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Chapter 2 - The Palm Strike and the Broken Grip

...the bridge of his nose.

CRACK.

The cartilage gave way with a sickening crunch. Gregory’s head snapped backward, his eyes rolling up into his head as a sharp spray of blood speckled the white hotel linen on the king-sized bed.

The shock on his face was instantaneous. The arrogant smirk vanished, replaced by sheer, unadulterated agony and confusion.

Before his fingers could tighten on the bat’s grip, my right hand slid down his forearm in a tight, mechanical wrist-lock. I twisted the aluminum shaft clockwise, applying standard Marine Corps pressure-point torque against his thumb joint.

The bat slipped effortlessly from his hand into mine with a soft metallic ring.

Gregory staggered back, clutching his bleeding face with both hands, stumbling against the balcony glass.

“What... what did you do to me?!” he gasped, blood dripping between his trembling fingers onto his custom linen shirt. “You broke my nose!”

I weighed the bat in my right hand, resting the cold aluminum barrel across my shoulder. My pulse was resting at a calm sixty-two beats per minute.

“You swung a deadly weapon at my ribs, Gregory,” I said, my voice dropping into the quiet, lethal cadence of a combat instructor on the drill deck. “In the civilian world, that’s Aggravated Assault with a Deadly Weapon. In my world, that’s an enemy engagement.”

Gregory snarled, fueled by injured pride and blind rage. “You crazy bitch!”

He lunged forward with both hands outstretched, attempting to tackle me by my waist.

I didn't even raise the bat.

I stepped forty-five degrees to the left, caught his incoming right shoulder, swept his trailing ankle with my heel, and drove his face directly into the plush carpet of the stateroom floor.

THUD.

The breath exploded from his lungs in a ragged wheeze. Before he could roll over, my left knee drove firmly into the center of his shoulder blades, pinning his two-hundred-pound frame against the floor with immovable, crushing leverage.

I reached back, twisted his right arm behind his back into a shoulder chicken-wing lock, and pulled until the joint popped with a sharp warning.

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Gregory screamed into the carpet. “Stop! Stop! It hurts! I give up!”

“You gave up the second you pulled a weapon on a Marine, Gregory,” I whispered into his ear.

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