Chapter 4 - The Confession of a Creator
“Intact?” Vance forced a dry, brittle laugh, adjusting his glasses with a hand that visibly shook. “Sebastian, don’t be absurd. The bomb blast threw you through a plate-glass window at seventy miles per hour. Shrapnel sliced through your lower thoracic vertebra. I performed the emergency laminectomy myself. I held your severed cord in my gloved hands.”
“You’re lying,” I said, stepping forward before I could stop myself.
Vance’s eyes snapped to me, filled with sudden, venomous hatred. “And who is this? A street-corner masseuse diagnosing complex neurosurgery? Do you even have a medical license, young lady, or did Sebastian pull you out of a back alley?”
“She has something you lost twenty years ago, Marcus,” Sebastian whispered, his voice dropping an octave, carrying the weight of a slow, agonizing execution. “She has hands that don't lie.”
Sebastian reached down, unbuckled the strap on his right boot, and pulled it off, followed by his dark sock.
He lifted his foot with his own hands, resting his bare heel on the metal footplate, and pointed at the lateral side of his ankle.
“When Claire pressed here,” Sebastian said, locking his eyes onto the surgeon, “my big toe flexed. Reflex arc. Bottom-up activation. You can’t get a reflex arc from a severed spinal cord, Marcus. You know that. It’s neuroanatomy 101.”
Vance stepped back. His heel hit the edge of the mahogany desk. His breathing turned shallow and rapid.
“It’s... it’s a muscle spasm,” Vance stammered, the professional facade completely crumbling. “Spasticity is common in paraplegics. It means nothing.”
“Then let’s test it,” Sebastian said. He nodded to Gabriel.
In a flash, Gabriel moved behind Vance’s two corporate mercenaries. Before they could reach for their concealed sidearms, Gabriel and another guard slammed them face-first against the bookshelves, kicking their legs out from under them and pinning them with steel-gripped forearms and drawn Glock 19s.
“Don't move,” Gabriel snarled, pressing a pistol barrel against the back of Vance’s lead bodyguard's neck.
Vance stared in horror as his men were neutralized in less than four seconds. He looked back at Sebastian, his mouth opening and closing like a fish out of water.
“You didn't just operate on me in 2006, did you, Marcus?” Sebastian asked softly, rolling his wheelchair an inch closer. “You found something else during the surgery. Or... you put something there.”
Vance’s knees buckled slightly. He grabbed the edge of the desk to keep from falling.
“You were twenty-two,” Vance whispered, his voice cracking. “Your father was old-school mob. He was ruthless, unpredictable, and he was steering the Chicago syndicate into a bloody drug war that was going to bring the federal government down on all of us—on our investors, on our political partners, on our biomedical contracts.”
Sebastian’s face went completely blank. “What did you say?”
“Your father was going to burn the whole city down,” Vance said, tears of pure terror welling in his eyes. “The syndicate needed stability. They needed a boss who was calculating, patient, and controllable. Someone who would rule with an iron fist, but from a position where he couldn't run, couldn't hide, and couldn't launch an independent war.”
The room went dead silent. The fire crackled in the grate.
“They didn't want you dead,” Vance choked out. “They wanted you grounded. The car bomb was a warning. But when you survived... the investors, the men sitting at your father's table, made a deal with me. During the emergency surgery, while you were under, I implanted a biopolymer neural stabilizer around your T12 vertebra. A device designed to block ninety-five percent of descending motor signals, while feeding a continuous micro-current into your lower nerves to prevent total atrophy.”
May you like
Vance pointed a trembling finger at Sebastian.
“You weren't paralyzed by the bomb, Sebastian! You were paralyzed by design! For twenty years, you’ve been sitting in that chair because your own empire was holding the remote control!”
