breaks hand

It had been an attempt to stall with one punch and crush the throat with the other—a technique Toys himself liked. But it was the kind of thing one did with the great unwashed. Not with another professional.

Toys turned his head and dipped, forcing the punch to land on his cheekbone. It hurt, but he knew it would hurt Stafford a good deal more. The killer snatched back his hand but wasted no time complaining about the pain; instead, he snapped out a very fast toe kick that, had it landed, would have done terrible damage to Toys’s crotch.

...


Stafford feinted high and ducked low, throwing a short, vicious hook to Toys’s groin, but the young man twisted aside and once more forced the punch to hit bone. Same hand. First the cheekbone and then the hip. This time, Toys saw pain flicker across Stafford’s face.

...

And midway through that last word, he moved, darting forward almost like a fencer with a step-drag motion that closed the gap while giving him a springy and balanced stance for a left-jab, right-hook combination.

Which was exactly what Toys expected him—wanted him—to do. He’d shifted to look like his weight was resting on his heels and let his arms sag as if too weary to keep his guard up. Stafford, the faster boxer, blitzed in.

Toys crouched a little and leaned away from the jab but into the line of the hook. The punch was so fast that Toys hadn’t yet braced his balled fists against his head so that his whole body would absorb and slough off the foot-pounds of impact. Stafford’s punch knocked Toys’s own fist into his left eye socket.

But Stafford’s already damaged right hand hit the bent elbow. The hand, for all the powerful things it can do, is remarkably fragile and made up of many small bones. The elbow, when bent double, is a club, a big knot of bone. Stafford’s fist hit that unyielding bone at thirty miles an hour. His knuckles exploded, driving sections of bone deep into the muscle and cartilage of the hand. Splinters of bone shot out through the skin, and all those bundles of nerve endings shrieked.

Stafford reeled back in agony, and Toys, dazed and bleeding, took his moment.

-Relentless pg. 474-481, Kindle Edition.