First turn: right. Second: left, then immediate right again into the narrow channel that ran along the eastern wall. She moved fast and silent, her flat shoes gripping the packed earth of the path.
Behind her, she heard him curse and enter the maze. He wasn’t quiet about it. He was fast, his stride long and confident. That wouldn’t last long in this elaborate labyrinth.
She cut left through a passage so narrow that the hedge walls brushed both shoulders. Fifteen feet in, a gap opened at the base of the wall where the boxwood hadn’t filled completely—a space maybe eighteen inches high and two feet wide. She dropped to her stomach and rolled through it, emerging on the other side in a parallel corridor.
She was on her feet and moving before the dirt had settled.
The maze was tight, intricate, designed for daytime wandering with a map and a glass of wine. In the dark it wassomething else entirely. Dead ends materialized out of nothing. Corridors doubled back on themselves. The walls were too high to see over and too dense to see through.
She knew where every dead end was. She knew which corridors connected, which ones looped, and which ones led to the four exits—three false ones that doubled back to the entrance and one real one, a cast iron gate in the northeast corner.
Isaac didn’t know any of it.
She could hear him working through it. Multiple curses. A pause at a junction. Choosing, committing, finding a dead end and reversing. He was methodical, systematic, not panicking.
But she was faster here. She knew the shortcuts, the gaps, the places where the hedges thinned enough for a body her size to slip through. She looped behind him twice, passing through a corridor he’d already cleared while he pushed deeper into a section she’d already left.
A flashlight beam cut through the dark from somewhere near the entrance. The guards had heard movement. She pressed herself flat against the hedge wall and held still.
The beam swept past her corridor and kept moving. It found Isaac instead—a man in a jacket, mid-stride, caught in the light.
“Sir! The maze is closed. You need to come back to the entrance.”
She heard Isaac say something calm and measured, buying time, playing the apologetic guest who’d wandered in without realizing. The guards were focused on him now.
The trained operative was the one they’d caught. The thief was invisible.
She moved through the last corridor, around the final turn, and there was the gate.
Cast iron, eight feet high, spiked finials along the top. Two doors that met in the center, held shut by a heavy chain loopedthrough the bars and secured with a padlock. Beyond it, the dark tree line and the service road where she could disappear.
She gripped the bars and pulled. The chain held. The gap where the two doors met was narrow—barely wider than her head. She turned sideways and pressed herself into it. Her left shoulder hit the iron bar first.
Too narrow. Her body wouldn’t compress enough with her shoulder in its socket.
Behind her, a voice. Not the guards.
“Fallon. Stop.”
She turned. Isaac was at the end of the corridor, ten feet away. She didn’t know how he’d slipped the guards, but he had. His jacket had dirt on one sleeve and a thin scratch ran along his jaw from a branch. He wasn’t winded, but he was still. Coiled.
The easy charm stripped completely from his handsome face.
“You’re going to come with me,” he said. “We’re going to walk out of here together, and we’re going to have a real conversation. No vanishing. No more games.”
She looked at him. Then she looked at the gate.
She had the drive on her. If he searched her, if he detained her, if he brought her to anyone, the Asshole walked free and the families with sick children never got justice. Two hundred families. Two hundred.
She wasn’t letting this job die in a hedge maze.
“I can’t do that,” she said.
“I’m afraid you’re going to have to. You’re not getting past me again, and there’s certainly no way you’re fitting through that gap.”
He didn’t understand. How could he? Very few people in the world did.
She turned back to the gate and braced her right hand against the iron bar. She tucked her left arm across her body, found the angle she needed and sucked in a breath.
