Ninety-nine doctors had told me I would never walk again, and after eight years in a wheelchair, I believed them. Then my maid’s little girl broke into the one room everyone was forbidden to enter, laughed in the face of the most feared man in the city—and somehow made my dead foot move.

At 5:00 AM, the private gym in the west wing sounded like a machine shop.

Vance and two trusted physical therapists locked the carbon-steel braces around my thighs and calves, strapping industrial ratchets tight against my atrophied muscle tissue. The mechanical servos whined quietly as the battery pack hummed to life, taking the weight off my spine and transferring it to the metal frame.

“Sir, your blood pressure is spiking,” one of the therapists warned, checking the monitor strapped to my wrist. “Your legs haven't supported your own body weight in eight years. The shock to your cardiovascular system—not to mention your nervous system—is going to be extreme.”

“Do it,” I gritted out through clenched teeth.

“Caleb, please,” Elena said, standing by the doorway with Lily and Leo. Her eyes were red-rimmed from lack of sleep, her hands clasped tightly together. “You don't have to prove anything to us. If Rossi takes the company, we can run. We can disappear.”

“I don't run from rats, Elena,” I replied, gripping the parallel bars bolted to the gym floor. “My father didn't. And neither do I.”

“On my count,” Vance said, his face set in stone. “Three... two... one. Lift.”

The mechanical servos engaged with a sharp, pneumatic hiss.

The floor rushed away from me. My hips were forced upward, my knees locked straight by the steel braces, and for the first time in nearly three thousand days, my eyes were level with the top of the gym mirror.

Pain—white-hot, blinding, and electric—shot up from my heels, through my spine, and straight into my skull. It felt as though someone was pouring liquid fire directly into my nervous system. My vision blurred. My lungs seized up.

“Boss!” Vance shouted, catching my shoulder as my knees buckled.

“Don't touch me!” I roared, the sound echoing off the tile walls like thunder.

I gripped the parallel bars so hard my fingers bled, my knuckles splitting against the cold metal. The pain was excruciating, but beneath the agony, something else flickered. A sensation. A feeling of cold air hitting the skin of my ankles. A pulse of raw, living electricity that didn't come from the battery pack, but from inside me.

I took a breath.

Then, deliberately, consciously, I commanded my left foot forward.

The metal brace swung. The heel struck the rubber mat with a dull, resonant thud.

Lily clapped her hands together, a bright, triumphant sound in the tense room. “See? I told you he wasn't broken. He was just rusty.”