Page 59 of Break For Me
It fits poorly—the shoulders are too narrow, the sleeves too long—but the fabric is correct. Charcoal wool, single-breasted. The kind of suit that says I belong on the Upper East Side and my presence requires no explanation.
Rory finds a white dress shirt in a closet. A silk tie—dark blue, conservative. Shoes that are a half-size too small, which means my posture will be rigid, which means the posture will be correct.
I shower first. The water is hot. The soap is French. The bergamot is wrong—different brand, different concentration—but the ritual is the same. I scrub my hands. Under the nails. Around the cuticles. Up to the wrists. I scrub until the skin is pink and tight, until the forest and the blood and the propane are gone.
Until my hands are clean again.
The man who looks back at me from the mirror is familiar.
Sharp jaw. High cheekbones. Glasses. The grey at the temples more pronounced than it was two weeks ago, the lines around the eyes deeper.
But the face is right. The mask is right. The Ice Queen—the persona I built to survive the Bratva’s operating rooms, the clinical detachment that walled off every feeling that could compromise the work—settles over my features like a visor lowering.
I am Dr. Adrian Sterling. I am a precision instrument. I am a tool of considerable value. I am walking back into the hands of the men who own me, and they will not see anything on my face except the cold, compliant surface they expect.
What is underneath—the rage, the guilt, the memory of his body against mine and his mouth on my throat and his voice in my ear—they will never see.
The dead zone on my wrist throbs. I press my thumb against it. The scar is numb. The man is not.
Rory wires me in the hallway. The transmitter goes under my collar—a flat disc taped to my sternum. The adhesive pulls at my chest hair. The GPS beacon goes in my shoe, wedged between the insole and the sole.
He tests the audio. He tests the signal.
"You’ll hear us through a bone-conduction receiver," he says. He presses a small device behind my left ear, against the mastoid process. "We’ll hear everything you say. If things go sideways, the code word is scalpel. Say it and we breach early."
"And if I can’t say it?"
Rory looks at me. The manic energy is gone. What’s left is the same sharp, assessing intelligence that lives behind Killian’s eyes.
"Then we breach anyway," he says. "We’re not leaving two Falcones in the ground."
The vehicle is a black sedan. Unmarked.
Alessandro drives. Rory is in the back with a laptop and the live feed from my wire. The breach team—eight men in a tactical van—left thirty minutes ahead of us. They are already in the drainage system, moving through the dark beneath the terminal, counting minutes.
The drive takes forty minutes. The city passes in fragments—highway lights, bridge cables, the industrial decay of the Jersey shore giving way to the flat, grey sprawl of Staten Island’s south coast.
The terminal appears on the waterfront like a bruise. Chain-link fence. Concrete. The dark outlines of warehouse buildings against the evening sky. Cranes stand motionless. Container stacks rise in geometric columns. No civilian traffic. No lights in the windows.
Alessandro stops the sedan two blocks from the main gate. He kills the engine.
The silence in the car is heavy, material. The weight of three people calculating the same odds and arriving at the same number.
"Forty-five minutes from the moment you cross the perimeter," Alessandro says. "Survive for forty-five minutes, and we will be inside."
"I’ve survived longer."
He turns in the driver’s seat and looks at me. The mask is in place—the Don, the strategist, the man who gives orders and measures outcomes. But behind it, in the fraction of a second before the mask settles, I see something else.
Gratitude. Fear. The specific pain of a man sending another person into the space where his brother is bleeding.
"Bring him back," he says.
I open the door. The cold hits my face. The suit is thin—the charcoal wool was designed for boardrooms, not waterfrontoperations—and the wind off the harbor cuts through the fabric and into my ribs.
I button the jacket. I adjust my glasses. I straighten my tie.
I walk.
