Isaac turned the phone back to himself. Cassandra’s eyes were wet behind her glasses. She blinked it away with the efficiency of someone who’d had practice.
“Tell me what to do,” he said.
“I told her not to climb, that her body needed a break, but she wouldn’t listen.”
“What’s wrong with her?”
“The climbing, the way she fits through impossible spaces, the dislocations—that’s not just talent. She has a condition called hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos syndrome. hEDS.” Cassandra paused. Steadied herself. “Her joints don’t have normal limits. They move past where they’re supposed to stop.Waypast. That’s what lets her do what she does.”
“The gate,” Isaac said. “The shoulder.”
“Yes. All of it. But every time she uses it, she’s doing damage that doesn’t repair the way it should. I’ve watched her come back from jobs where she couldn’t close her hands for two days. I’ve talked her through nights where her hip dislocated in her sleep and she had to put it back herself at three in the morning.” Cassandra’s voice thinned. “The dislocations get easier over time, and that’s the cruelest part. It doesn’t mean she’s getting better. It means the joints are getting looser. Less stable. She’s been spending what she can’t afford to spend for years, and tonight her account hit zero.”
Isaac sank onto the edge of the bed.
“What does she need right now?”
“Warmth. That’s the most important thing. Her joints seize after trauma and cold. A warm bath: not super hot, just warm. The heat will help the tissue relax and let things find their ownalignment. Gentle compression on the wrist if you can, but don’t force anything back into place. And absolutely no ice. I know that sounds wrong, but ice makes it worse. It locks everything up tighter. Warmth opens it.”
“Warm water. No ice. Don’t force the joints.”
“That’s it. Her body will do the rest if you give it time and heat.”
Cassandra’s voice broke.
A syllable that hitched. A breath that came in shaking and went out worse. She caught it, held it, pushed through it, but the fracture was audible and she didn’t try to pretend it wasn’t.
“Isaac.”
“I’m here.”
“Don’t hurt her.” The words came out thick, and she wasn’t talking about joints. Her jaw was trembling behind her glasses and she was staring at him through a phone screen from however many miles away, trusting a man she’d never met with the person she loved most in the world. “Don’t use what you know against her. Don’t turn her in. Please.”
“I’m not going to hurt her, Cassandra. Not in any way.”
She searched his face through the screen. Looking for the lie, the hedge, the fine print. He gave her nothing but the truth.
“Okay,” she whispered. “I can be reached at this number. Fallon is the only one who has it.”
The call ended. Isaac set the phone on the nightstand and went to the bathroom.
The tub was small. Standard white porcelain. He turned the faucet and held his hand under the stream, adjusting until the temperature was right. Warm. Steady. Cassandra’s instructions replaying on a loop behind his eyes.
He went back to the bedroom.
Fallon hadn’t moved. He crouched beside the bed and touched her cheek. Cool skin. Her eyes opened at the contact, glassy and distant.
“I’m going to get you in the bath,” he said. “Cassandra told me what you need. The warm water is going to help.”
Her lips moved. He took it as consent.
He undressed her. Jacket first, easing the sleeve over the swollen wrist a fraction of an inch at a time, pausing when she flinched, waiting, continuing. Her shirt, lifting it over her head while supporting her neck. Her pants, working them down over the knee that had gone rigid and hot. Clinical. Careful. His hands doing what needed to be done and nothing else.
What he was looking at was damage. The wrist, mottled purple. The knee, swollen and tracking wrong beneath the skin. Bruising along her left hip he hadn’t known about. Her right shoulder sitting lower than her left, the joint not fully seated. A map of what this night had cost her, drawn across a frame that was too small and too stubborn and too brave for the work it had been asked to do.
He lifted her from the bed, carried her to the bathroom, and lowered her into the water.
The warmth reached her joints and something released. The sound she made stopped his heart: a raw exhale of relief so complete it was almost a sob, pulled from somewhere below thought or language. Every rigid line in her frame softened. The locked muscles in her shoulders let go all at once, and her head fell back against the rim of the tub, and she breathed out long and shaking, and the deep grooves of pain around her mouth eased for the first time since he’d pulled her off that wall.
