Chapter 28 #2
She stored all of it. She wasn’t giving herself over to this psychopath without a fight.
Kessler straightened. Checked her restraints once. Nodded to himself.
“You got what you wanted. Let him go. That was the deal.”
Kessler looked at her. The patience in his expression was worse than cruelty. “Yeah, unfortunately there is no actual deal. I just needed you to get here.”
“You just said you were a man of your word.”
Kessler shrugged casually. “When it suits my purposes.” He glanced at Isaac. “He stays until the handoff is arranged. After that, I’ll deal with him.”
The words landed without inflection. He wasn’t taunting her. He was correcting a misunderstanding, the way someone might correct a mispronounced word.
He pulled out his phone and jerked his chin at the other man.
Both of them walked toward the loading dock door at the far end of the room.
She could hear his voice, clipped and businesslike, making calls.
Confirming delivery. Arranging the handoff.
The three former targets who’d pooled their money to buy her, and Kessler was closing the deal.
The loading dock door shut behind him. His voice faded to a murmur on the other side.
She turned to Isaac. “Are you okay?”
“You shouldn’t have come.” Barely above a whisper.
“You would have died.”
“And now we both die.”
“No.” She met his eyes. “We don’t.”
His mouth pressed tight. Even that small movement cost him. She could see the pain register across what was left of his face.
“How bad are you?” she asked.
“Ribs. Shoulder. I can’t tell what’s broken and what’s just beaten to hell.” He tried to shift in the chair and a sound escaped his throat that he couldn’t suppress. “My legs work. That’s about all I can promise you right now.”
She looked down at the zip ties on her wrists. The plastic was industrial grade, cinched tight enough that her fingers were already tingling. The tie that anchored her to the chair arm gave her about four inches of slack.
She could slip them. Both thumbs would have to dislocate. Maybe the left shoulder and wrist too, depending on how the angle worked. It was joints that were already damaged. Joints that might not come back to normal this time.
That didn’t matter. She’d worry about permanent damage later. Right now, she had to get Isaac out of here. She started working her right hand against the tie, testing the give.
Isaac saw it. His one open eye locked on her wrists, and the anguish that had been in his face when she walked in doubled.
“Don’t. Fallon, please don’t.”
“He’s coming back.”
“There has to be another way.”
“There isn’t.”
“Your wrist won’t take it. You know it won’t. After Chattanooga, after everything, you do this and…”
She looked at him. Blood-crusted, broken, tied to a chair in a room that smelled like concrete dust and motor oil. The man who’d held her in warm water and wrapped her joints and slept in a chair beside her bed. The man who’d given up his career for her.
“When he comes back through that door, he’s going to kill you. You’re a liability. He has me, which is all he needs for the payday. You are not useful to him anymore.” She locked onto his one open eye. “This is not a choice, Isaac.”
His mouth opened. Closed. The argument died behind his teeth because the truth of it was irrefutable and they both knew it.
She positioned her right hand. Rotated the wrist inward, pressing the base of her thumb against the hard edge of the zip tie. She’d done this before with dozens of joints that didn’t want to cooperate. The technique was the same. The geometry was the same.
Her body was not the same.
She pushed.
The thumb joint resisted. She pushed harder, the pressure building at the base of the metacarpal, and the joint held for two seconds before it gave with a wet, grinding pop that sent fire up her forearm and into her shoulder.
She bit down on the inside of her cheek hard enough to draw blood and kept going.
The right thumb was free of the tie. She rotated her hand, pulling the wrist through the gap the dislocated thumb had created, and the zip tie scraped across her knuckles.
Her wrist screamed. Not the dull ache she’d been managing for weeks.
A sharp, electric shriek that radiated from the joint into the bones of her forearm and up into her elbow.
The left hand was next. Same technique. Same pressure. The joint fought her harder this time, the tendons pulling tight against the displacement, her body’s last protest against what she was asking it to do. She pushed through it. The pop was louder than the first. The pain was worse.
Both hands free of the zip ties. Her thumbs hung at wrong angles, dislocated, useless. Her wrists throbbed with a deep, sick pulse that made her vision swim.
Her hands were shaking as she reset her thumbs. Her whole body was shaking. But her hands were free and she could move.
She stood. The room tilted and she grabbed the back of the chair until it steadied. Then she crossed to Isaac.
His restraints were tighter than hers. She couldn’t work a zip tie free with just her hands, so crossed the room and found what she needed among the scattered hardware. A utility knife, the blade rusted but intact.
She sawed through Isaac’s ties with fingers that kept losing their grip, the fine motor control in her hands degraded by what she’d just done to them. The blade slipped twice before the plastic gave.
She got him free.
Isaac stood. Or tried to. His legs held for two seconds before his left knee buckled and he caught himself on the chair. The beating had done more damage than he’d admitted. She got under his arm, his weight heavy across her shoulders, and they moved toward the door.
Three steps. Five. Seven. Each one a collaboration between two bodies that were failing in different ways. His ribs ground against her shoulder. Her wrists sent jolts up both arms every time she adjusted her grip.
They weren’t going to make it. The door was twenty feet away and they were covering ground in inches, and on the other side of the loading dock Kessler’s voice had gone quiet.
Isaac heard it too. His arm tightened around her.
The loading dock door opened.
Kessler stood in the frame, the other man a step behind him.
He took in the scene, the empty chairs, the cut zip ties, the two of them upright and halfway to the exit, and his expression didn’t change.
No surprise. No anger. Given Isaac and Fallon’s physical conditions, he knew the situation was still entirely under his control.
He was right.
Isaac pushed Fallon behind him as Kessler approached.
Kessler hit him once in the ribs, a short, precise strike to the area that was already damaged, and Isaac folded. He went down hard, his knees hitting concrete, his arms wrapping around his midsection. The sound he made was involuntary and raw.
Kessler looked at Isaac on the floor. The calculation was visible. He had Fallon for the payday.
He reached for the knife on his belt, turning away from Fallon to finish Isaac off.
Fallon grabbed a pipe she’d spotted when she came in. She swung for Kessler’s head.
But her wrist buckled mid-arc and the pipe dropped six inches, catching him across the shoulder instead. The hit was hard enough to knock him sideways, his grip on the knife loosening, his balance gone for one critical second.
Isaac got up.
She didn’t know how he managed, but Isaac put himself between her and Kessler with a violence that came from somewhere deeper than his body had any right to access in its condition.
The other man started forward. Kessler held up a hand without looking at him. The man stopped.
Isaac’s fist connected with Kessler’s jaw.
Kessler absorbed it and came back with a combination that drove Isaac into the shelving unit.
Metal crashed. Isaac rebounded and caught Kessler with an elbow to the throat.
Kessler took the hit and answered with a knee to Isaac’s midsection that folded him forward, but Isaac grabbed Kessler’s shirt on the way down and pulled him off balance.
Both men hit the shelving. A box of hardware scattered across the concrete.
Fallon tried to raise the pipe again, but her wrists refused. The grip gave out and the pipe slipped two inches in her hands. She adjusted, squeezed harder, the damaged tendons in her left wrist sending a bright spike of pain through her forearm.
She swung.
The pipe caught Kessler across the back of the shoulders again. He turned toward her, and Isaac used the opening. A knee to the midsection that doubled Kessler forward, then an elbow to the back of the neck that drove him to the floor.
Kessler hit the concrete. He started to push himself up. All she could do was watch.
They were going to die in this room. Isaac couldn’t stand, she couldn’t grip, and Kessler was already getting back to his feet. He would keep getting back on his feet, even if they managed to knock him down again.
Plus, his man was standing ten feet away, armed and waiting to step in as soon as Kessler so much as glanced in his direction. There was no way out. She’d come here to save Isaac, but he was still going to die.
Then the door crashed open with a force that nearly knocked her off her feet.
The noise was enormous. Bodies filled the doorway, weapons up, voices layered over each other in rapid bursts she couldn’t separate. Flashlight beams cut through the room in crossing arcs. Someone was shouting commands. Someone else answered.
A boot hit metal, and the sound ricocheted off the concrete walls and multiplied. She couldn’t tell how many people had come through that door. Four? Six? More? Some coming through the back, also.
She flinched hard when a hand closed around her arm. Isaac. He’d dragged himself across the floor to reach her, and now he pulled her against his chest and curled his body around hers.
Kessler’s man went down first. She saw that much through the gap between Isaac’s arms around her.
Two operatives took him to the ground before he cleared his weapon.
Kessler was on his knees when three more converged on him, driving him flat, pinning his arms behind his back.
He didn’t go easy. It took all three of them.
She registered Ryder. He was in the doorway, weapon drawn, his eyes sweeping the room. She didn’t know how he was here. She didn’t have the capacity to figure it out.
Isaac’s grip on her was loosening. The strength that had gotten him across the floor to reach her was draining out of him, his arms going slack, his weight settling heavy against her. She shifted beneath him, easing him down, and his head came to rest against her chest.
She found the spot beneath his jaw and pressed. Her fingers were clumsy, swollen, the fine motor control gone, but she held them there until she felt it.
His pulse pushed back against her fingertips. Steady. Present.
He was alive.
The room was dimming around her as her own pain took over. Ryder’s voice was somewhere above, giving orders, coordinating the team, and the sound of it was already fading into something muffled and distant.
Her vision was contracting. The edges had gone dark, and the center was going gray, and the only point of clarity left was the two inches of skin beneath her fingertips where Isaac’s blood moved through his veins.
She held on to that. Let everything else fall away. The pain in her wrists, the concrete under her knees, the chaos of the room, the voices that were getting farther and farther from her. All of it dissolving into dark.
Isaac’s pulse, still there, still beating, under her fingers. That was all that mattered.
The darkness took her.