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.
