Six months after a bullet paralyzed me, my fiancée canceled my therapy, sneering, “Helping him is pointless now.” She spent our money on wedding dresses while demanding my signature on our harbor properties. But my $25-an-hour nurse refused to let me rot. She rebooked my session and secretly placed a folded document on my hospital bed: “Mr. Corvino… your fiancée doesn’t want you to walk again.” Reading Arya’s signature at the bottom, I realized the bullet wasn’t an accident—it was an inside job Kertati

On the fourteenth second, my right knee buckled inward. The world tilted, and I crashed into the padded medical mat, dragging Patel and Tessa down with me in a heap of tangled limbs and leather.

I lay there on the floor, my cheek pressed against the rough wool, gasping for air like a landed fish.

“Again,” I rasped.

“Vincent,” Patel breathed, rubbing his wrenched shoulder. “Your autonomic system can’t take another drop today. Your heart rate is—”

“I said *again*.”

Tessa was already on her knees beside me. She didn’t offer a hand to help me sit up. She simply reached down, checked the tension pins on the right brace, and snapped them back into the third slot.

“He said again, Doctor,” she said softly.

We worked until five in the afternoon, until the skin beneath my armpits was raw and purple, and my forearms were so spent I couldn’t hold a glass of water without spilling half of it down my chin.

At six o’clock, the main front doors of the estate slammed open.

I sat in my standard mechanical chair by the cold hearth, a wool blanket tucked tightly across my shins, my hands resting limp in my lap. Tessa stood by the corner table, quietly wiping down a medicine tray.