“What did you do?” Len asked, his voice barely louder than the hum of the cooling pipes behind the brickwork.
Doma didn’t answer with words.
Her right hand shot across the table with the blinding, bone-shaking speed of an uncoiling spring. Before Len could pull back, her thick, calloused fingers clamped around his right wrist—his sound wrist. Her grip was not a woman’s grasp. It was an iron cooper’s clamp. He drove the outward and ulnar bones together until the nerves in his palm screamed with pressure.
Len gasped, his body jerking backward. But she leaned her full sixty pounds of weight across the pine planks, pinning his forearm flat against the grease-stained map. The cedar splints on his broken left arm banged against the rough wall. It sent a sickening jolt of pain through the fracture, but she didn’t flinch, and she didn’t lessen the torque on his sound arm.
“Feel that?” she hissed, her face six inches from his, her eyes hard as river slate. “Pull against it, courier. Use your Surefoot. Use your runner’s lungs. Pull your hand back.”
Len strained, his bicep knotting under his coarse wool sleeve, his boots slipping on the wet floorboards as he threw his shoulder back. His cedar splints dug into his ribs, the linen wrapping groaning under the tension, but her hand didn’t yield a sixteenth of an inch. Her fingers were dug deep into the tendon groove above his wrist. It packed the wrist blood vessel until his fingertips…
