Chapter 15 Adrian
Chapter Fifteen
ADRIAN
Snow in my mouth. In my eyes. Packed into the collar of my shirt.
The cold traces each vertebra of my spine like a finger running down a set of stairs.
I am face-down on a steep slope. The left side of my body is buried in snow. My right arm is extended above my head, fingers locked around a handful of wool fabric. I tighten my grip. I feel a deadweight at the end of it.
Killian.
The name activates something in my brain that overrides the concussion. I open my eyes. The world is white and tilted.
Smoke climbs the hillside above me—black against the grey sky.
It carries the chemical stink of burned propane and splintered wood.
Where the shack stood, there is a wound in the landscape.
Charred timber. Twisted metal. The skeleton of the potbelly stove stands in the center of the wreckage like a monument.
I pull myself toward Killian. My right arm drags his body closer. He’s on his side, half-buried in the deep snow. His face is grey. His lips are blue.
I roll him onto his back. I press my fingers to his carotid.
Pulse. Weak. Thready. One hundred and thirty beats per minute. Compensating. But present. The beat pushes against my fingertips. Each push is a data point that means alive.
I check his dressing. The abdominal bandage is intact. My work holds, even through an explosion. The drain tube has been ripped free. The exit wound is seeping, a dark stain spreading across the gauze. It’s venous, not arterial. Manageable.
His breathing is labored. Shallow. Rapid. The accessory muscles in his neck are engaging. Possible pneumothorax from the blast pressure. Possible rib fractures.
I don't have a stethoscope. I don't have a blood pressure cuff. I don't have saline or antibiotics.
I have my hands. I have my training. And I have the body of a man I was told to fix.
The man who told me to fix him is gone.
Rocco is gone.
The thought arrives. I don't let it land. I pack it away behind the clinical wall. Into the compartment where the things I can't process go to wait.
The luxury of falling apart is not available. It hasn't been available since a girl bled out under my hands in Baltimore.
I sit up. I look down the slope. The ravine drops away below us—steep, snow-covered. The trees thicken as the grade increases.
Above us, the smoke column marks the shack. Voices drift through the cold air. Russian. Clipped. Professional. The kill team is in the wreckage. They’re searching.
They aren't searching down the slope. The explosion threw us clear. The tumble carried us forty yards into the tree line. The fresh snow has already begun to fill the channels our bodies carved on the way down.
We are invisible. For now.
I need to move.
Killian weighs one hundred and ninety pounds. I weigh one hundred and seventy. The physics of dragging a man who outweighs me through deep snow on a thirty-degree grade are not in my favor.
I don't care about the physics.
I care about the man who blew up a building so I could run. I care about the debt that was created when Rocco Falcone stepped between me and a kill squad. He fired a flare into a cloud of propane gas with the full understanding that he might not survive it.
He chose me. Not Alessandro. Not the arrangement. Not the order from his brother. He chose me.
The weight of that choice is heavier than the man I’m dragging.
I hook my arms under Killian’s shoulders. I lock my hands across his chest. I lean back and pull.
The first ten yards take everything I have. My boots slip on the frozen ground. My back screams. My arms are not built for sustained gross motor exertion. I am a surgeon with thin arms dragging a dying man through a forest while men with rifles search above me.
I pull. Rest. Pull. Rest. The rhythm is crude. But it moves us. Yard by yard. Tree to tree. Each pause spent listening for the sound of boots on snow.
I keep to the densest cover. The stands of pine where the canopy blocks the view. The branches hang low enough to catch a drone’s camera.
I drag Killian through a frozen creek bed. The ice cracks under our combined weight. Cold water soaks through my pants and into my boots.
The water will obscure our tracks. The cold will accelerate hypothermia. I choose the tracks over the temperature. Tracks are a certainty. Hypothermia is a probability.
The forest is a maze of identical trees and identical silence. I have no compass. No landmarks.
I navigate by the smoke column—keep it behind us. Keep moving downhill. Find water. Follow water to civilization. The logic is crude. The logic is all I have.
Killian stirs. A groan—deep, guttural. His eyes open. Green. Unfocused.
"Don't talk," I say. "Conserve your energy."
"Where—"
"We’re moving. You’re alive. That’s all that matters."
His eyes find my face. He looks at me with that sharp, feral assessment. Can this person keep me alive?
"Rocco?" he asks.
I don't answer. I adjust my grip under his arms and pull.
The phone is in the pocket of a dead man.
I find him at the bottom of the ravine. A Russian soldier, thrown by the blast. His body is crumpled against a boulder.
The tactical vest is shredded. The balaclava is pulled down over his face. A mercy I don't investigate. His right leg is bent at an angle that indicates a comminuted femur fracture. He’s been dead since he landed.
I check his pockets. A spare magazine for a weapon I don't have. A protein bar. A radio—earpiece attached, channel open, Russian chatter bleeding through the static.
And a phone. A cheap burner. The screen is cracked but functional.
I take the phone, the protein bar, and the radio. I leave the magazine. I don't see his weapon. It’s buried in the snow somewhere.
I power on the phone. One bar of signal. Thirty-one percent battery.
I need a number.
I don't have numbers. I don't have a phone, a wallet, an identity. Everything I owned is in an apartment on East 63rd that the Russians have certainly cleaned out by now. I don't know Alessandro Falcone’s number. I don't know Rory Kavanagh’s number.
Rocco gave me a number. Ten digits, recited in the dark while he prepared the propane tank. A lifeline that weighs nothing. I said it back to him once. He nodded. The nod of a man transferring a weapon.
I dial the number.
The phone rings. Once. Twice. Three times. The signal is weak.
Click.
"Who is this?"
Alessandro Falcone. The timbre is identical to the voice I heard through the cabin wall. Controlled. Measured. He answers unknown numbers the way most people answer loaded weapons.
"This is Dr. Adrian Sterling."
The silence that follows is dense. I can feel him processing the name.
"I have your husband. He’s alive. He has a healing jejunal anastomosis, a detached surgical drain, possible blast-related rib fractures, and early hypothermia. He needs a hospital within the next four hours."
"Where are you?"
"I don't know. North of Poughkeepsie. In the woods east of the Hudson. We’ve been moving downhill for two miles from a position where a kill team engaged us. I’m following a frozen creek bed south-southwest."
"Rocco?"
The name hits me in the sternum. A physical impact. I close my eyes. The clinical wall holds. The compartment holds.
"Your brother detonated a propane tank to cover our escape. He was separated from us in the blast." I pause. The pause is involuntary. "The Russians have him. They were asking for me, not for him. He’s alive because he’s leverage. They’ll keep him alive as long as they believe they can use him to get me back. "
The silence from the other end is not processing. It is the silence of a man absorbing a blow. I’ve heard it in waiting rooms. The quiet that follows we did everything we could.
"I’m triangulating your signal now." Alessandro’s voice has changed. The control is intact, but beneath it is iron. A gear shifting. "Stay on the line. Keep the phone powered. I’ll have a team to your position within ninety minutes."
"He blew the building to save us," I say. I don't know why I say it. It is tactically irrelevant. But the words come out because the compartment is leaking.
"I know what my brother would do," Alessandro says quietly. "Stay on the line, Doctor."
The helicopter comes in low over the tree line.
I hear the heavy, percussive chop of rotors beating the cold air. It grows to a roar that shakes snow from the branches. Black. Military-grade. No markings. It sets down in a clearing sixty yards south of our position.
Men spill out. Four of them in tactical gear. Behind them, a fifth figure. Tall. Lean. No tactical gear—a dark overcoat, a suit underneath. Alessandro Falcone walks across the clearing with the bearing of a man crossing a boardroom. The incongruity is so complete it feels like a hallucination.
Behind him, a sixth figure. Younger. Smaller. Moving with a quick, wiry energy. Rory.
Alessandro reaches us. His eyes go to Killian first. Killian is lying on the frozen ground where I propped him against a tree. He sees Alessandro, and his face cracks. The feral hardness gives way to something raw.
Alessandro drops to his knees in the snow. His suit trousers soak through. He cups Killian’s face. His thumbs brush Killian’s cheekbones. He doesn't speak. The tremor in his hands says everything.
Rory is beside them, gripping Killian’s shoulder.
I step back. The scene is intimate in a way that makes my chest ache. Two men and a boy kneeling in the snow around a body I kept alive. Their grief and their relief tangled together. I am the outsider.
The tactical team moves to Killian. They lift him onto a stretcher. IV lines. Thermal blankets. Oxygen. The equipment I haven't had access to in weeks appears in the hands of professionals.
They load him into the helicopter. Rory climbs in after him.
Alessandro stands. He turns to me.
His face is composed. The tremor is gone. Whatever cracked when he knelt beside Killian has been sealed.
"Tell me about Rocco."
I tell him. The transmitter. The kill team. The siege. Garrett. The propane tank. The explosion. The tumble down the slope. The Russian voice asking where is the doctor with a boot on Rocco’s chest.
I tell him everything except what happened against the wall of the shack. That belongs to a different ledger.
Alessandro listens. His face doesn't change. But something behind his eyes hardens. The way steel hardens in a forge.
"They want you," he says.
"Yes."
"They took my brother to get to you."
"Yes."
He looks at me. The assessment is clinical. The same flat gaze his brother turned on me the night we met. They learned it from the same source. They weaponized it differently.
"Then we get him back. Today."
The words are quiet. Final. The commitment in his voice is a declaration of war compressed into six words.
"I’m coming with you," I say.
Alessandro looks at my hands. My surgeon’s hands—scraped, bruised, raw. The hands that fixed his husband and his brother.
"Yes," he says. "You are."
He turns toward the helicopter. The rotors are spinning. The downwash flattens the snow.
I follow him. My legs are steady. My hands are steady. The tremor that has plagued me for days is gone. In its place is something clean and cold.
Purpose.
Rocco Falcone is in the hands of men who want to use him to get to me. He is bleeding, concussed, broken. A body I stitched and washed and held against mine in the dark. A body I know better than my own.
I climb into the helicopter. The door closes. The aircraft lifts.
I am going to get him back. And when I do, I am going to put my hands on him. Not to fix. Not to clean. Not to stitch.
To hold. To claim. To touch the man who chose me over his own survival.
The helicopter banks south. I press my palm against the window and watch the wilderness fall behind us.
My hands do not shake.