Chapter 6 - Standing on Broken Ground
"I'm done listening to your speeches!" Vance roared, pointing his custom silver pistol directly at Sebastian's chest. "Sign the paper, or I put a bullet through your heart!"
From our position high up on the steel catwalk, Gabriel raised his rifle, aiming directly at Vance's head. "I take Vance, you duck behind the crates," Gabriel whispered to me.
"Wait," I gasped, holding Gabriel's arm. "Look at Sebastian's feet."
Through the dim, hanging lights of the warehouse, I saw it.
Sebastian's legs weren't limp. His boots were planted flat on the concrete floor, his thighs tense, muscles trembling under immense pressure. The weeks of deep manual therapy, the broken scar tissue, the reawakened nerve signals—everything was converging in this single, impossible moment.
Sebastian stared up at Vance. "You think I'm helpless because I sit in this chair, Marcus? You think twenty years of pain made me weak?"
Slowly—unbelievably—Sebastian reached down and gripped the armrests of his wheelchair.
The room fell into a dead, suffocating silence. Mercenaries lowered their weapons slightly, staring in utter disbelief.
Sebastian pushed.
Veins bulged along his neck and arms. His breath hissed through his teeth as decades of dormant muscle fiber fought against years of atrophy. His left knee locked into place. Then his right.
With a low, guttural roar that tore from the depths of his soul, Sebastian Lombardi stood up.
The crime boss of Chicago—the man doctors declared permanently paralyzed—towered over the room, standing on his own two feet for the first time in two decades.
Vance stumbled backward, his eyes wide with absolute horror, as if he were looking at a dead man resurrected from the grave. "No... no, it's impossible... your spine was destroyed!"
The sudden shock broke the mercenaries' focus for a split second.
That second was all Sebastian needed.
With a explosive surge of power, Sebastian grabbed the heavy titanium wheelchair he had sat in for twenty years, lifted it with his massive upper body strength, and hurled it with terrifying force straight into the three mercenaries standing in front of Vance.
The heavy metal chair smashed into them like a battering ram, sending men and weapons flying across the concrete floor.
"FIRE!" Gabriel screamed from the catwalk, pulling the trigger.
Gabriel's rifle rained fire down on Vance's men from above, creating total chaos. Sebastian's loyal guards opened fire from behind the cover of the crates.
"Clare! Stay down!" Gabriel shouted as he ducked behind a steel beam to reload.
In the middle of the gunfight, Vance scrambled to his feet, bleeding from his forehead where the thrown wheelchair had clipped him. He raised his pistol toward Sebastian, who was struggling to maintain his balance, his freshly healed nerves firing erratically under the intense stress.
"If you won't die sitting down, you'll die standing up!" Vance screamed, squeezing the trigger.
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"NO!" I cried out.
Without thinking about the danger, without thinking about my own survival, I broke away from Gabriel, ran down the steel stairs of the catwalk, and threw myself into the open.
