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

“No,” I said. “It doesn’t fix a single centimeter of bone. And it doesn’t buy me anything.”

“Then why did you do it?”

I looked past her, out through the wide clinic windows toward the gray waters of the harbor in the distance. The cranes of Corvino Maritime were visible on the horizon, lifting steel into the overcast sky like mechanical monuments to an era that was already slipping through my fingers.

“Because for forty years, I believed that strength meant never having to apologize,” I said. “I thought that if you were powerful enough, the world had to absorb the damage you caused. Then a bullet went through my spine behind Warehouse Twelve, and I spent six months lying in a bed realizing that the empire I built didn’t even have enough love in it to keep my fiancée from trying to steal my house.”

I reached down, grasped the armrests of my chair, and took a deep, steadying breath.

“Tessa,” I said.

My former aide moved forward instinctively, reaching for my belt.

“No,” I said gently. “Just stand near.”

I locked the mechanical pins on my leg braces with two sharp, metallic clicks. I planted my rubber-soled shoes flat against the linoleum.