Page 68 of Break For Me
Rory appears in the doorway. He’s wearing a tactical vest over a t-shirt. His dark hair is wild. His green eyes are lit with the manic, brilliant energy of a man who thrives in the exact kind of chaos that kills everyone else. He has a Glock 19 in his hand.
He looks at me. He looks at the blood. He looks at Dmitri’s unconscious body on the floor and the specialist crumpled against the wall.
"Let’s go," he says. "We’ve got about four minutes before their QRF arrives from the north pier."
The terminal is a war zone.
We move through the warehouse in a column—two operators on point, Rory covering our flank, Adrian behind me. My body is between his and whatever comes through the smoke.
The fluorescent tubes are dead. The only light is tactical—flashlight beams cutting through the haze, muzzle flashesstrobing in the dark. The air is thick with cordite and concrete dust and the chemical bite of the breaching charges.
Bodies on the floor. Russians. Three that I count. Two more at the end of the container row, positioned behind a forklift, returning fire toward the drainage access point. The point operators engage. Suppressed rifles. The rounds are precise, surgical.
My ribs scream with every step. My left arm hangs at my side, the forearm laceration bleeding freely, the bandaged hand a fist of agony clenched against my hip.
My right hand is wrapped around a pistol Rory pressed into my palm as we exited the container—a backup Glock, compact, fifteen rounds. I hold it the way I hold everything. Like a hammer.
We reach the main corridor. The warehouse doors are ahead—rolling steel shutters, one blown off its track by a breaching charge. Beyond the open shutter, the terminal yard is visible. Floodlights dead. Vehicles burning. The orange glow of something on fire near the perimeter fence casts long shadows across the asphalt.
A figure steps from behind a container stack to our left. Six feet away. Rifle up. His eyes find Adrian first—the white shirt, the suit, the anomaly in the tactical darkness—and the barrel swings toward the doctor’s chest.
I don't think. Thinking is a luxury for men with time. I raise the Glock and fire twice.
The rounds hit the man’s chest. The body armor absorbs the first. The second catches him in the gap between the vest and the shoulder plate. He staggers.
I close the distance. Three steps. I grab the barrel of his rifle with my left hand. The pain is incandescent, a white supernova that detonates in my palm and travels through my arm like a current.
I wrench the weapon sideways and drive the stock into his throat.
He drops. He doesn't get up.
I stand over him. My chest heaves. Blood drips from my left hand onto the stock of his rifle. Adrian is behind me—pressed against the container stack, his eyes wide. His hands are flat against the corrugated steel.
I turn to him. His face is pale in the reflected firelight. His glasses are intact. His hands—his surgeon’s hands, the hands they wanted to take from him—are unbroken, uncut, untouched.
"Nobody touches you." My voice is gravel and blood. "Not while I’m standing."
He stares at me. His mouth opens. Closes. His hand reaches out and his fingers close around my forearm—the wounded one, the one that’s bleeding through the reopened sutures. He holds on. His grip is firm. Warm.
"Then stay standing," he says.
The extraction vehicles are staged beyond the perimeter fence. Two armored SUVs, engines running, a driver behind each wheel. The breach team provides covering fire as we cross the yard. The asphalt is slick with meltwater and oil. Burning debris from the power station lights the path in flickering orange.
Alessandro is in the lead vehicle. The passenger window is down. His face is visible—composed, controlled, the mask in place. But his eyes track me as I cross the yard. What lives behind them is the thing he’ll never say aloud. The thing that existed between us before he became Don and I became his hammer. The thing that says brother in a language that predates words.
Rory covers our final approach. He kneels behind a jersey barrier, his pistol up, laying down precise fire toward a cluster ofRussians who’ve regrouped near the dock crane. The operators move in pairs, leapfrogging toward the vehicles.
I get Adrian to the SUV. I open the rear door. I push him in. He goes without resistance. His medical bag materializes from somewhere—Rory must have grabbed it—the leather strap across his shoulder as he slides onto the back seat.
I get in beside him. The door slams. The driver hits the gas. The SUV lurches through the open gate—the same gate Adrian walked through alone—and accelerates down the access road. The second vehicle follows. Behind us, the terminal recedes in the rearview mirror, the buildings outlined in fire.
The compound burns.
I watch it from the back seat. The orange glow fills the rear window and turns the interior of the SUV amber. The gunfire fades with distance. Popcorn. Static. Silence. The tires hum on asphalt. The heater pushes warm air against my face.
Adrian is beside me. He is looking at his hands. They’re in his lap, palms up, the fingers extended. He’s checking them—flexing each digit individually, testing the range of motion. He is confirming that the joints respond, that the tendons glide, that the machinery is intact. The inspection is clinical, thorough.
His hands are clean. Unbroken. The knuckles are scraped from the container floor but the fingers are straight, the joints mobile, the palms unmarked. Surgeon’s hands. Preserved.
