Page 90 of Break For Me
My right hand shoots up over the edge of the mattress, reaching for the bedside table. The Glock is resting on the surface. My fingers find the textured polymer grip in the pitchdark—pure muscle memory. The topography of the weapon is mapped in my palm the exact way Adrian’s anatomy is mapped in his hands. I pull it off the table and drop back down.
The assassin fires again.
The round hits the bedside table. The expensive wood splinters violently. The heavy brass lamp topples over. Adrian’s glasses skitter across the smooth surface and fall to the floor with a clatter.
The muzzle flash strobes the dark room in a split-second of harsh white light, and I see him clearly. Black tactical clothing. A tight balaclava. Tactical shooting gloves. The suppressed pistol is tracking smoothly downward, aiming toward the floor where we just landed.
I fire from the floor. Right hand, one-handed grip. The heavy recoil of the .45 is entirely manageable because I’ve spent weeks training for this exact physical deficit. The round goes high—punching into the plaster ceiling. The angle is wrong because I’m shooting upward from a prone, awkward position and the geometry is bad.
But the bright muzzle flash marks my position. The assassin adjusts his aim, and that critical adjustment takes him off-target for the half-second I desperately need.
I roll backward, putting the massive bed between us. The mattress is king-sized. The frame is heavy, solid oak. It is dense enough to stop a handgun round at close range. I press my bare back against the solid frame and bring the Glock up in a standard two-handed grip. My rebuilt left hand closes tightly around my right. The grip holds firm. The surgically repaired fingers squeeze the polymer frame. The neural signal travels cleanly through the repaired nerve. The hand works. The hand holds the weapon steady.
The assassin moves. I can hear him now—the very soft displacement of weight on the hardwood floor, the tactical,sliding shuffle of a man repositioning to get a clear angle of fire. He’s slowly circling the bed. Coming around the footboard to get a direct line of sight on the floor where Adrian and I landed.
Adrian isn’t on the floor beside me anymore.
I hear him move—bare feet stepping lightly on the hardwood. Nearly silent, gliding—Adrian navigates dark operating rooms without bumping a tray. The same instinct carries him now. He is on the far side of the room, near the dresser.
The assassin doesn’t hear him. The assassin is focused entirely on me, on the solid bed frame, on the heavy Glock he saw in the muzzle flash. He’s solving the wrong tactical equation.
The crash comes from my left side.
The bedside lamp—the heavy, solid brass one from Adrian’s side of the bed, the one the assassin’s bullet missed—arcs violently through the dark air. It connects solidly with the side of the assassin’s head.
The impact is dense. Unforgiving. Metallic. The horrific sound of heavy brass meeting a human skull through a thin layer of balaclava fabric.
The assassin staggers backward. His suppressed pistol fires directly into the floor—a reflexive, uncontrolled discharge. The round punches through the hardwood and buries itself into the subfloor.
I come over the top of the bed.
The motion is explosive and vertical. Hands flat on the mattress. Vault. My naked body clears the heavy oak frame in a single, desperate movement. My healed rib protests sharply. My body completely overrides the pain signal.
I land directly on the assassin’s back. My full weight drives him face-first into the hardwood floor. Two hundred and forty pounds of bare, sweating skin and rebuilt muscle crashing down on a man who has just taken a brass lamp to the temporal bone.
He’s incredibly fast. Even stunned, he’s fast. The highly trained, conditioned speed of a professional who has fought his way out of compromised positions before. He bucks hard. He twists violently. His sharp elbow drives backward, catching me directly in the floating ribs. The pain is a familiar, unwelcome guest at a party I’ve stopped trying to end.
I absorb the vicious elbow strike. I wrap my right arm tightly around his throat. The rear naked choke—the oldest, most brutal submission in the combat catalogue. The one that doesn’t require two perfectly working hands. The one that uses the bicep and the forearm as a mechanical vise around the carotid artery.
I compress. I squeeze until the oxygenated blood physically stops reaching his brain.
He fights like a cornered animal. His gloved hands claw frantically at my forearm. His heavy boots kick against the floor. The suppressed pistol is on the floor somewhere—dropped during the initial impact, the weapon separated from the hand. His strong fingers dig deep into the crease of my elbow, trying desperately to create an inch of space, trying to break the airtight seal of my grip.
He’s strong. He’s highly trained. He is also being choked unconscious by a man who learned this exact technique in a maximum-security prison, perfected it in dirty basements, and has never, not once in his life, let go before the job was completely done.
His body convulses sharply. The heavy legs stop kicking. The gloved hands finally release my forearm. He goes entirely limp—the progressive, undeniable shutdown of a human brain deprived of oxygen.
Five seconds of unconsciousness. Ten seconds of unconsciousness. Fifteen.
I hold the choke for five more seconds. The margin of error. The tactical insurance. The critical difference between a man who wakes up angry and a man who doesn’t.
I release the grip. His limp body drops fully to the hardwood. His chest rises. Falls. The breathing is shallow, highly irregular. The ragged, gasping respiration of a brain that has been starved and is slowly rebooting its systems. He’s alive. Unconscious, but alive.
I’m kneeling on the floor, completely naked, breathing hard, my hands resting on the body of someone who just tried to put a bullet in our heads while we slept. The bedroom is pitch dark. The white feathers from the destroyed pillow float lazily in the air like snow falling inside a room that was supposed to be completely safe.
"Adrian."
"Here." His voice comes from the darkness beside the tall dresser. I hear him moving—the soft rustle of fabric, the distinct sound of a wooden drawer opening.
