She didn’t see him. She was operating at her normal level of caution—the level that would have been more than enough at any event that didn’t have men prowling the room hoping to catch someone. She was reading the crowd, mapping herapproach, doing the work she’d done dozens of times. And she had no idea that the man twenty feet to her left was hunting.
Isaac watched the geometry. Fallon’s trajectory toward a man in a blue suit who was holding court near the bar. Red Face’s sight line, sweeping the same section. The distance closing between them, and neither of them aware of the other.
Fuck. Fallon was going to make her move. Red Face was going to see it.
Every instinct he had said go. Get to her.Now. But Endicott was his responsibility here, not Fallon. Three hundred guests, a credible threat, a client paying Zodiac to keep him alive. If he left his position, the operation had a gap.
Fallon took a half-step toward the man in blue.
Isaac looked across the room to Endicott who was still at his table, Laura beside him, the close protection detail three feet away. Covered. Safe.
He looked back at Fallon. She had no one.
He crossed the room.
He moved fast but not urgently—a man with somewhere to be, nothing more. He adjusted his path to intersect with hers before she could close on the mark. Ten feet. Five.
He caught her elbow.
Her head snapped toward him. The flash of recognition was instant—then confusion, then the beginning of something sharp and angry.
“Don’t,” he said, low enough that only she could hear. “Come with me right now.”
“What are you?—”
“Right now, Fallon.”
He steered her away from the bar, away from Red Face, away from the crowd. Through a gap between cocktail tables, past a service door. A utility closet was just inside. He jerked the door open and pulled her inside and shut it behind them.
Dark—only light enough to see from the red of the backup lights in the corner. Tight. A mop bucket against one wall, shelving stacked with cleaning supplies, barely enough room for two people standing face to face. The sounds of the event were muffled now—music and voices reduced to a low hum through the walls.
She ripped her arm free.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing, Isaac?”
“Keeping you from getting hurt.”
“I wasn’t doing anything. I hadn’t even?—”
“I know you hadn’t. But you were going to. I got to you first.”
Her eyes narrowed. “You just pulled me off the floor in front of three hundred people fornothing. I thought we agreed you didn’t care. That petty theft was below Zodiac’s?—”
He cut her off. “The venue security team doesn’t feel the same.”
“What? Nobody?—”
“Listen to me. Two of this venue’s security guys were bragging about how their coworkers caught someone in Dallas going through coat pockets. You know what they did to him? Took him out back and broke his fingers. And then they stood there laughing about it, saying they hoped someone would try it tonight so they could do the same thing.”
Her jaw tightened. “I’ve dealt with aggressive security before.”
“Not like this. These are actively looking for someone like you. They’rehopingsomeone gives them a reason to get ugly. They want it, Fallon. They’re bored and they’re violent and they’re looking for exactly what you do.”
She opened her mouth. Closed it. He watched the argument die on her lips as something behind her eyes shifted.
She shook her head. “You weren’t even supposed to be here tonight.”
He had to find out how she kept knowing Zodiac’s schedule, but not right now.
