Chapter Seventeen
The burner phone had seventeen unanswered messages.
Fallon sat on the fire escape landing of a three-story brick building in Chattanooga, her back against the railing, the phone’s glow painting her fingers blue in the dark. Below her, the street was empty. A single streetlight at the corner threw a yellow circle on the pavement that didn’t reach the building’s face.
She scrolled.
The oldest messages were from six days ago. Three in a row, sent within an hour of each other.
Where are you?
Fallon. Talk to me.
I’m not angry. I just need to know you’re okay.
Then a gap. Twelve hours. Then two more messages.
I don’t care why you left. I care that you’re safe.
Call me. Please.
After that, the frequency dropped. One a day for three days. Then every other day. The last message was two days ago.
Maybe Isaac had given up. It had to happen sometime. She just hadn’t expected it to hurt so much.
She told Cassandra she’d thrown the phone away. She hadn’t. It sat every day in the inside pocket of her jacket like a piece of him she’d kept. A small, stupid, sentimental thing that existed only because she couldn’t make herself let go.
She closed the screen. The landing went dark again.
Chattanooga. New city. New target. Cassandra had been building the file for weeks, and Fallon had just gotten the data she needed off a computer in a third-floor office.
Business as usual.
This was the deal. She finished a job, she moved on, she didn’t look back. She’d done it before. She would do it again.
Except she’d never had anyone worth looking back at before.
Definitely hadn’t had anyone willing to restructure his life for her, and all the while she couldn’t explain why she couldn’t let him. And then left him without a goodbye. Ghosted him.
She put the phone in her jacket pocket and stood.
It didn’t matter now. She was in Chattanooga. He was in Austin or wherever his job had taken him. And she had a building to climb down.
Outside had been a much better option than getting up to the third floor from the inside. The building was old—brick and limestone, three stories, with decorative molding beneath each window, stone ledges jutting from the façade at every floor, carved corbels anchoring the corners. All good for climbing. Plus, no cameras. That was key.
Inside, was the opposite. The lobby had a guard and cameras everywhere, impossible to be avoided. So while everyone insidewas busy with their party, the guards and cameras focused on them, Fallon had gone the outside route.
She’d mapped every inch section she was climbing. Spent two hours yesterday with binoculars from the parking garage across the street, cataloging handholds and footholds, measuring gaps, calculating angles. There were no cameras out here because no sane person would try to scale this building.
But Fallon wasn’t most people and she’d done more complicated climbs than this before.
She swung her legs over the fire escape railing and lowered herself to the ledge below. Her left hand found the decorative molding beneath the third-floor window. Her fingers curled over the lip—not gripping with strength, but settling into it, her joints conforming to the stone’s contour in a way that created suction more than force.
Her wrist extended past the angle where most wrists stopped, the bones rotating in their loose housing until her palm was flat against the vertical face of the brick while her fingers hooked the horizontal ledge. Two planes at once.
A grip that physics and biology shouldn’t have allowed. But that was what made Fallon so good at what she did.
Her right foot found a corbel six inches below her hip. She pressed the ball of her foot against its curved surface and let her ankle roll inward, past neutral, past the point where ligaments should have pulled taut and saidstop.
