In Too Deep

doing a really good job. I got promoted to Department A.”
    “What’s Department A?”
    “It’s an elite investigation division within Lucan,” she said. “Very hush-hush.”
    Fallon suppressed a groan. “Right. Hush-hush.”
    “I was doing okay, making good money. I was even thinking about getting vested in the company retirement plan. I had a nice apartment. It almost felt as if I was starting to get a life. Finally.”
    “You didn’t have one before going to work for Lucan?”
    “Not the normal kind,” she said. “Do you have any idea what it’s like living under fake names and IDs your whole life?”
    “No,” he admitted. “But I can see where it would start to wear on a person.”
    “After a while, you start to wonder if you really exist. But I was beginning to feel comfortable at Lucan, probably because people like me are considered normal there, at least inside Department A.”
    “You mean people with some talent?”
    She nodded. “Lucan hires a lot of sensitives, especially in Department A. It caters to clients who are sensitives and deal in antiquities that have a paranormal provenance. All in all, I fit right in. Then I found out what was really going on.”
    The rabbit hole suddenly got a whole lot darker.
I’m doomed
, Fallon thought.
I’ve fallen for a woman who has gone over the horizon.
    “What did you stumble into?” he asked, resigned to his fate.
    “One of the lead investigators in Department A, Julian Garrett, my old boss there, is running his own private business. He’s an arms dealer. But not just any arms dealer. He specializes in paranormal weapons.”
    Isabella waited, watching expectantly for his reaction to her bombshell.
    “Huh,” he said.
    “That’s all you have to say? I thought Arcane frowned very heavily on that kind of thing.”
    “It does.” Fallon put his fingertips together and gave the subject some serious thought. “Hard to imagine that something like that could be going on inside Lucan Protection Services, though. I don’t doubt that Max Lucan has brokered a few shady antiquities sales in his time. And I’m aware that he specializes in art and artifacts with a paranormal provenance. But Lucan is no fool. He knows that if Arcane finds out that he’s dealing para-weapons to bad guys with some talent, J&J will come down on him like a very big mountain.”
    “I don’t think Max Lucan knew what was going on. But I think he must have been getting suspicious about Department A. Julian Garrett knew that. To save his own hide, he set me up to take the fall. Now Lucan thinks I’m the one who was dealing the para-weapons. I’m sure he told Julian to find me and bring me in, but Julian wants me dead so I can’t talk.”
    “Let’s go back a step. How did you discover that you were being set up by Julian Garrett?”
    “I walked into my cubicle one morning and saw a whole bunch of really ugly energy around my desk and computer. It was not there the day before when I left work. The trail led straight back to Julian Garrett’s office.”
    “What did you do?”
    “I realized Julian had been in my cubicle, but I couldn’t imagine why. I started going through my drawers. I didn’t find anything, so I went to work running all sorts of virus checks and searches on my computer.”
    “You found something?”
    “A hidden file,” Isabella said. “It contained a record of the sale of a number of antiquities. At first glance there didn’t seem to be anything unusual about it, but I couldn’t understand why Julian put the file on my computer. So I started researching the individual artifacts.”
    “What did you find?”
    “I soon discovered that all the objects had a few things in common. In addition to having the usual paranormal provenance, every single one of them should have been classified as weapons-grade artifacts according to the company guidelines.”
    “Anything else?”
    “All of the transactions had been handled off the books. None of the sales were recorded in the company archives. What’s more, they had all been obtained from a single source, a broker named Orville Sloan. He’s a major player in the black market.”
    “Did you confront Julian Garrett?”
    “For Pete’s sake, of course not,” Isabella said. She looked horrified. “It was obvious he was setting me up. It would have been my word against Julian’s. Julian has worked for Lucan for several years. Lucan trusts him. What’s more, Lucan would have been ruthless. He