Page 38 of Break For Me
I try the blood pressure cuff. My left hand can’t operate the inflation bulb. The tremor turns the squeeze-release rhythm into a stutter. The bulb wheezes erratically. The gauge needle jumps.
I release the cuff. I sit back on my heels. I stare at the equipment in my lap.
The equipment is useless because the operator is broken.
A surgeon who can’t count a pulse. A doctor who can’t inflate a cuff. A man whose single remaining value is the steadiness of his hands, and the hands are shaking.
I put the cuff down. I stand.
The room is too small. The walls—concrete block, unpainted, streaked with grease—are closer than they were a moment ago. The ceiling is lower. The air has thickened.
I know this isn’t real. I know the room hasn’t changed dimensions. I know what I’m experiencing is a sympathetic nervous system cascade triggered by acute stress and sleep deprivation.
Knowing doesn’t help.
The attack arrives like a cardiac arrest. Sudden. Total. With a momentum that makes resistance irrelevant.
My breathing accelerates. I can feel the rate climbing. Eighteen. Twenty-two. Twenty-six breaths per minute. Eachinhalation is shorter than the last. I’m hyperventilating. The CO2 in my blood is plummeting. The pH is rising. The alkalosis is making my fingers tingle and my vision spark. The room tilts on an axis that doesn’t exist.
I press my back against the wall. The concrete is cold through my shirt. I slide down. My knees come up. My arms wrap around them.
My head drops between my knees. I breathe into the dark space between my chest and my thighs. The breathing doesn’t slow. The breathing isn’t the problem. The problem is that I am standing in the wreckage of my life and I can’t find a single load-bearing wall.
My apartment has been compromised. My identity has been compromised. The Russians know I’ve been taken. Which means Dmitri knows. Which means Kazimir knows. Which means every calculation that has kept Elena safe for the past two years has been rendered null.
I am not at the clinic. I am not answering my phone. I am not compliant.
The terms of the arrangement have been broken. The consequences fall on Elena. They always fall on Elena. That is the architecture of my cage. The architecture hasn’t changed just because the cage has moved.
She has a recital. She has a recital and I’m not going to be there. I’m not going to call her on Sunday. She’s going to call me. The phone is going to ring in an empty apartment. She’s going to worry. Then she’s going to be scared. And then?—
My hands are on my face. I’m pressing my palms against my eyes. It’s the same gesture Rocco uses when he’s fighting the pain. The same animal need to push the world out through the skull.
My breath comes in short, ragged pulls. The sound bounces off the concrete walls. It comes back distorted. The acousticsignature of a man falling apart in a room designed for machines.
I’m not a doctor. The board revoked my license three years ago. I haven’t been a doctor since the day I held a nine-year-old girl’s aorta between my fingers. I watched the blood pump through my hands faster than I could clamp it. Her body emptied itself in front of me while her father screamed through the glass of the observation gallery.
I am a man with a set of skills that criminals find useful. A pair of steady hands—except the hands aren’t steady anymore. A clinical mind—except the mind can’t count to sixty without losing its place.
I am the thing Dmitri called me: a function. A tool. And the tool is malfunctioning. Which means the tool is worthless. Which means?—
"Adrian."
The voice comes from above me. Close. The sound of my name in that heavy, rough tone. It cuts through the static like a hand through water.
I don’t look up. I can’t look up. My forehead is pressed against my knees. My arms are locked around my shins. The posture is fetal. Defensive. The body’s last-resort configuration for withstanding something it can’t escape.
A sound. The creak of weight settling onto the concrete beside me. The scrape of a boot.
Then heat. Not from the space heater. Not from fever. Body heat. Massive and close. Radiating from a source positioned to my left.
He’s sitting beside me. His shoulder is inches from mine. The proximity is a fact I can measure: the thermal gradient against my upper arm, the displacement of air, the faint vibration of his breathing transmitted through the floor.
A hand presses against my back.
His palm covers the space between my shoulder blades. The hand is enormous. I can feel the span of it. Fingertips near my right scapula. The heel of his palm against my left. The damaged hand with its fresh sutures and gauze pressing warmth through my shirt.
The contact is firm. Not gentle—he doesn’t know how to be gentle. But solid. Stable. A fixed point in a room that won’t stop moving.
