“Better.”
He walked her back to the bedroom. She lowered herself onto the edge of the bed, and the stiffness in her knee sent a bolt up her thigh that she absorbed without sound. He crouched in front of her and checked the compression wrap, his fingers gentle on the edges, testing the tension.
“Would another bath help? The warm water worked last night.”
She’d remembered it in pieces—the water, the heat, the slow release of her locked joints—but she’d filed it with the other fragments, half-convinced it was something her brain had assembled from need rather than memory.
But it was real. He’d put her in a bath. And she couldn’t have held herself upright, which meant?—
He’d been in the water with her.
She could feel it now. The specific memory clicking into focus like a lens turning. His chest behind her. His arm across her waist. The way she’d rested against him because there was nothing left in her body that could hold itself up. She’d been undressed. She’d been unable to support her own weight. Andhe’d climbed in behind her and held her there in the warm water until the pain released its grip.
“Fallon?”
She looked at him. He was still crouched in front of her, his hands on the compression wrap, waiting.
“The bath,” she said. “You were in the water with me.”
Something moved across his face. “You kept falling over. I couldn’t hold you up from outside the tub.”
She absorbed that. The intimacy of it. The vulnerability she hadn’t been conscious enough to guard against. He’d seen her at the absolute bottom. Not just hurt, but helpless. Unable to sit up in a bathtub without someone else’s body holding hers in place.
And then a second thing connected.
Cassandra told me what to do.He’d said that. Last night, or early this morning, somewhere in the blur. She’d half-heard it. His voice near her ear, low and steady:Cassandra told me what to do.
He’d talked to Cassandra.
If Isaac had talked to Cassandra, if she’d told him about the warm water and her hEDS, then the wall between Fallon’s two worlds had a door in it now.
And Isaac had walked through it.
She sat with that. The jolt of it reverberating through her chest in waves she couldn’t name. Fear. Relief. A disorienting sense of exposure, as if someone had pulled back a curtain she’d spent years keeping closed. Whatever she was feeling, she couldn’t sort it into anything as clean as a single emotion.
He was still here. He’d talked to the one person who knew everything, and he’d used that information to take care of her. He hadn’t run. Hadn’t recoiled. He’d held her in warm water and wrapped her wrist and sat in a chair all night.
“Food?” she said. “You mentioned peanut butter.”
He made her crackers with peanut butter. Brought them on a plate with more water. She ate slowly, her right hand useless, her left doing all the work. He sat on the edge of the bed beside her and waited until she’d finished before he spoke.
She set the plate on the nightstand. “How did you find me? How are you even in Chattanooga?”
He leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “I used what I had: the burner phone. I had my tech guy help me narrow the signal to Chattanooga through cellular triangulation.”
Of course. That was why Cass had wanted her to get rid of it. Because it was a liability. But Fallon hadn’t.
He paused. “From there, we researched people who could be your potential targets based on your previous marks. Wealthy, corrupt, the kind of people who’d earned what you do.”
She went still.
“The past five nights I’ve gone to every gala, every fundraiser, every black-tie anything that any of your potential targets might be at. Bought tickets, talked my way in, stood in rooms full of people I didn’t care about and looked for you. Sheer fucking luck I looked up and saw you on that building last night.”
“You said something last night,” she said. “In the car. You said you know. About all of it.”
He straightened. Met her eyes.
“I know you’re not a pickpocket, Fallon. I know you’re targeting corrupt people and taking them down. The thefts, the public exposure, the financial records leaked to the press. You’re dismantling them. Robin Hooding.” He said it plainly. No judgment, no accusation. Just the shape of the truth, laid out between them. “It’s a much bigger operation than anything I initially assumed.”
