Page 60 of Break For Me
The main gate is two hundred yards ahead. Chain-link, topped with razor wire, flanked by concrete jersey barriers. A guard booth with tinted windows. A security camera on a pole, the red LED blinking.
I walk toward it with the measured, deliberate stride I’ve used on East 72nd for two years. I belong here. My stride says so. Whose presence requires no explanation. Whose value protects him from the violence he’s walking into.
The camera tracks me.
The guard booth door opens. A man steps out—compact, armed, wearing a tactical vest over a dark sweater.
He sees me and freezes. Recognition.
He says something into a radio on his shoulder. The response is immediate—the gate mechanism engages. The chain-link rolls sideways on its track. The metal squeals in the cold air.
I stop at the threshold.
The terminal stretches beyond the gate—warehouse buildings, loading docks, the dark geometry of an industrial complex that has been repurposed for war.
Somewhere inside Building C, in a shipping container or a storage room, Rocco Falcone is bleeding in the dark.
I step through the gate.
"I’m Dr. Adrian Sterling," I say to the guard. My voice is level. Clinical. The Ice Queen’s voice—the one that performs surgery on mobsters and doesn't flinch. "Take me to Dmitri Volkov. Tell him his property has returned."
The guard stares at me. He speaks into his radio again.
The gate closes behind me. The metal squeals. The lock engages.
I am inside. The clock is running. Forty-five minutes.
My hands are at my sides. They don't shake.
Chapter Seventeen
ROCCO
The chain allowsfour feet of movement.
I've measured it. I’ve measured it a hundred times. Four feet from the heavy steel bolt welded into the container wall to the farthest point my right arm can reach. The chain is marine-grade galvanized steel—three-eighths inch links, rated for two thousand pounds of load. I know this because I spent the first hour testing every single link with a left hand that no longer fully closes, feeling the familiar heft and the unyielding strength of the metal.
The container smells of old rust, diesel fumes, and something deeper—salt, maybe. Brine that has seeped into the corrugated steel walls over years of ocean transit. This container has traveled across the world. I haven't. I've been here for what I estimate is three full days, based on the slow, rhythmic cycle of light and dark filtering through a single ventilation hole the size of a quarter.
They come twice a day. Two men. The same two every time. One holds a Makarov steady at my head while the other slides a plastic tray through the gap at the bottom of the door. The tray holds a bottle of water and a piece of bread. The bread is stale. The water is clean.
They want me alive.
The alive part is the problem—not for them, for me. Alive means they have questions they haven't asked yet. Alive means someone is coming who knows exactly how to ask them. Alive means this is just the waiting room for something much worse.
My left hand is a swollen, useless club. The reconstructed tendons throb with a deep, wet heat that tells me the infection has set in hard. Adrian would know the clinical term for it. Adrian would have a plan—antibiotics, elevation, a precise timeline measured in hours rather than agonizing days. Adrian would look at my hand and see a complex problem he could solve.
Adrian is not here.
I think about his hands. The surgeon’s hands—long-fingered, precise, steady in a way that mine have never been. Hands that rebuilt a man's entire bowel anastomosis under the piss-poor light of a camping lantern. Hands that closed the wound in my palm three separate times without flinching. Hands that touched my face in the dark of the cabin and didn't pull away from what they found there.
I think about his voice. The flat, clinical cadence he uses when he's afraid. The words getting more precise as the fear gets worse, as though perfect accuracy is a form of control. The way he said my name in the truck, his voice a low command. The way he said my name in the cabin, his voice raw and broken against the plywood wall. The way he didn't say my name at all when we barricaded the door and waited for the world to end.
I think about whether he's alive.
The thought is a room I refuse to enter. I stand at its threshold. I look at the closed door. And I keep the door shut. Because if I open it—if I allow myself to consider the possibility that he didn't make it—then this chain becomes permanent.These four feet of movement become the entire world. This steel container becomes a coffin with a single ventilation hole.
The bolt in the wall is welded solid. The chain is sound. My right hand can still make a fist.
