Page 95 of Break For Me
I look at the window. Thirty feet down. Fifty yards across. Two hostiles at the target. A building full of unknowns. A hand that works and a rib that’s healed and a man beside me who throws lamps at assassins and headbutts handlers.
"Together," I say.
He nods. The single, precise motion of a man confirming a diagnosis.
Killian opens the window. The cold February air pours in—sharp, clean, carrying the scent of frozen ground and the distant hum of the perimeter lights. The garden stretches below, white with frost. The magnolia’s bare branches reach into the dark.
I check the Glock. Full magazine. One in the chamber. I check my left hand—close, open. The rebuilt fingers respond. The nerve conducts. The grip holds.
Adrian checks the Sig. He pulls the slide back an inch to confirm the round. The motion is clean, practiced.
We climb out the window. The cold hits my face. The rope bites into my rebuilt hand. The grip holds at eighty percent—Adrian's number, verified last week. Tonight eighty percentneeds to be enough. My left side screams where the rib shifted during the climb. I can feel the displaced edge grinding against intercostal muscle with every breath. Behind me, Adrian's arms are shaking—micro-tremors visible even in the dark. Killian moves last. His jaw is locked. His abdomen is six weeks post-surgery and he's asking it to support a controlled descent. The wall doesn't care about our medical histories.
The wall drops away beneath us.
Below, the garden waits. Beyond the garden, the east wing. Behind a blast door and two armed men, a girl who plays Chopin sleeps in a room that was supposed to be safe.
We go together.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
ADRIAN
The wall drops awaybeneath my feet. My body informs me, in the unambiguous language of adrenal response, that I am not a man who climbs down buildings.
Rocco went first. He descended the limestone facade mechanical, efficient—his body has been solving vertical problems since adolescence. Feet braced against the stone, hands gripping the knotted bedsheet rope that Killian anchored to the radiator pipe, his descent was controlled, fluid. Thirty feet consumed in seconds. He landed on the garden path in a crouch, the Glock up, scanning the perimeter before he looked up at me in the window and nodded.
My turn.
I grip the sheet. The fabric is cold, taut. The knots are spaced at two-foot intervals. My hands know knots—surgical knots, the precise architecture of loops and tension that hold tissue together. These knots are larger, cruder, tied by Killian—rough, fast. He learned to rig in a different context..
I wrap the sheet around my right forearm the way I’ve watched Rocco wrap bandages—once, twice, the friction creating a brake. I swing my legs over the sill.
The cold hits my face. The garden is below—white with frost, the magnolia a dark skeleton against the compound wall. Floodlights cast pools of yellow across the stone path. The gaps between them are filled with shadow. The east wing is visible fifty yards away. Dark windows. The ground floor curtained. Elena’s room is on the corner.
I descend. The process is ugly. My arms take the weight, and my arms are not built for this. They are the lean, efficient musculature of a surgeon, designed for fine motor precision, not gross motor load-bearing. My shoulders burn. My forearms tremble. The sheet bites into my palms through the wrap. The friction generates a heat that competes with the February cold.
I lower myself knot by knot. Each one a controlled release, each one requiring me to let go with one hand and re-grip below. The letting-go is the hardest part. It requires trust in the physics, in the knots, in the radiator pipe three stories above me that is the only thing between my body and the frozen path.
Ten feet from the ground, my foot slips. The limestone is frosted—a slick, invisible glaze. My boot skates off the wall. My body swings. The sheet takes my full weight. My forearm screams. I hang, spinning, the garden rotating beneath me.
Rocco’s hands close on my hips. He steadies me—the grip firm, practiced. His body absorbs my momentum the way he absorbs everything.
"I’ve got you," he says. "Let go."
I let go. His arms take my weight. My feet hit the ground. The impact travels through my ankles, my knees, my hips. I’m standing. My hands are rope-burned and shaking.
"Move," he says.
The garden is fifty yards of open ground. Open ground means exposure. The floodlights create alternating zones of illumination and shadow. The path between us and the east wing crosses through both. We move in the shadows—skirtingthe light pools, staying close to the hedgerow that borders the garden’s south edge. Our bodies are low, our footsteps crunching softly on frozen grass.
Above us, Killian is in the window. He has the hunting rifle from Alessandro’s study—a bolt-action Remington with a scope. He’s braced against the windowsill, the barrel resting on the stone ledge. His eye is on us. His finger is on the trigger guard. The knowledge of his overwatch is a weight I feel between my shoulder blades. The paradoxical reassurance of knowing a man with a rifle is watching your back.
We’re halfway across when the patrol appears.
Two men. Coming around the east wing’s corner, their flashlight beams sweeping the garden path. They’re walking the perimeter—the standard night patrol. Except the standard patrol doesn’t carry rifles at low-ready. They don't move in a tactical pair with five-foot spacing.
Rocco pulls me behind the magnolia. The trunk is wide enough to shield us both—barely. His body presses against mine. His hand covers my mouth. The gesture is instinctive, protective. I don’t need silencing. But I don’t pull his hand away.
