Page 11 of Break For Me
The highway curves. The truck drifts.
The tires hit the rumble strip with a sudden, bone-shaking growl. The vibration rattles through the cab. His eyes snap open, the pupils blown wide and dark.
He was fading. He caught it. But the corrections are getting sluggish. The gap between the drift and the save is widening.
I need to speak. I need to override the part of me that wants to remain a ghost, small and unnoticed. If the man who kidnapped me dies behind the wheel, I die with him.
And I cannot die. Elena has a recital in three weeks. She needs her brother in the front row.
"Pull over."
His jaw tightens. The muscle jumps under the skin of his cheek. He doesn't look at me.
"Shut up, Doc."
"You have lost roughly seven hundred milliliters of blood in the last twenty minutes. Your systolic pressure is tanking. I can see it in your neck."
He says nothing. The truck drifts again, the tires flirting with the white line.
"You’re entering compensatory shock," I continue, my voice gaining a clinical edge I haven't used in years. "In anotherfive minutes, your peripheral vasoconstriction will fail. Your pressure will crash. You will pass out, and we will both go through the windshield."
The rumble strip growls again. It sounds like a warning from a beast.
"If you crash this truck, the man on the table dies. The man you just killed two of Volkov's men to get me for. He dies because you were too stubborn to let me wrap a wound."
His eyes cut toward me. They are bloodshot and hot with a fury that makes my skin crawl. I don't look away. I have nothing left to lose in this car except the ending, and the ending is currently hurtling toward a concrete barrier.
He wrenches the wheel to the right.
The truck lurches across the shoulder, tires spitting gravel against the undercarriage. We shudder to a halt in a dark pulloff bordered by a wall of black, tangled trees. The engine idles, a low, mechanical panting.
He kills the lights. We sit in a sudden, heavy blackness cut only by the green glow of the dashboard. Somewhere out there, the river moves in the dark.
"Five minutes," he says. The words sound like they were dragged over broken glass.
I unbuckle my seatbelt. The click is loud in the silence. I open my medical bag and my hands find what they need by touch—gauze rolls, hemostatic packing, a tourniquet.
I pull the LED penlight from the side pocket. I click it on and hold it between my teeth. The narrow beam turns the cab into a makeshift trauma bay.
"Give me your hand."
He doesn't move. His left hand stays on the wheel, the fingers curled like talons. He is an animal guarding a kill.
"I need to check the tendon. If the flexor digitorum is severed, you’ll lose those fingers permanently. You won't be able to hold a weapon."
"I don't give a damn about my fingers."
"You should. I assume they're part of your career path." I hold out my hand, palm up. "Give me the hand, Rocco."
He stares at me. The light from the dash catches the ruin of his face—the split cheek, the blackening bruise, the dried blood matted into his eyebrow. He looks at my hand as if it’s a trap. He has never extended a wounded part of himself and expected anything but more damage.
Then, he lifts the hand off the wheel. He drops it into mine.
The weight is the first thing I feel. His hand is massive. Broad across the palm, thick through the bones, the fingers heavy and blunt.
My hand looks skeletal underneath his. It is an obscene contrast: my scrubbed, pale skin against his scarred, blood-soaked meat. My fingers are clean. His are crusted with layers of trauma—his own blood, older blood from the ring, grit from the floor.
I angle the penlight. The laceration bisects his palm diagonally. It runs from the thumb base toward the outer edge. It is deep.
