Chapter 3 - The Impossible ReturnClara let out a choked shriek, stumbling backward until her heel struck a loose stone. Mark lunged forward, his primal survival instinct overriding his shock.
— You freak! How did you—? — Mark roared, closing the distance between them with fists clenched, ready to finish the job with his bare hands.
The hooded figure didn’t flinch. As Mark threw a heavy, vicious punch aimed at the jaw, the figure sidestepped with astonishing, fluid grace—movement that a paralyzed man in a wheelchair for two years should have found physically impossible.
Mark’s momentum carried him past. In a blur of motion, the figure swept Mark’s legs out from under him with a textbook martial arts low kick. Mark crashed hard onto the jagged stones, gasping for breath as the wind was forcefully knocked from his lungs.
The figure stepped on Mark’s right hand, applying just enough pressure to elicit a sharp, agonizing cry from the lover.
Slowly, the figure reached up and pulled back the hood.
It was Arthur.
His face was pale, lined with exhaustion, but his eyes burned with a terrifying, razor-sharp clarity. There was no trace of the vacant, broken invalid who had sat helplessly in that wheelchair just ten minutes prior.
— Surprised, my dear wife? — Arthur asked, his voice dripping with a chilling sarcasm as he looked down at Clara, who was paralyzed by absolute horror against the cliff wall. — Did you really think two years of medical records couldn't be faked? Did you think a brilliant engineer couldn't design a breakaway harness system that let me slip free of the chair the exact millisecond gravity took over?
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— You... you faked it? All of it? The paralysis? The weakness? — Clara whispered, her voice a broken rattle.
— I needed to know who wanted me dead, Clara, — Arthur replied softly, shifting his weight off Mark’s hand. — And you delivered your confession with cinematic perfection.
