Chapter Fifteen
The house was quiet in the way only empty houses were quiet—not silent, but holding its breath.
Fallon sat on the floor of a walk-in closet in a first-floor guest room, her back against the wall, her knees drawn to her chest. She’d broken in nearly six hours ago, while Chemo Money Asshole was still at a foundation board dinner across town, and tucked herself into the one room Cassandra’s surveillance confirmed he never entered: a guest room at the back of the house that smelled like carpet cleaner and disuse.
He’d come home at nine-fifteen. She’d heard the garage door, the alarm panel beeping its welcome-home sequence, the heavy tread of a man who owned four thousand square feet and filled it with nothing but himself and stolen money. He’d moved through the kitchen. Opened something—a cabinet, a bottle. The downstairs television had come on somewhere on the other side of the house, loud enough to reach her hiding place in muffled bass notes.
Now it was eleven-forty. He’d gone to bed twenty minutes ago. She needed to wait at least another thirty before she moved.
Her left hip ached from the hard floor. She shifted, extending one leg straight out along the carpet, and her knee popped twice.
Her mind went to another closet four nights ago. She closed her eyes.
Isaac’s hands pulling her against him. The wall biting into her shoulder blades through the thin fabric of her dress. The desperate, graceless urgency of it—nothing like Boston, nothing slow or careful.
He’d been terrified for her. She’d watched his face in the seconds before she kissed him, and what she’d seen there had rearranged something behind her ribs that she still hadn’t put back in order.
Nobody had ever been afraid for her like that. Cassandra worried—of course she did. But Cassandra’s worry was operational.Are you safe, did anyone see you, is the exit clear?
Isaac’s fear hadn’t been about the work. It hadn’t been about anything excepther.
And she was about to finish this job and leave Austin and never see him again.
The television had gone silent. The house settled deeper into its nighttime sounds—the tick of cooling pipes, the low hum of the HVAC system, a clock somewhere marking seconds she couldn’t afford to waste on a man she couldn’t keep.
The master suite was upstairs on the second floor, a whole story and the full length of the house between them. She’d tested the sound carry during her walk-through when the house was empty—a whisper from this guest room didn’t even reach the first-floor hallway, let alone the stairs.
She pulled out the burner phone and called him.
He picked up on the first ring. “Hey.” His voice was relaxed, unhurried. Off the clock. Their nightly calls had settled into this window—late enough that his shifts were over, late enough that neither of them had anywhere else to be.
“Hey.” She kept her voice barely above a whisper.
“You’re up late,” he said.
“Working late.”
“Everything okay?”
“Everything’s fine. Just a long night.”
“The kind of long night where you can talk, or the kind where you’re about to tell me you have to go?”
She let her head fall back against the wall. “The kind where I can talk. For a little while.”
She heard him settle. A shift of fabric, the creak of a headboard. “Good. I missed your voice today. The texts are good, but they’re not the same.”
“You saw me four days ago.”
“Four very long days ago. In a closet. Under circumstances that didn’t exactly lend themselves to conversation.”
Her mouth curved. “No. They did not.”
“Although I’d argue we communicated effectively.”
She pressed her lips together to keep from laughing. The sound would carry. “You’re ridiculous.”
“I’ve been told. Usually by people who then stick around anyway.”
