Page 56 of Break For Me
"They want you," he says.
"Yes."
"They took my brother to get to you."
"Yes."
He looks at me. The assessment is clinical. The same flat gaze his brother turned on me the night we met. They learned it from the same source. They weaponized it differently.
"Then we get him back. Today."
The words are quiet. Final. The commitment in his voice is a declaration of war compressed into six words.
"I’m coming with you," I say.
Alessandro looks at my hands. My surgeon’s hands—scraped, bruised, raw. The hands that fixed his husband and his brother.
"Yes," he says. "You are."
He turns toward the helicopter. The rotors are spinning. The downwash flattens the snow.
I follow him. My legs are steady. My hands are steady. The tremor that has plagued me for days is gone. In its place is something clean and cold.
Purpose.
Rocco Falcone is in the hands of men who want to use him to get to me. He is bleeding, concussed, broken. A body I stitched and washed and held against mine in the dark. A body I know better than my own.
I climb into the helicopter. The door closes. The aircraft lifts.
I am going to get him back. And when I do, I am going to put my hands on him. Not to fix. Not to clean. Not to stitch.
To hold. To claim. To touch the man who chose me over his own survival.
The helicopter banks south. I press my palm against the window and watch the wilderness fall behind us.
My hands do not shake.
Chapter Sixteen
ADRIAN
The Falcone compoundis a fortress pretending to be a home.
I see it from the air first—eight acres of limestone and manicured grounds behind a twelve-foot wall topped with sensors and cameras. It sits on the edge of the water, isolated, untouchable. It whispers of old money and older violence.
The helicopter banks. The transition from the wilderness to this civilization is abrupt. My nervous system misfires, unable to reconcile the clean concrete of the helipad with the blood dried under my fingernails.
We touch down. The rotors slow to a rhythmic thwup-thwup.
Men in dark suits swarm the aircraft. They move with the coordinated efficiency of a private military, which is exactly what they are. They take Killian first. A medical team—real equipment, real gurneys, real IV lines in sealed packaging—loads him onto a stretcher. They wheel him through a side entrance, their movements practiced and urgent.
I follow. Instinct overrides exhaustion.
The entrance leads to a clinical suite built into the east wing of the house. It isn't a first-aid room. It’s a trauma center. Hospital-grade monitors. An operating table with surgical lighting. Intubation equipment, a crash cart, a pharmacy cabinetstocked with narcotics that would require a triple-lock safe in a regular hospital.
The Falcone family has a private infirmary that would embarrass most rural emergency departments.
The attending physician is a woman in her fifties. She wears a scrub cap over grey hair and has eyes like flint. She looks at Killian, then at me. She opens her mouth to ask who I am.
