The event eventually wound down. Guests filtered toward the exits. The jazz trio packed up. Waiters cleared tables. Isaac moved around and did what he’d been doing all night—scanning the room, simultaneously checking for both danger and a dark-haired woman, and finding neither.
He swept the thinning crowd along the east wall. The bar. The terrace doors where Ryder was holding his position. The stage, mostly empty now. Everyone would be gone in another thirty minutes.
Then at far edge of the room, near the south corridor.
Fallon.
She was standing near the door. No drink in her hand. No companion. No coat or clutch or any of the small props people carried to give themselves something to do at events. She was just there, her body angled toward him, watching. She was holding a blonde wig off one finger.
Damn it, she’d been here the whole time. He should’ve known to think of a wig. He’d looked right past her, over and over, because she was that good at being invisible when she wanted to be.
She wasn’t invisible now. She held his gaze across the emptying ballroom, steady and unhurried, and let him see her. No mask, no angle, no exit strategy. Just Fallon, standing still in an open room, letting him know she was here. That she waswhole. That she’d been watching him all night and had chosen this moment to stop hiding.
A phone was in her hand. She lifted it and began to type.
Isaac took a step toward her. He could close the distance in seconds. Ask her if the shoulder was okay, if she’d seen a doctor, if anyone in her life knew what her body went through.
But then he stopped. He didn’t want to chance doing anything that might make her hurt herself again.
His pocket buzzed.
What the fuck? His phone was on his belt loop; nothing should be in his pocket. Especially nothingbuzzing.
He reached in his jacket pocket and pulled out a burner phone. Cheap, prepaid, the kind you bought at a gas station. His watch was wrapped around it, the leather band wound tight, the face pressed against the screen.
He looked up.
Fallon was gone, the space where she’d been standing empty. The south corridor behind her was dark and still.
The burner’s screen was lit with a single message.
I was wrong. You are good at your job.
