Chapter Eighteen
Isaac was driving too fast, but he couldn’t make himself slow down.
Beside him, Fallon was reclined against the passenger seat with her eyes closed, her right wrist cradled against her chest. She’d surface for a few seconds—a sharp inhale, her jaw clenching, her left hand gripping the armrest hard enough to whiten her knuckles—and then the pain would pull her back down. Each time, it took longer for her to come back up.
Every instinct he had saidhospital. An ER with imaging equipment and IV pain management and people who understood what was happening inside her, because he sure as hell didn’t. Her wrist was swollen to nearly twice its normal size. Her left knee hadn’t borne weight since he’d pulled her through that window.
She’d told him she had some sort of condition, and then every joint she owned had proven it in the most brutal way possible.
But she’d been adamant: no hospital. Her voice may have been thin and cracked as she said it but it had left no room for argument. Unless her pulse went sideways or she stopped responding entirely, he’d honor it.
He pulled out his phone and called Peter.
“I need a safehouse.” No preamble. “Chattanooga. As fast as you can, man.”
Peter didn’t ask unnecessary questions. Isaac heard the keys start immediately, the rapid-fire staccato of a man who understood the difference between a request and an emergency.
“Give me two minutes.”
Isaac kept driving. In the passenger seat, Fallon’s head turned toward the window. A low sound escaped through her clenched teeth—involuntary, animal—and her breath fogged the glass.
His grip tightened on the wheel.
Thirty seconds.His mind kept circling back to it. He’d been inside that building for hours, working the event, scanning every face in every room, looking for Fallon. She hadn’t been there. He’d given up, accepted that tonight was another dead end in the trail that had brought him to Chattanooga, and walked out.
Then he’d happened to look up from his car.
A figure on the exterior wall, two stories above the sidewalk. Moving down the façade in a way that shouldn’t have been possible—hands finding holds in the stone that didn’t look like holds, feet gripping the brick at angles that defied what he understood about how a human body was supposed to work.
He’d known it was Fallon. Instantly, completely, before the recognition even reached his conscious brain. Something in his nervous system had identified her from sixty feet away in the dark.
He hadn’t known she was in trouble. Hadn’t known her wrist was about to give out, that her knee was one bad step from buckling, that she was seconds from a fall that would have ended everything. He’d just known she was there, and that he couldn’t let her vanish again.
So he’d gotten back inside the building, past the lobby guard, up to the second floor. He’d been working the window open when her hand slipped.
Thirty seconds.If he’d left the event thirty seconds earlier, he might not have seen her at all. Wouldn’t have been there to grab her through that window. He would have driven away, and she would have been lying on a sidewalk in the dark.
Alone.
“Got one.” Peter’s voice cut through. “Rental property, short-term listing. Booking it now under a clean alias. Sending you the address and the lockbox code.”
“Thank you.”
“Isaac. Do you need backup?”
“No. Just the safehouse.”
Peter let it go. The address came through ten seconds later. Twelve minutes away.
Isaac made it in eight.
The safehouse was a single-story bungalow on a quiet residential street. Porch light off, driveway empty. Isaac pulled in, killed the engine, and was around to the passenger side before the ticking of the cooling engine had started.
He opened her door. Fallon’s eyes were half open, glassy, tracking his face without quite landing on it.
“We’re at a safehouse. We’re secure here,” he said. “I’m going to get you inside.”
She didn’t argue. He wasn’t sure she could.
