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.

By dusk, the boardroom takeover was complete, but the war was far from over.

Rossi’s signatures were secured, his illicit shell companies frozen by federal prosecutors alerted by Vance’s digital dossier, and the compromised board members were sitting in federal holding cells downtown. But Dominic Rossi had managed to slip away during the chaos, fleeing toward his private staging yards at Pier 42 on the Brooklyn waterfront—the very same docks where my father’s warehouses had burned fifteen years ago.

My car pulled up to the rusted iron gates of Pier 42 just as the sun dipped below the horizon, painting the sky the color of a bruised plum.

I didn't use the exoskeleton this time. The battery pack was dead, and my legs were shaking from the sheer exhaustion of the Manhattan boardroom. But I didn't need steel braces anymore. The numbness was gone, replaced by a dull, throbbing ache of living nerve endings reconnecting in the dark.

I stepped out of the black sedan, using a heavy oak cane carved with the Marino family crest, flanked by Vance and a dozen armed men.

Dominic Rossi was standing near the edge of the concrete pier, a desperate, wild look in his eyes as he held a detonator connected to a series of fuel drums stacked beside my family’s old shipping containers.

“Stay back, Caleb!” Rossi screamed, waving a pistol in one hand and the detonator in the other, the cold ocean wind whipping his gray hair across his face. “You want your empire back? Fine! Take the ashes! I’ll blow this whole pier straight into the East River before I let you win!”

“You already lost, Dominic,” I called out, walking slowly across the cracked concrete, my boots crunching against the gravel. Every step sent a jolt of fire up my spine, but I forced my weight forward, refusing to stumble. “You killed my father. You cut my brakes. And you thought you could bury the Marino name under eight years of silence.”

“I should have finished the job that night on the highway!” Rossi shrieked, his thumb trembling over the red trigger button. “I should have put a bullet in your head instead of leaving you to rot in that damn chair!”

“You made one fatal mistake, Dominic,” I said, stopping ten feet from him.

Rossi blinked, confused. “What?”

“You underestimated what a little girl with a portable speaker could do to a dead man’s heart.”

Before Rossi could press the trigger, a sharp crack echoed across the pier.

Vance’s sniper rifle barked from the roof of the warehouse behind us. The pistol flew out of Rossi’s hand, spinning into the dark water of the harbor. At the exact same second, I lunged forward across the concrete, ignoring the agony in my legs, tackling Rossi hard against the metal railing just as he tried to hit the detonator.

We crashed to the ground together. Vance and his men swarmed in, tearing the detonator from Rossi’s grip and pinning him face-down to the cold concrete.