Page 53 of Break For Me
The blond cocks the Stechkin. The click is small, precise, mechanical. A period. An ending.
I close my eyes. I think about his hands.
The boot presses down, and the world goes dark.
Chapter Fifteen
ADRIAN
Snow in my mouth.In my eyes. Packed into the collar of my shirt.
The cold traces each vertebra of my spine like a finger running down a set of stairs.
I am face-down on a steep slope. The left side of my body is buried in snow. My right arm is extended above my head, fingers locked around a handful of wool fabric. I tighten my grip. I feel a deadweight at the end of it.
Killian.
The name activates something in my brain that overrides the concussion. I open my eyes. The world is white and tilted.
Smoke climbs the hillside above me—black against the grey sky. It carries the chemical stink of burned propane and splintered wood. Where the shack stood, there is a wound in the landscape. Charred timber. Twisted metal. The skeleton of the potbelly stove stands in the center of the wreckage like a monument.
I pull myself toward Killian. My right arm drags his body closer. He’s on his side, half-buried in the deep snow. His face is grey. His lips are blue.
I roll him onto his back. I press my fingers to his carotid.
Pulse. Weak. Thready. One hundred and thirty beats per minute. Compensating. But present. The beat pushes against my fingertips. Each push is a data point that meansalive.
I check his dressing. The abdominal bandage is intact. My work holds, even through an explosion. The drain tube has been ripped free. The exit wound is seeping, a dark stain spreading across the gauze. It’s venous, not arterial. Manageable.
His breathing is labored. Shallow. Rapid. The accessory muscles in his neck are engaging. Possible pneumothorax from the blast pressure. Possible rib fractures.
I don't have a stethoscope. I don't have a blood pressure cuff. I don't have saline or antibiotics.
I have my hands. I have my training. And I have the body of a man I was told to fix.
The man who told me to fix him is gone.
Rocco is gone.
The thought arrives. I don't let it land. I pack it away behind the clinical wall. Into the compartment where the things I can't process go to wait.
The luxury of falling apart is not available. It hasn't been available since a girl bled out under my hands in Baltimore.
I sit up. I look down the slope. The ravine drops away below us—steep, snow-covered. The trees thicken as the grade increases.
Above us, the smoke column marks the shack. Voices drift through the cold air. Russian. Clipped. Professional. The kill team is in the wreckage. They’re searching.
They aren't searching down the slope. The explosion threw us clear. The tumble carried us forty yards into the tree line. The fresh snow has already begun to fill the channels our bodies carved on the way down.
We are invisible. For now.
I need to move.
Killian weighs one hundred and ninety pounds. I weigh one hundred and seventy. The physics of dragging a man who outweighs me through deep snow on a thirty-degree grade are not in my favor.
I don't care about the physics.
I care about the man who blew up a building so I could run. I care about the debt that was created when Rocco Falcone stepped between me and a kill squad. He fired a flare into a cloud of propane gas with the full understanding that he might not survive it.
