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The world that had cost him his soul.

He turned off the screen and pushed in his chair.

At least his fascination with Cassandra was done. Whatever he’d imagined, whatever warmth he’d projected onto a voice on a phone, it was fiction and the fiction was over. She was a tool he needed for the job, and that was it.

Chapter 5

The migraine had broken about an hour ago.

Cassandra had been lying in the dark for so long that when she finally opened her eyes, the dim glow from the nightstand clock felt aggressive. She lay still and waited, the way she always waited after the bad ones, testing whether the pain was really gone or just circling back for another pass.

Gone. Or close enough.

She sat up slowly. The room stayed steady. No spike behind her right eye, no nausea, just the hollow, wrung-out feeling that came after her brain had spent hours trying to eat itself alive. Her mouth was dry. The glass of water Fallon had left on the nightstand when she’d come to check on her after the meeting was warm, but she drank all of it.

She sat on the edge of the bed and let herself breathe for a minute. Then she started packing.

She couldn’t stay here. The briefing meeting had made that spectacularly, humiliatingly clear.

She wasn’t quitting. The case mattered. The kids mattered. Cassandra was willing to work this operation the same way she’d worked everything for the past three years. But she’d do it the best way: alone, behind her own equipment, in a space where she didn’t have to be around other people.

This compound was definitely not that space.

She’d made a complete idiot out of herself in that conference room. One meeting. One hour of sitting at a table while her brain tried to rip itself apart, and the best she’d managed was a single mumbled word while a room full of people stared at her. People who had dropped their lives to help find stolen children, and she couldn’t even look at them.

She didn’t want to think about that. She especially didn’t want to think about who else had been in that room, watching her fail.

So she wasn’t going to. She was going to go home, set up her systems, and do what she was actually good at.

She folded everything with the kind of precision that came from wanting to be gone five minutes ago, which meant shoving everything into the bag. Clothes, toiletries, the pharmacy bag with her remaining migraine pills. Laptop in its case. She was reaching for her jacket when someone knocked.

Shit. It had to be Fallon. Cassandra knew she couldn’t just leave without saying goodbye, but she also wished she didn’t have to face her friend right now. She pushed her bag to the side of the bed and opened the door.

“Hey.” Sure enough, Fallon stood in the doorway, scanning Cassandra’s face like she was checking for damage. “You look so much better.”

“I feel better.” That was true. The hollow feeling was still there behind her eyes, but nothing she couldn’t function through.

Fallon came in and sat on the edge of the desk chair. “You really scared me earlier, Cass.”

“Yeah.” She grimaced. “I’m sorry. I took my migraine meds and slept it off.”

“Was the headache already building during the briefing? Is that why you had the glasses on?”

Explaining the real purpose of the glasses wasn’t an option. Especially since they hadn’t worked anyway and she’d looked like a complete idiot. “Yeah. I’m sorry. I should have just told you that instead of trying to play it off. You know how fluorescents get me.”

Fallon was quiet for a moment. “Cass. In the briefing. You seemed…” She was obviously choosing her words carefully. “You seemed really far away. Not just quiet. The way you couldn’t look up when I introduced you…. Even for you, that was different.”

Cassandra’s chest tightened. She could feel the truth sitting right there, pressing against her teeth. Three years of friendship. Three years of Fallon trusting her with everything, and Cassandra couldn’t give her this one thing back.

She almost said it. The sentence was right there. It’s not migraines, Fallon. It’s my brain. It does something I can’t control and pretty much makes me a freak.

“It was the migraine,” she said instead. “A bad one. I could feel it coming on during the briefing, and I was trying to hold it together long enough to get out of there.”

Fallon studied her. Cassandra could feel the gaze even without looking up. Fallon wasn’t stupid. She’d spent three years reading people for a living, and Cassandra was lying to her face, and some part of Fallon probably knew it.

Cassandra’s brain was comfortable enough around Fallon that it didn’t automatically search for patterns with her like it did with strangers, but no doubt she’d find patterns suggesting disapproval or frustration if she gave her brain free rein.

Fortunately, Fallon decided to let it all go. “Okay. As long as you’re all right.”