Page 66 of Break For Me
The first pin sets. The second resists. The lock is crude, the tolerances loose. The third pin catches. The lock clicks open.
The shackles fall. Rocco’s arms drop. The sound he makes when the weight transfers from his wrists to his legs is involuntary—a grunt of pain and relief compressed into a single exhale.
I catch him before he falls. His weight hits me—all of it. Two hundred and forty pounds of damage and muscle. My knees almost buckle. I brace. I hold. His head drops onto my shoulder. His arms hang at his sides, the wrists raw and bleeding.
"How long?" he breathes.
I don't know. I don't have a watch. I have the bone conductor behind my ear and the silence it’s been feeding me.
"Soon," I say.
His forehead presses against my shoulder. His breath is hot against my neck. His hands—both of them, the ruined and the whole—come up and grip the back of my jacket. His fingers close in the charcoal wool.
I hold him in the yellow light of a shipping container, and I count. I count because counting is what I do. It is the structure I built over the ruins of my life.
I am at thirty-seven when the container door opens.
Dmitri steps inside. Behind him, a man I haven't seen before. Tall. Broad. Flat, dead eyes.
He carries a leather roll. He unfolds it on the floor with the casual precision of a craftsman setting up his tools. The implements inside gleam under the yellow bulb. Pliers. A soldering iron. Hooks.
Dmitri looks at Rocco—unchained, unsupported except by my arms. His pale eyes move to the open padlock on the floor. To the bent pen clip beside it. To my hands on Rocco’s back.
The thin smile returns.
"I see," he says quietly. "Not property after all."
He turns to the specialist. He says something in Russian. I catch fragments. Hands and slowly.
The specialist picks up the pliers. He tests them—open, close. The jaws click. He looks at me with professional interest.
"Kazimir sends his regards, Doctor," Dmitri says. "He wanted me to remind you that your hands are your value. He wanted me to ask: how much value can we remove before the surgeon becomes useless?"
Rocco’s grip on my jacket tightens. His body shifts. The combat instinct engaging despite the damage. He is positioning himself between me and the specialist. A wall of broken muscle, putting his body in front of mine.
Again. Even now. Even chained and beaten and burning with infection.
The specialist steps forward. The pliers catch the yellow light.
I count. Thirty-eight. Thirty-nine. Forty.
Five minutes. I need five more minutes.
Chapter Nineteen
ROCCO
The pliers reachfor his hand.
I stop being a man.
There’s a switch somewhere in my brainstem, buried deep below the cortex, that predates language and reason and every civilized impulse. It has a trigger. The trigger is Adrian’s hands.
The specialist’s fingers close around Adrian’s left wrist and pull it forward. The pliers open. The switch flips.
I am no longer Rocco Falcone. I am two hundred and forty pounds of damage moving at a speed my body should not be capable of producing.
The adrenaline hits like a defibrillator. My vision narrows to a tunnel—Adrian's hands, the pliers, the man holding them. The infection, the dehydration, the broken rib—my body files them under a category it will revisit later, if there is a later. The nervous system floods with everything it has left. I will pay for every second of this. But the bill comes after.
