Page 97 of Break For Me
She falls. She lands on the corridor floor with her left arm tucked against her chest. Blood runs through her fingers.
I am moving before the sound registers.
The corridor is twenty feet. I cover it in a dead sprint. I hit the floor beside her. I slide on the limestone. My hand finds her arm.
The wound is a laceration—three inches long, running diagonally across the anterolateral forearm. The depth is through skin and subcutaneous tissue into the superficial layer of the brachioradialis muscle. The bleeding is arterial—bright red, pulsatile. The radial artery is grazed by the fragment. Not transected. Grazed. The difference between a wound that kills and a wound that scares.
"Rocco!"
"I see her!" His voice comes from behind me. "Fix her! I’ll hold them!"
The words land in my body like a defibrillator. A patient on the floor. A firefight around me. A man I love holding the line so my hands can work. The focus descends. The corridor disappears. The gunfire becomes white noise. The fear compresses into a single point. The point is the wound. The wound is a problem. Problems have solutions. I am the solution.
I rip the sleeve of my shirt. I tear it into strips. I don't have a kit. I don't have sutures. I have my hands and my knowledge.
I apply direct pressure. My palm over the laceration. The torn sleeve compressed against the wound. Elena gasps. Her body flinches. Her eyes are wide, wet, locked on my face.
"Adrian—"
"Look at me. Don’t look at your arm. Look at me." My voice is the attending surgeon’s voice. The one that delivers information without inflection. "The wound is a laceration. The artery is grazed, not severed. The bleeding is controllable with pressure. You are not going to die. Do you understand me?"
She nods. Tears stream down her face. Her right hand grabs my wrist—the one applying pressure—and holds on.
I tie the pressure dressing. Strip of sleeve, wrapped twice, knotted over the wound site. A surgeon’s knot. The bleeding slows. The dressing darkens, but the saturation stabilizes.
Behind me, the gunfire shifts. Rocco’s Glock fires—two, three, four rapid shots. A body hits the floor. Then silence. The click of a magazine release. The slap of a fresh magazine. The rack of the slide—one-handed, the Glock’s sight hooked on his belt. The technique from the gym.
A rifle fires from the T-junction. Russo is still active. Rocco returns fire—controlled pairs.
"Elena, I need to move you." I slide my arm under her shoulders. "We’re going into your room. Can you walk?"
She nods. I lift her. She’s light—a hundred and fifteen pounds. The build of a musician. I guide her through her doorway and lower her onto the bed.
I go back to the corridor. Rocco is kneeling behind the console table Russo used for cover. He’s advanced. The Glock is trained on the T-junction. Russo’s rifle barrel is visible around the corner—firing blind.
"Elena?" Rocco asks.
"Stabilized. Forearm laceration, radial artery graze. The dressing is holding."
"Vendetti?"
I look down the corridor. Vendetti is on the floor where I shot him. His eyes are closed. The shoulder wound has bled significantly.
Rocco fires twice. Russo’s rifle barrel withdraws. The brief silence fills with the sound of feet—more men approaching from the main hall.
"How many?" I ask.
"At least two more. Maybe four." He drops back from the console. "We can’t go back across the garden. They’ll have the windows covered. We can’t reach the west wing—the blast doors are sealed."
He looks past me. Past Elena’s room. Down the corridor in the opposite direction, toward the service stairs.
"The tunnels," he says.
The compound’s basement is a Cold War relic. A network of utility corridors and storage rooms. The main electrical panel is there. And the security hub’s power supply—the system that controls the blast doors.
"If we cut power to the hub, the blast doors default to open. Alessandro regains access. The loyalists lose control."
"And we lose the lights," I say. "The entire compound goes dark."
