Chapter Ten
This place was a damned circus.
Almost literally. The fundraiser sprawled across the grounds of a limestone estate on the edge of the hill country, three hundred guests in black tie and masquerade masks milling between open-air bars and cocktail tables scattered across a lawn manicured to within an inch of its life.
Acrobats spun on silks between the trees. Fire dancers traced bright arcs against the dark. Thousands of lights were woven through the hedgerows and draped across the pergolas and strung between iron posts driven into the grass, turning the whole property into something between a carnival and a fever dream. At the far south end, a tall boxwood hedge maze rose dark and dense against the tree line, its entrance marked by iron posts with unlit lanterns.
The masks made everything easier.
Fallon moved through the crowd and let the masquerade do half her work for her. Every face around her was already altered—feathered, gilded, beaded, obscured. No need to reshape her own with contouring and prosthetic adhesive when the dress code required concealment.
She’d chosen a simple mask, black with silver threading at the edges, fitted close enough that it wouldn’t shift if she had to move fast. Her hair was pinned tight under a dark headpiece. Her black silk pantsuit was elegant enough not to draw attention for being too casual, but gave her freedom to move.
She loved the freedom of not having to worry about cameras but hated every other single thing about this event.
All of it—the lights, the acrobats, the masks, the grotesque beauty of the evening—was paid for with money that was supposed to help families whose children were dying.
Chemo Money Asshole’s foundation at its finest. Fallon was so looking forward to taking this bastard down. The money clip had been just a taste.
She rotated her right shoulder as she walked. A low-grade stiffness had settled into the joint sometime in the last hour, the kind of deep tightness that meant the tissue was unhappy but not yet in revolt. She noted it, filed it, and kept moving.
Cassandra had confirmed no Zodiac Tactical presence tonight. Endicott wasn’t invited—the biotech crowd and the charity circuit overlapped, but not here, not at this event. Isaac’s team had no reason to be anywhere near this property.
She’d forced herself not to think about him on the drive over, and she’d mostly succeeded.Mostly.
The building at the center of the estate was a stone and glass structure that served as the Asshole’s foundation headquarters. Guests were kept outside, but what Fallon needed was inside. Two guards flanked the main entrance, and she’d clocked a third at the service door on the east side. All three wore the same black polo with the foundation logo, all three had radios, and none of them looked like they’d been hired for their critical thinking skills.
This was a big play. Not a wallet lift, not a watch off a wrist. What she needed was inside that building, on theAsshole’s office computer—financial records that would prove the donations raised at events exactly like this one went straight into his accounts.
Cassandra needed the data to build the exposure case. Without it, he was just another rich man with a charity. With it, he was a criminal who’d stolen from families with dying children and bought himself a lifestyle with their grief.
Her shoulder twinged again. She rolled it once more and let it go.
Worth it. All of it would be worth it when Chemo Money Asshole’s face was on every news outlet in the state.
She circulated for another twenty minutes, tracking the guards’ patterns. The two at the main entrance stayed put. The one at the service door was the weak link. He kept drifting toward the fire dancers on the east lawn, turning his body away from the door for ten or fifteen seconds at a stretch before remembering he had a job and snapping back.
Fallon waited. She positioned herself near a cluster of guests watching an acrobat descend from a silk cord in a slow spiral, close enough to the east side of the building that the move would take less than eight seconds.
The fire dancer on the lawn launched into something dramatic. Twin poi, both lit, spinning in wide arcs that drew gasps from the nearest guests. The guard at the service door took a few steps away and turned to watch.
Fallon moved.
She crossed the gap between the crowd and the building in six seconds. The service door had a keypad lock, but the code was the foundation’s EIN number reversed—Cassandra had pulled it from a vendor invoice that the Asshole’s event coordinator had been careless enough to email on an unsecured server. Four digits, green light, door open.
She slipped inside and eased it shut behind her.
The interior was dim. Emergency lighting only. Pale strips along the baseboards cast just enough glow to navigate. She stood still for a five count, letting her eyes adjust, listening. The building was quiet. Climate control hummed somewhere overhead. Through the walls came the muffled thump of music and the distant roar of the crowd.
She moved down the corridor. The Asshole’s office was on the second floor, northeast corner. Cassandra had pulled the floor plan from a permit filing with the county. The stairs sat at the end of the hall, second door on the right.
The stairwell was dark. Fallon took the steps by feel, her hand trailing the railing, her weight distributed to avoid any creak from the treads. At the top, she paused again. Listened. Nothing.
The office door was unlocked.
She almost hesitated at that. Unlocked meant either confidence or carelessness, and with this man it was probably both. He didn’t think anyone would get past his guards. He didn’t think anyone would try.
She crossed to the desk. The computer was in sleep mode, the monitor dark. She touched the mouse and the screen lit up—password prompt, as expected. She typed in the string Cassandra had pulled from a breached credential database three days ago. The man ran a multimillion-dollar fraud and reused the same password across six accounts.
