Page 88 of Break For Me
We lie there together. The infirmary machines hum.
His head stays resting on my shoulder. His breathing evens out. His hand moves from the table to my chest. The habitual, protective placement.
Steady. Completely steady. The hands that shook for two hours have stopped.
I hold him tight with my right arm. My left arm rests on my chest, the heavily splinted hand resting against his hair. The damaged hand and the healing hand.
He eventually cleans us up. Sterile medical wipes. Highly efficient. He redresses, tucking his shirt in, resetting his glasses on his nose. He gently pulls my waistband up. He carefully adjusts the compression wrap on my ribs. His hand lingers softly on the fracture site.
"It held," he says.
He unlocks the door. He turns the harsh fluorescent light back on. The sterile clinical environment reasserts itself. But the room has fundamentally changed. The air has changed.
I unwrap the chocolate bar. Elena's cheap chocolate bar. I break it neatly in half. I hold one piece out to him.
He takes it. He eats it. He doesn't look at me, but his hand finds my knee and rests there. The weight of his palm is the weight of everything we've built in the dark.
The fingers are still.
Alessandro arrives ten minutes later.Killian is with him, sitting in the wheelchair.
"Dmitri's body has been handled," Alessandro says immediately. "The house is completely sanitized. The operatives are in Rory's custody for intense questioning."
"And the driver?" I ask.
"Fled. We have the plates. He won't get far."
Alessandro sets a high-end tablet on the counter. A massive financial diagram. The web of shell companies Rory showed usearlier. But it has expanded significantly. New nodes. New global connections.
"With Dmitri eliminated, the Russian operation here has collapsed. Volkov is financially isolated. He's retreating entirely to his offshore infrastructure."
He taps the screen. A cluster of nodes is centered on a single entity. Meridian Fine Art Acquisitions. London.
"Rory cracked the deeply encrypted financial data from Dmitri's phone. The funds flowing through Meridian are the absolute backbone of Volkov's contingency network. Safe houses. Fake identities. Extraction routes. Everything the Ghost needs to disappear and rebuild his empire."
Killian leans forward in the chair. "So we cut the money and the Ghost bleeds out."
"The money runs entirely through the art. The art is forged. And the forger—" Alessandro taps a node on the screen labeledAnonymous."The forger is the absolute key. Find the forger, and we find the Ghost's last remaining artery."
He looks at me. He looks at Adrian. The Don's evaluating gaze.
"Rory leaves for London in the morning," Alessandro says. "He firmly believes he can identify the forger through the specific brushwork. He recognized the technique from images on Dmitri's phone."
"He's twenty-three and walking into Volkov's massive financial empire alone," Adrian points out.
"He won't be alone." Alessandro's mouth tightens. "I'm sending a tactical team. But Rory is uniquely qualified for the identification."
The tablet glows brightly. A tangled web of money and art and deception stretching from New York to London to Zurich.
The war isn't over. The local battle is won. Dmitri is dead. The terminal is ash. Elena is safe. But the war has shifted geography entirely.
I look at my left hand. The heavy splint. The thick bandage. The hand that Adrian meticulously rebuilt. It's healing.
I look at Adrian. He's staring at the tablet. The clinical mask is noticeably thinner now. The man underneath is much closer to the surface. The man who drove his elbow into a man's radial nerve and knelt beside an exam table and said my name.
London waits. The Ghost waits. The forger waits.
But right now, in this quiet infirmary, with chocolate melting on my tongue and his hand resting steady on my knee, the shield rests. The mechanic rests.
