens up and was pulling data faster than most people could read it.
“Give me ten seconds.”
Isaac used those ten seconds. A woman in heels had gone down near the auction tables, her ankle turned on the wet floor. He crossed to her in four strides, took her arm, and helped her up. She was shaking, mascara running, clutching a handbag to her chest like a life preserver.
“Straight ahead. Follow the crowd to the front doors.”
She nodded and went. A man was trying to go back toward the bar—his wife’s coat, his phone, something he’d left—and Isaac caught his shoulder and turned him around.
“Everything stays. You go out.”
Peter’s voice came back. “Boston FD dispatch shows an active fire call at your address. Engine company en route, ETA three minutes. Looks like it originated in the basement level—mechanical or electrical, but it’s real. Not a drill, not a false alarm. Get out of the building.”
“Copy.” Isaac hung up.
The crowd was thinning. Most people had funneled through the front entrance by now, but the back half of the room was still a mess—overturned chairs, shattered glasses, water coming down in sheets. The lighting had gone to emergency backup, casting everything in a flat, institutional glow.
He moved through it methodically. This was the part of his brain that worked best: clear objective, real stakes, no ambiguity. No cocktail napkins, no small talk, no pretending to be less than he was. He checked the bar area, found it empty. Checked the alcove near the windows where he’d first seen Fallon tonight. Empty. The DJ had abandoned his setup, cables and equipment sitting in an inch of water.
He was heading toward the main exit when he saw her.
She was in the hallway near the private gallery rooms. Standing just outside the second door—the one that led to thesmall exhibition space—half-turned toward it, her hand on the frame.
She was soaked. Her hair had come loose from the twist and hung against her neck. The dark dress clung to her shoulders and arms, and the water on her skin caught the emergency lights. She looked disoriented. Lost.
“Fallon.”
She turned. A flash of calculation crossed her face—quick, controlled, before disappearing. Then she was just a wet, cold woman standing in a hallway she shouldn’t be in.
“I, uh, got turned around,” she said.
“It’s this way. Come on.”
He took her arm again, the same way he had on the dance floor but with zero romance in it now. Her skin was cold and slick under his hand. He guided her back through the main room, around the overturned furniture and the standing water, and out through the front doors into the night air.
The street was chaos in a different key.
Two fire trucks had already arrived, lights strobing red and white against the brick facades of the surrounding buildings. A police cruiser was angled across the intersection, blocking traffic in both directions.
The crowd from the fundraiser had spilled onto the sidewalk and into the street—three hundred people in cocktail attire, soaked to the bone, some of them still holding drinks they’d somehow carried out. Everyone was on their phone. A woman was crying near the curb. Two men in suits were arguing about whose car was blocked in.
Fallon hugged her arms across her chest. She was shivering. Her makeup had washed away almost completely—the sculpted brows, the dark lip, all of it dissolved in the sprinkler water.
What was left was a face he hadn’t seen before. Younger. Her eyes were brighter without the dark liner framing them, and theangles of her cheekbones and jaw were more pronounced. He liked this version better.
“What?” she asked.
Your face is different,” he said. “The makeup. It’s gone.”
She touched her cheek with the back of her hand, a reflex, then dropped it. “I probably look like a drowned raccoon.”
