Page 100 of Break For Me
The second is on the stairs—the main staircase between the basement and the ground floor. He has night vision. The green glow of the monocular is a single luminous eye floating in the blackness.
Night vision needs ambient light. In a building with no power, no emergency lighting, the ambient light is zero. The monocular shows him a green field of nothing. He’s wearing a blindfold with a lantern strapped to his face.
I come up the stairs below him. I grab his ankle. I pull. He falls. The night vision monocular cracks against the stair edge. His body tumbles. His weapon discharges into the ceiling.
I’m on him before he lands. My knee on his chest. My fist—the right fist—drives into his jaw. Once. The fight goes out of him.
The ringleader is in the security hub.
The hub is on the ground floor. The door is steel, closed, the manual bolt thrown from inside.
I don’t knock.
I kick the door at the lock plate. The bolt holds. I kick again—full body weight behind the boot. The wood splinters. The third kick tears the bolt from the frame and the door crashes inward.
I snap on the flashlight.
Vincenzo Morelli sits in the command chair. He’s sixty-one. A capo under Salvatore. He was at Alessandro’s wedding. He brought a gift—a silver frame. To the new family. I’ve seen him once before this. The mess hall. The night we brought Elena in. He was the older man sitting next to Bellini—the one who didn’t stand, didn’t nod, and watched me with the patience of someone who had already decided something.
He’s holding a pistol. It’s aimed at me. His hand is steady.
"Vincenzo," I say.
"Rocco." His voice is calm. Resigned. "Your father would have understood."
"My father was a butcher who ran this family into the ground."
"Your father understood that strength is tradition. Your brother—" His lip curls. "Your brother married an Irishman. He put a foreign surgeon in our house. He made the Falcone name a joke."
"The Falcone name survived because Alessandro made it survive."
"The Falcone name survived because men like me held the line." He stands. The pistol stays level. "I have seventeen men in this city who answer to me. The compound is a skirmish. The war is outside. Kill me, and the war continues."
"Seventeen men who just watched their commander lose control of a building to one man with a flashlight." I step into the room. The flashlight beam pins him. "Your coup lasted forty minutes. Your assassin failed. Your guards are on the floor. Your blast doors are open."
His trigger finger tightens. I see it in the beam. The tendon flexing. He’s going to shoot.
I drop the flashlight. The room goes dark. His gun fires. The muzzle flash is a strobe. The round passes through the space where my chest was. I’m already below the line of fire.
I close the distance. My body hits his—low, shoulder to hip. The tackle drives him backward into the command console. The monitors crash. His gun fires again—into the ceiling.
I pin his gun hand against the console with my left. The rebuilt fingers close around his wrist. The grip holds.
My right hand finds his throat. Not the choke. The grip. The permanent grip.
Vincenzo Morelli makes a sound. Small, guttural. His body writhes beneath mine.
I hold. The dark holds. My hand holds.
He stops moving.
I release. I sit back on the floor. The dead man slumps in the command chair. The room is silent. The building is silent.
The lights come back in stages.
Alessandro’s work. The generator. The backup system. The compound shudders back to life. The ventilation hums. The heating engages. The cameras blink online.
I walk out of the hub. The corridor is full of men—Falcone soldiers, the loyal ones. They followed Alessandro’s voice through the dark to the armory. They see me. They see the blood. They part.
