“Whatever your reasons are—I hope they’re worth it.”
The line went quiet as they disconnected the call. She sat with the phone against her chest and listened to the silence fill the space where his voice had been. The house ticked and hummed around her. The closet walls held her in place.
She forced herself to give it another forty-five minutes. Let the conversation drain out of her body until all that remained was the job.
She eased the closet door open and stepped into the guest room. There was no sound from upstairs. No television, no movement.
Her shoes were soft-soled, chosen for exactly this. She moved through the doorway and into the hallway, staying close to the wall where the floorboards were tightest against the joists.
The safe was in Asshole’s study on the far end of the first floor. Fallon knew exactly where. Cassandra had traced the delivery records—a Langford residential safe, twelve hundred pounds, installed fourteen months ago by a bonded company whose technician had been careless enough to file the work order on an unsecured network.
The study door was open. She slipped inside and eased it shut behind her.
Bookshelves lined two walls. A mahogany desk dominated the center. The safe was behind a hinged section of shelving on the east wall—a false panel that looked like part of the built-in cabinetry.
Fallon pressed two fingers against the upper right corner of the panel. The latch released with a soft click and the section swung outward on concealed hinges.
The safe was matte black, digital keypad, biometric backup. She didn’t need the biometric. The code was an eight-digit string that Cassandra had extracted from a password file on his personal laptop—the same laptop where he tracked exactly how much money he’d diverted from families whose children were dying.
She keyed in the code. The lock disengaged with a low, mechanicalthunk.
She opened the door.
The gemstones caught what little ambient light there was and threw it back in fragments. Rubies, emeralds, sapphires—loose stones arranged in velvet-lined trays, sorted by color and size. Dozens of them. Some rough-cut, most polished, all of them beautiful in the cold, precise way that expensive things were beautiful when they’d been bought with suffering.
Hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of jewels. He’d bought them using money that was supposed to pay for chemotherapy and experimental trials and hospital bills that no parent should have to face alone. He’d skimmed from every fundraiser, every donor dinner, every black-tie event with fire dancers and twelve-hundred-dollar tickets.
He’d stood in rooms full of people who thought they were helping sick children, and he’d pocketed their generosity and bought gemstones.
Fallon pulled the leather roll from the inner pocket of her jacket and laid it flat on the carpet. One tray at a time, she transferred the stones. Her hands were steady. Her breathing was controlled. Each stone placed into its slot with the careful precision of someone who’d done this before and couldn’t afford a single mistake.
The phone buzzed in her pocket.
She was mid-transfer, crouched in front of the safe with the second tray in her hands. Every protocol, every instinct, every lesson three years of this work had taught her said to finish the job and check later.
She set the tray down and looked.
Isaac. A photo of a vending machine with a handwritten sign taped to it read OUT OF ORDER. Below the photo:
This machine and I have a lot in common tonight.
She was crouched on the floor of a criminal’s study at midnight, transferring a fortune in stolen gemstones into a leather roll, and Isaac was sending her a picture of a broken vending machine because it was the kind of small, stupid, ordinary thing two people shared when they’d gottencomfortable enough to send each other the pointless moments of their day.
She typed back:
Did you try asking it nicely?
Sent it. Put the phone away. Her hands were still steady when she reached for the third tray. Her chest was not.
She finished the transfer. Every stone accounted for. She rolled the leather case tight and secured it with the strap, then slipped it back inside her jacket. The weight settled against her ribs.
Now the signature. Always her favorite part, even if it was, arguably, the riskiest.
These people had to know. Had to understand it wasn’t random thefts. It was their own actions that had brought this on.
She reached into her other pocket and pulled out a small plastic bag. Inside was a child’s hospital identification band—the kind they put on a patient’s wrist during admission. Tiny. Faded. The name and date had been redacted, but the hospital logo was still visible, and the band itself was real. Cassandra had sourced it through a nurse at a children’s oncology ward who’d kept it after a young patient passed away. The family had given permission.
Fallon set the band inside the safe, centered on the empty velvet where the largest tray had been. Beside it, she placed a folded note card. She’d written it herself, by hand, in neat block letters.
