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.
