Page 98 of Break For Me
"We’ve fought in the dark before."
He’s right. The container. The bedroom. The dark is where we work.
I go back into Elena’s room. She’s on the bed, her right hand holding the dressing against her left forearm. Her face is pale. Her eyes track me.
"We’re going downstairs," I say. "I’m going to carry you."
"I can walk."
"You’ve lost blood and you’re in shock. I’m going to carry you."
She looks at me. She looks at the doorway, where Rocco fills the frame—bloodied, focused.
"Okay," she says.
I pick her up. She’s light in my arms. Her right arm goes around my neck. Her left arm presses against my chest, the dressing warm and wet against my shirt.
Rocco takes point. The Glock is up. The corridor behind us fills with the sound of approaching feet. We move in the other direction. Toward the service stairs. Toward the basement. Toward the dark.
I carry my sister into it. Rocco walks ahead of me into it. The door to the stairs opens and the cold basement air rises to meet us.
We descend.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
ROCCO
The basement is mine.
I know this the way an animal knows its den—by feel, by instinct, by the muscle memory that lives in my hands and my feet and the back of my skull. I’ve walked these corridors since I was a boy, sent down by our father to fetch wine from the cellar. I’ve maintained the boilers. I’ve replaced fuses in the junction boxes and checked the sump pumps after storms. I’ve sat in this utility room with a bottle of bourbon on the nights when the walls of the compound above me felt too clean for the man I was.
The basement is the building’s honest face—the pipes and the wiring and the old stone that predates the renovation. It’s the bones of the house stripped of their cosmetic plaster.
We move through it in the dark. My right hand is on the wall, my fingertips reading the surface—limestone, then cold steel conduit, then the sweating skin of a water main, then limestone again. The geography resolves through touch.
The boiler room is behind us. The utility corridor runs ahead, east to west, under the full length of the compound. The main electrical panel is at the western end—a junction that serves both wings, the security hub, the blast doors. Cut the power at thepanel, and the magnetic locks lose their current. The blast doors default to open.
Adrian is behind me. Elena is in his arms. I can hear him, his footsteps careful and measured, his breathing labored but controlled. The rhythm of a man managing exertion through pure will. Elena is quiet. The shock has settled in. She’s conscious but passive, her weight against Adrian’s chest.
The corridor is narrow. The ceiling is low—I can feel the pipes just above my head, copper and PVC running in parallel tracks, the condensation dripping at irregular intervals onto the concrete floor. My boots find each step before I commit my weight.
The Glock is in my left hand—the rebuilt hand. The grip is tight. The fingers are responsive. The pain is a background signal, present but managed, filed away.
A sound. Ahead.
The scrape of a boot sole on concrete. The involuntary noise of a man shifting weight. The sound is sixty feet away, maybe less. It came from the direction of the electrical panel.
I stop. I hold my hand back—palm flat, a silent signal that Adrian reads without instruction. His footsteps stop. Elena’s shallow breathing is the only sound in the corridor.
I wait. The dark is absolute. No emergency lighting in the basement. No windows. No ambient glow. Down here, the dark is total. It fills the space the way water fills a tank—completely, uniformly.
The man ahead doesn’t know I’m here. He’s listening for us. He’s positioned at the panel because someone with tactical sense realized that the panel is the objective. Cut the power, free the doors, end the lockdown. The ringleader sent someone to guard the asset.
I set the Glock on the floor. The metal touches the concrete with a soft click that I absorb by holding the frame against thesurface. A gunshot is loud. It announces position. It’s a last resort.
I move forward in the dark. My hands guide me. Right hand on the wall, left hand forward, fingers reading the air like a blind man reading braille. I move in a crouch, weight on the balls of my feet, my breathing shallow. This is Dannemora. This is the cell block at lights-out. The corridor between the racks. This is the space where I learned that silence is a weapon and darkness is a friend.
Thirty feet. I can hear him breathing now—nasal, congested. The breathing of a man who spent the winter fighting a cold he never quite shook.
