The tackle was graceless and desperate and fueled by something that had nothing to do with training or technique and everything to do with a man who’d dragged himself down three flights of stairs and across a frozen shoreline on cracked ribs and adrenaline and the kind of will that didn’t heed the body's objections.Sullivan's shoulder drove into Brune's midsection, and the two of them went down in a tangle of limbs and chain, and the anchor spinning free across the ice with a shriek of metal on frozen water.
Isla felt the chain at her ankles jerk violently as the anchor slid, and then go slack as it came to rest six feet from the hole.She twisted against her bonds, craning her neck to see.
James was on top of Brune.His hands were at the older man’s collar, pinning him to the ice, and in the strobing blue-and-red light his face was a mask of pain held in place by fury.He was in no condition for this.She could see it in the way his left arm shook, in the way his torso was canted to one side to protect the ribs that Brune himself had cracked three weeks ago, in the shallow, ragged breathing that meant every movement was costing him something he didn’t have to spend.
Brune recovered faster than a sixty-five-year-old man should have been able to.His body was hard from decades of labor, compact and dense, and the ice was his element the way it would never be Sullivan’s.He got a hand free and drove it upward into James’s injured side—a short, vicious strike, targeted with the precision of a man who knew exactly where the damage was because he’d inflicted it.
James made a sound that Isla felt in her chest.Not a scream—Sullivan didn’t scream—but a choked, involuntary grunt of pain that buckled him sideways.His grip loosened.Brune twisted beneath him, scrambling for purchase on the ice, getting a knee up between them and shoving.
Sullivan rolled.Came up on all fours, one arm wrapped around his ribs, his face white in the spotlight’s approaching glow.He was wearing the flannel shirt she’d seen him in earlier that evening—no coat, no gloves, nothing between him and the March cold except cotton and whatever fire was burning inside him.
Brune got to his feet.Blood on his lip from where his face had hit the ice.He looked at Sullivan with an expression that was almost curiosity—the evaluating gaze of a predator encountering unexpected resistance from something it had already cataloged as prey.
“You should have stayed down,” Brune said.“At the apartment.At the scrapyard.You keep getting up, and it keeps not mattering.”
Sullivan stood.The act of standing was itself a kind of violence—she could see what it cost him in the tremor of his legs, the way his jaw clenched so hard the muscles in his neck stood out in cords.He was six-two and broad-shouldered, and under normal circumstances, he would have outmatched Brune in every physical metric that mattered.But these were not normal circumstances.These were the circumstances of a man with cracked ribs and deep tissue bruising fighting a serial killer on frozen ice in the dark, and the math was not in his favor and they both knew it.
He charged anyway.
They collided again, closer to the hole this time, and Isla heard the ice groan beneath the impact—a deep, structural sound, the lake’s frozen skin protesting weight and force it hadn’t been asked to absorb.Sullivan got his hands on Brune’s jacket and drove him backward, boots scraping and sliding on the ice, but Brune was low and balanced and he absorbed the momentum the way he absorbed everything—with patience, with the economy of a man who didn’t waste movement.He hooked a foot behind Sullivan’s ankle and pulled.
James went down hard.His back hit the ice with a sound that traveled through the frozen surface and into Isla’s knees like a tremor.She heard the breath leave him—all of it, at once—and saw his body curl around the ribs that had just been driven into unforgiving ice.
Brune was on him immediately.A knee on Sullivan's chest, a hand at his throat—not squeezing, not yet, but holding, pinning, establishing the kind of control that turned a fight into an execution.Sullivan grabbed Brune's wrist with both hands and pulled, but the leverage was wrong, and his strength was failing, and his face was going from white to gray in the strobing light.
The spotlight found them.
It swept across the ice and locked on—three figures on the frozen lake, two of them locked in a struggle beside a hole in the ice, the third bound and chained ten feet away.The light was merciless.It exposed everything—the blood on Brune’s face, the agony on Sullivan’s, the anchor sitting on the ice like an accusation.Voices erupted from the shore, amplified by a bullhorn, the words distorted by wind and distance into something that sounded like authority but arrived too late to be useful.
They were still a hundred yards away.On shore.Even if they came onto the ice now—and they would, she knew they would—a hundred yards of frozen lake was not a sprint.It was a careful, measured approach on uncertain footing, and careful measured approaches took time that neither she nor James had.
Sullivan got a hand free and drove his fist into Brune’s jaw.It was a good punch—short and tight, the punch of a man who’d been in fights before and knew where to put his knuckles—and it snapped Brune’s head sideways and bought James enough space to get the knee off his chest.He rolled, tried to rise, made it to one knee before Brune was on him again.
The fight was terrible to watch.Not because of its violence—Isla had seen violence, had inflicted it, understood it as the blunt instrument it was.It was terrible because of its asymmetry.James Sullivan is fighting with the heart of a man defending someone he loved, and his body refuses to match the scale of his intent.Every blow he landed cost him.Every grapple, every twist, every second on the ice drained reserves he'd been rebuilding for weeks and was now spending in minutes.She could see the moment approaching—the inevitable arithmetic of injury and exhaustion and cold—when his body would simply stop cooperating, the way it had stopped in the apartment hallway, and then Brune would finish what he'd started.
She had seconds.James was buying them for her at a price he couldn’t afford, and she was wasting them on the ice with dead hands and dead feet and ropes that wouldn’t break.
She needed a different approach.She needed to stop fighting the ropes and start fighting the cold.
The spotlight held steady on the scene, pinning them all in its white beam like specimens under glass, and from the shore came the sound of boots on ice—distant, approaching, not fast enough.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Her thumb was the key.
Isla had learned this at Quantico, in a defensive tactics module taught by a retired Marine who’d spent eleven months as a prisoner of war and had opinions about restraints that he delivered with the calm precision of a man who’d tested every one of them on his own body.The thumb is the narrowest point of the hand.Dislocate the carpometacarpal joint and the hand collapses to a width that can pass through a binding designed to hold a closed fist.It hurts.It hurts worse than almost anything you’ll do to yourself on purpose.But if the alternative is dying, you do it, and you deal with the pain after.
The cold was the advantage she hadn’t expected.Her hands were numb—not reduced-sensation numb but gone numb, the complete absence of feeling that came with prolonged exposure and restricted circulation.She’d been fighting the numbness for twenty minutes, treating it as an enemy.But it wasn’t an obstacle.It was an anesthetic.The most brutal field anesthetic imaginable, delivered by the same lake that was trying to kill her.
She braced her right thumb against the heel of her left hand, behind her back where Brune couldn’t see—he was ten feet away, grappling with Sullivan, the two of them locked in a fight that was buying her the only currency that mattered.
She pushed.Hard.Sideways, against the joint.
The thumb dislocated.
She felt it—not as pain, not the way she would have if her hands had been warm and the nerves reporting accurately.She felt it as a deep, structural wrongness, a grinding shift beneath skin she couldn’t feel, followed by a wave of nausea that rolled up into her throat with enough force to make her gag behind the cloth.The pain was there—somewhere behind the numbness, banked like a fire under ice, and she knew with certainty that when feeling returned it would be the worst pain of her life.But feeling wasn’t coming back yet.The cold held it at bay, and she had a window.
She pulled her right hand.The rope resisted.The nylon compressed the dislocated joint in a way that sent a fresh surge of nausea through her, distant and muffled but real.She pulled harder.The hand deformed—the thumb folding at an angle, thumbs weren't designed to fold, the width narrowing by the critical half-inch that marine-grade nylon didn't account for, because it was designed to hold rigid objects, not objects that could reshape themselves through injury.
