Touched the Paralyzed Mafia Boss’s Foot Once—Then Every Man in the Room Stopped Breathing

The second time Sebastian Lombardi’s foot moved, no one in the room breathed.

Not Gabriel. Not the guards with their hands hovering near weapons. Not the silent nurse standing near the wall with a tray of unused syringes. Not even Sebastian himself, whose face had gone so still he looked carved from stone.

My fingers remained at his ankle.

Beneath my touch, something impossible answered.

A tremor.

Small. Weak. Real.

Sebastian looked down at his foot as if it had betrayed him.

“Again,” he said.

His voice was quiet, but the command cracked through the room like a gunshot.

I swallowed. “I need everyone to step back.”

No one moved.

Sebastian did not look away from me. “You heard her.”

Chairs scraped. Leather shoes shifted. Guns disappeared beneath jackets. The men retreated to the edges of the room, though every eye stayed locked on my hands.

I adjusted my grip around his heel and calf. The skin was cool, the muscles wasted but not dead. That was the first thing that struck me. Not paralyzed in the way his doctors had claimed. Not gone. Dormant.

Hidden beneath years of neglect and false certainty was a body still trying to speak.

“Can you feel this?” I asked, pressing along the outside of his ankle.

“No.”

I moved higher, to a tendon near the shin. “This?”

His jaw flexed.

“Answer me.”

His eyes cut to mine. “Heat.”

A sound passed through the room.

It was not relief. Not joy.

Fear.

Because men like Sebastian Lombardi were not supposed to receive miracles. Miracles made them dangerous in new ways.

I pressed again, deeper this time, following the line of old scar tissue along his lower leg. The muscles twitched beneath my thumb. Sebastian’s fingers dug into the armrest of his chair.

“You feel that,” I said.

“I feel something.”

“What?”

He stared at me, and for the first time since I had entered his mansion, the arrogance slipped. Beneath it was something raw, almost young.

“Pain,” he said.

I sat back on my heels.

Pain meant connection.

Pain meant the message was traveling.

Pain meant someone had lied.

Gabriel stepped forward. “Ms. Bennett?”

I didn’t answer him. My eyes were on Sebastian’s spine, or rather, the shape of it beneath his tailored black shirt. I had worked with spinal injuries before. Not at this level. Not with this kind of money surrounding it. But bodies followed rules even when powerful men did not.

If his spinal cord had been fully severed, nothing I touched should have reached him.

Nothing should have moved.

Nothing should have hurt.

“Who told you it was complete paralysis?” I asked.

Sebastian’s expression closed instantly.

“Every doctor.”

“Names.”

Gabriel’s gaze flicked to his boss. That told me everything. The names mattered.

Sebastian leaned back, the firelight catching the sharp planes of his face. “Dr. Malcolm Voss. Dr. Adrian Bell. Dr. Lucia Marchand. Too many others. The first report came from St. Bartholomew’s private trauma unit.”

“And did you ever see the scans yourself?”

A bitter smile touched his mouth. “I was twenty-two. My father was dead. Half my family was trying to decide whether I was still useful. I saw what they gave me.”

“What they gave you,” I repeated.

The silence changed.

It thickened.

Sebastian’s eyes narrowed. “Choose your next words carefully.”

I stood slowly, my knees aching from the floor. “I think your injury was real. I think you were badly damaged. But I don’t think your body ever completely gave up. I think something interrupted recovery.”

Gabriel’s face paled.

Sebastian did not move.

“What kind of something?” he asked.

“I don’t know yet.”

His gaze dropped to his foot.

The foot moved again.

This time, no one doubted it.

The heel lifted barely half an inch from the platform before falling back with a soft metallic tap.

Sebastian stared at it.

I had seen patients cry when sensation returned. I had seen them laugh, curse, pray, collapse into trembling disbelief.

Sebastian Lombardi did none of those things.

He smiled.

It was the most terrifying thing I had seen all night.

“Gabriel,” he said.

“Yes, boss.”

“Lock down the house.”

The men along the wall came alive.

Doors shut. Radios clicked. Guards moved into hallways with practiced precision.

I took a step back. “What are you doing?”

Sebastian looked at me calmly. “If you are right, Claire Bennett, then for twenty years someone has kept me in this chair.”

“That doesn’t mean they’re here.”

“It means they were close enough to decide what I knew. That is here.”

My pulse pounded in my throat.

The money on my clinic table had already felt dangerous. The blindfold. The armed men. The mansion. But this was different. I had not been brought to treat a broken man.

I had been dropped into the center of a buried war.

“I need to go home,” I said. “My son—”

“Oliver is safe.”

The room blurred for one sharp second.

“What did you say?”

Sebastian’s face changed, just slightly, as if he realized he had stepped on a wire.

Gabriel moved closer. “We placed a man outside your building. Protection only.”

“You put someone near my child?”

“To protect him,” Gabriel said.

“From whom?”

No one answered.

My stomach turned cold.

Sebastian rolled his chair closer with a soft mechanical hum. “You were not threatened, Claire. You were selected.”

“Selected by who?”

“By me.”

I shook my head. “No. Your man found me because desperate people talk, because injured criminals recommend each other, because I take cash and don’t ask questions.”

“That was how we found you,” he said. “It is not why I chose you.”

He reached into a side compartment of the wheelchair and removed a thin folder. Gabriel’s hand tightened as if he had not expected him to reveal it.

Sebastian held it out.

I did not take it at first.

He waited.

Finally, I opened it.

The first page was a photograph of me leaving a hospital ten years earlier, younger, exhausted, still wearing a white coat. The second page was a copy of my license. The third was an old article from a medical journal about experimental nerve response mapping.

My name was buried in the acknowledgments.

My mouth went dry.

“I was an assistant,” I whispered. “Barely. I logged patient responses. I wasn’t even one of the lead therapists.”

“You noticed patterns the doctors missed.”

I stared at him.

“How do you know that?”

Sebastian’s eyes darkened. “Because the same research team treated me in 2006.”

The folder nearly slipped from my hands.

“What?”

“St. Bartholomew’s contracted them after the explosion. A private neurological study. New methods. New drugs. New hope.” His smile vanished. “Then my lead doctor told me there was nothing left to save.”

I turned another page.

A grainy photograph stopped me.

A hospital room.

A young Sebastian lying unconscious in a bed.

Doctors around him.

And behind them, half hidden by a curtain, stood a man I recognized.

Not from any journal.

Not from any clinic.

From my divorce hearing.

My ex-husband, Daniel Price.

The air left my lungs.

Sebastian watched my face. “You know him.”

I could not speak.

Daniel had been many things. Charming. Ambitious. Cruel in quiet ways. He had worked in medical administration, not treatment. He understood money, records, insurance codes, and the soft, invisible ways lives could be ruined without leaving fingerprints.

After Oliver was born sick, Daniel had lasted three years before deciding fatherhood was too expensive and my grief was unattractive. He walked out with half our savings and all of his pride.

I had not seen him in nine months.

Now his face stared at me from a photograph taken twenty years ago.

“That’s my ex-husband,” I said.

Gabriel cursed under his breath.

Sebastian’s gaze sharpened. “Daniel Price.”

The way he said the name told me he already knew.

“You brought me here because of him,” I said.

“I brought you here because two weeks ago, one of my accountants found a payment trail tied to my original medical care. Shell companies. Research grants. Private rehabilitation invoices. For twenty years, someone has been paid to keep my condition classified as hopeless.”

“And Daniel?”

“Signed three of the accounts.”

I felt sick.

“No. He would’ve been too young. He would’ve been—”

“Twenty-five,” Sebastian said. “A junior coordinator. Ambitious. Invisible. Exactly the kind of man powerful people use when they want dirty work done cleanly.”

The room felt too hot.

The fire. The guards. The lake wind pressing rain against the windows.

All of it seemed far away.

Daniel had known about Sebastian. Daniel had known about the study. Daniel had known enough to hide.

And somehow Sebastian thought I was the key.

“I don’t know anything about this,” I said.

“I believe you.”

The words surprised me.

Sebastian Lombardi did not sound like a man offering comfort. He sounded like a judge recording evidence.

“Then let me leave.”

“Not yet.”

My fear rose again.

His eyes held mine. “Because you touched my ankle once and did what twenty years of specialists failed to do. I need to know whether it can happen again.”

“And if I say no?”

“Then I still pay you. I still protect your son. And I find Daniel Price another way.”

A reasonable offer.

Too reasonable.

I looked down at the folder, at the photograph of Daniel, at Sebastian unconscious in a bed, at the doctors frozen forever in grainy black and white.

“Why would anyone want you trapped in that chair?” I asked.

A low laugh moved through the room.

One of the guards looked at me like I had asked why wolves had teeth.

Sebastian answered anyway.

“Because a crippled king is useful. Strong enough to command. Dependent enough to control.”

The words settled heavily.

He turned his chair toward the window. Beyond the glass, Lake Michigan was a black emptiness, swallowing the rain.

“My uncle took over the family when my father died. He claimed it was temporary. Until I recovered. When I did not recover, I became a symbol. The surviving son. The tragic heir. The man everyone underestimated.” His fingers tapped once on the armrest. “By the time I realized I was being managed, I had already learned to manage them back.”

“Your uncle is dead?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

Sebastian looked at me.

I understood then not to ask again.

Gabriel’s phone buzzed. He checked it, and his face hardened.

“Boss.”

Sebastian turned.

Gabriel lowered his voice, but not enough. “Dr. Voss is in the city.”

The name struck the room like a match.

Sebastian went very still.

“When?”

“Tonight. He landed at Midway forty minutes ago.”

“Where is he going?”

Gabriel hesitated. “Here.”

No one moved for half a second.

Then the mansion became a machine.

Men spoke into radios. Footsteps thundered above us. Someone drew curtains. Someone else killed the lights in the hallway outside the bedroom. The fire became the only warm thing in the room.

I backed toward the wall. “Who is Dr. Voss?”

Sebastian’s face had become unreadable.

“The man who told me I would never walk again.”

My mouth went dry.

“And he’s coming here tonight?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

Sebastian’s eyes slid to his foot.

“Because someone told him I moved.”

The answer chilled me more than any threat.

Only the people in this room had seen it.

I turned slowly.

Gabriel. The guards. The nurse. The silent men by the door.

One of them had already sent word.

Sebastian seemed to reach the same conclusion. He did not raise his voice.

“Phones on the table.”

Every man obeyed.

Almost every man.

The nurse moved too late.

A young woman with pale hair and steady hands, she reached into her pocket while everyone else was still placing their devices on the polished wood desk. Gabriel saw it first.

“Stop.”

She ran.

The bedroom erupted.

A guard blocked the door, but she was fast. Too fast. She ducked beneath his arm and drove a syringe into his thigh. He collapsed before he could shout.

Gabriel lunged. She threw the tray at his face. Metal instruments scattered across the marble floor like silver insects.

I stumbled backward.

Sebastian’s chair hummed forward, blocking her path with impossible speed. She skidded, trapped between him and the fireplace.

For one breath, their eyes met.

“Who sent you?” Sebastian asked.

The nurse smiled.

Then she looked at me.

Not at him.

At me.

“Ask your husband.”

She bit down on something.

Gabriel slammed into her, forcing her mouth open, but it was too late. Her body convulsed once, twice, then went limp on the floor.

I covered my mouth.

The room froze around the dead woman.

Sebastian looked at me.

The message had landed exactly where it was meant to.

Ask your husband.

“My ex-husband,” I whispered.

But no one cared about the distinction.

Gabriel wiped blood from his lip. “She’s dead.”

Sebastian did not look away from me. “Search her.”

A guard knelt, checked the nurse’s pockets, and removed a small black transmitter no bigger than a coin. He handed it to Gabriel.

Gabriel examined it. “Active.”

“How long?” Sebastian asked.

“Could’ve been transmitting all night.”

The mansion suddenly felt transparent, every wall made of glass.

I thought of Oliver sleeping in our apartment. His dinosaur blanket tucked under his chin. The oxygen machine humming beside his bed.

“My son,” I said.

Gabriel was already dialing. He listened, then stiffened.

“What?” I demanded.

He looked at Sebastian.

That was the worst answer.

Sebastian’s voice turned deadly soft. “Say it.”

“The man outside her building isn’t responding.”

I moved before anyone could stop me.

I ran for the door.

Two guards blocked me. I shoved at them uselessly, screaming Oliver’s name, clawing against suits and muscle and guns. Gabriel caught my shoulders.

“Claire. Claire!”

“Let me go!”

“We’re going now,” he said. “But you need to breathe.”

I almost laughed at the cruelty of that word.

Breathe.

My whole life had become that word.

Oliver breathing. Oliver not breathing. Oliver fighting through another night while adults lied, left, and took whatever they wanted.

I looked at Sebastian.

His face had changed again.

Not pity.

Recognition.

He knew what it meant to be trapped in a body while someone else decided the terms of survival.

“Bring the car,” he said.

Gabriel hesitated. “Boss, Voss is coming here.”

“Let him come.”

“We can’t leave you exposed.”

Sebastian’s eyes flashed. “I said bring the car.”

Within minutes, I was in the back of a black SUV, no blindfold this time. Sebastian sat beside me, his wheelchair locked into a system built into the vehicle floor. Gabriel rode up front, speaking in low, brutal fragments into a secure phone.

Chicago streaked past in wet neon smears.

I pressed my hands together so tightly my fingers hurt.

Sebastian watched me.

“He has doctors?” he asked.

“Oliver?”

“Yes.”

“Pulmonologist. Immunologist. Emergency team at Mercy.”

“Good?”

I gave him a sharp look. “Good enough to keep him alive. Not rich enough to make miracles.”

He accepted that without offense.

Rain hammered the roof.

Gabriel ended one call and started another. “No sign of forced entry yet. Neighbor heard nothing. Elevators running. Building cameras down.”

My heart nearly stopped.

“Cameras down?”

Gabriel looked back at me. “We don’t know anything yet.”

But he did.

They all did.

Sebastian’s hand rested on the armrest. Calm. Still.

Only his thumb moved, rubbing once over the side of his chair.

At my building, two of Sebastian’s men were already outside. One lay on the pavement near the alley, alive but bleeding from the scalp. The other stood by the entrance with a gun hidden beneath his coat, his face grim.

I was out of the SUV before it fully stopped.

“Oliver!”

Gabriel caught up with me at the stairs. “Stay behind me.”

I did not.

I climbed three flights faster than I ever had in my life.

My apartment door stood open.

The oxygen machine was still humming.

The dinosaur blanket was on the floor.

Oliver was gone.

For a moment, the world made no sound.

Not the rain.

Not Gabriel shouting orders.

Not my own breath tearing in and out of my chest.

I walked into the room like a sleepwalker and picked up the blanket. It was still warm.

Sebastian entered behind me in his chair, maneuvering through the narrow doorway with cold precision. His presence filled my shabby apartment in a way that made the peeling paint and cheap furniture seem even more fragile.

On Oliver’s pillow sat a folded piece of paper.

My name was written on it.

Claire.

I opened it with shaking hands.

There were only six words inside.

You woke him. Now wake the other.

Beneath the words was a symbol drawn in black ink.

A serpent wrapped around a spinal column.

Sebastian saw it over my shoulder.

For the first time all night, he looked afraid.

Not shocked. Not angry.

Afraid.

“What is it?” I asked.

He did not answer.

Gabriel came in from the hallway. “No witnesses. Whoever took the boy was in and out within four minutes.”

“My son has a medical bag,” I said. “His inhaler, his emergency steroid, his—”

“They took it,” Gabriel said quickly. “His medications are gone too. That means they intend to keep him alive.”

The words were meant to comfort me.

They didn’t.

I turned on Sebastian. “Who are they?”

His eyes remained on the symbol.

“Sebastian.”

His voice was low. “The Ashen Veil.”

Gabriel stiffened as if the name itself had teeth.

I had never heard of them, but the fear in the room told me enough.

“They were supposed to be gone,” Gabriel said.

“They were never gone,” Sebastian replied. “Only quiet.”

I gripped Oliver’s blanket. “What does that mean? A gang? A family?”

“Older than both,” Sebastian said. “Doctors. financiers. priests, judges, men who learned that controlling bodies was more profitable than killing them.”

I stared at him.

“They did this to you?”

His mouth tightened. “I thought they only funded the hospital after the bombing. I thought they used my injury to influence my family. But that symbol…” He looked at the note again. “That symbol was on my father’s private files.”

The room tilted.

“Why would they take Oliver?”

“Because of you.”

“No.”

“Yes.” Sebastian’s voice hardened, not cruelly, but because softness would have been a lie. “You found what they buried in me. They need to know if you can find it in someone else.”

My throat closed.

“The other,” I whispered.

The note shook in my hand.

You woke him. Now wake the other.

“Who is the other?”

Sebastian’s answer was interrupted by Gabriel’s phone.

He listened for two seconds. Then his face went white.

“Boss,” he said. “Dr. Voss arrived at the mansion.”

Sebastian turned his chair.

“And?”

Gabriel looked from him to me.

“He’s not alone.”

The phone speaker crackled as Gabriel switched it on.

A voice filled my apartment.

Cultured. Elderly. Calm.

“Sebastian. I assume Ms. Bennett is with you. Excellent. That saves time.”

Sebastian’s hand curled into a fist.

“Voss.”

“Still dramatic, I see. I warned them you would be difficult.”

“Where is the boy?”

A soft sigh. “Safe, for now. His breathing is being monitored by people far more qualified than his mother’s charity doctors.”

I stepped forward. “Let me hear him.”

There was a pause.

Then a small, sleepy voice came through the line.

“Mom?”

My knees nearly gave out.

“Oliver. Baby. Are you hurt?”

“I’m okay,” he whispered. “There’s a lady doctor. She said not to be scared.”

“Listen to me. Breathe slow. Like we practice. In for four—”

The line cut.

I screamed his name into the dead air.

Voss returned. “Touching. Truly. Now, Ms. Bennett, you will come with Sebastian to the old St. Bartholomew’s surgical wing. Bring no police. Bring no army. Bring only your hands.”

Sebastian’s voice was ice. “If you harm him—”

“You remain so certain harm is the worst thing we do.” Voss chuckled softly. “Poor boy. Even after all these years, you still misunderstand your own story.”

The call ended.

No one spoke.

Outside my apartment window, the rain began to slow.

Inside, something worse gathered.

Sebastian looked at Gabriel. “Prepare a team.”

Gabriel nodded. “Quiet or loud?”

Sebastian’s eyes moved to me.

“To get the boy back?” he said. “Quiet.”

Then he looked down at his foot.

It shifted once against the metal plate.

“To end this?” he said. “Loud.”

We returned to the SUV with Oliver’s blanket in my arms and the note folded in Sebastian’s hand. I should have hated him. Part of me did. His world had swallowed my child. His enemies had reached into my home.

But another part of me knew the truth.

This had started long before I touched his ankle.

Long before Oliver was born.

Long before Daniel stood in a courtroom and convinced a judge I was unstable, overworked, and unfit to manage money.

Daniel had been arranging my life like a file in a cabinet, moving pieces until I ended up exactly where someone wanted me.

Poor.

Desperate.

Invisible.

Available.

The old St. Bartholomew’s surgical wing stood on the West Side, abandoned after a fire eight years earlier. At least, that was the official story. Sebastian’s men surrounded it from blocks away, silent shadows in rain-dark alleys.

I sat in the SUV, staring at the broken windows.

Sebastian watched the building with the focus of a man looking into his own grave.

“I woke there,” he said.

I turned to him.

“After the bombing?”

“Yes.” His voice was distant. “My first memory was the smell of antiseptic and smoke. I thought the steakhouse was still burning. Then Voss leaned over me and said, ‘You survived, Mr. Lombardi. Now we decide what survival means.’”

A chill moved through me.

“You remember that?”

“I remember more tonight than I have in twenty years.”

“What does that mean?”

He looked at me. “When you touched my ankle, I felt pain. Then I remembered a needle behind my ear. My uncle shouting in the hallway. My mother crying. Daniel Price handing Voss a clipboard.”

My blood turned cold.

“My mother?” I whispered.

Sebastian’s gaze sharpened. “What?”

“My mother worked nights at St. Bartholomew’s. She died when I was fourteen. They said it was an accident. A fall in the stairwell.”

Gabriel, standing outside the open door, slowly turned.

Sebastian’s voice lowered. “What was her name?”

“Eleanor Bennett.”

The name struck him.

He closed his eyes.

When he opened them, the man in the wheelchair was gone for a second, replaced by the wounded twenty-two-year-old who had awakened surrounded by enemies.

“She was the nurse who tried to stop them,” he said.

I could not breathe.

“No.”

“She smuggled copies of my nerve response tests out of the hospital. My father’s lawyer was supposed to get them. He died the next day.”

I pressed Oliver’s blanket to my chest.

“My mother died because of you?”

Sebastian said nothing.

That was answer enough.

The anger came so fast it almost steadied me.

“You brought me into this house. You watched my life. You knew my son’s illness. You knew Daniel. Did you know about my mother?”

“No,” he said.

I wanted it to be a lie.

It sounded like the truth.

Gabriel leaned down. “Boss. Movement inside.”

Sebastian’s face hardened again. “Claire.”

I turned away.

“I will get your son back.”

I laughed once, bitter and broken. “You can’t even stand.”

The words hit the air brutally.

Gabriel looked ready to speak, but Sebastian raised a hand.

He accepted the blow.

Then, slowly, impossibly, he looked down at his right foot.

“Not yet,” he said.

Inside the old surgical wing, the halls smelled of dust, bleach, and old secrets.

Sebastian insisted on coming in.

Gabriel hated it. I hated it. No one stopped him.

The wheelchair moved soundlessly over cracked tile. Men disappeared ahead and behind us, weapons drawn. Somewhere deep in the building, machinery hummed where there should have been no power.

We reached an operating theater sealed behind modern steel doors.

They opened before we touched them.

Light spilled out.

Inside, Oliver lay on a hospital bed, small beneath white sheets, an oxygen mask over his face. A woman in scrubs stood beside him, checking a monitor.

I ran forward.

No one stopped me.

“Oliver!”

His eyes fluttered open. “Mom?”

I grabbed his hand, kissed his hair, checked his breathing, his pulse, his color. He was alive. Scared. Drowsy. Alive.

The relief nearly destroyed me.

Then I saw the second bed.

Across the room lay a man enclosed in a frame of metal supports and wires. His face was hidden beneath a breathing mask. His body was thin, pale, motionless.

Dr. Malcolm Voss stood beside him.

He was older than the photograph, with silver hair and a surgeon’s delicate hands. Daniel stood behind him in a dark coat, not ashamed, not surprised, not even nervous.

“Claire,” Daniel said softly. “You look exhausted.”

I would have crossed the room and clawed his face open if Gabriel had not caught my arm.

“You took my son.”

Daniel tilted his head. “I protected him. There is a difference.”

Sebastian rolled forward. “Where is the rest of the Veil?”

Voss smiled. “Always searching for the throne room. You never understood, Sebastian. The Veil is not a place. It is continuity.”

“Enough,” Sebastian said. “Who is he?”

Voss looked lovingly at the man on the second bed.

“The future.”

I followed his gaze.

Something about the patient’s face, what little I could see, twisted through my memory.

The shape of the brow.

The line of the jaw.

Sebastian went silent.

Gabriel whispered, “Impossible.”

Voss removed the breathing mask.

The man on the bed had Sebastian Lombardi’s face.

Older than Sebastian had been at twenty-two.

Younger than Sebastian was now.

A living copy suspended between death and waking.

My hand tightened around Oliver’s.

Sebastian stared at the man as if the floor had opened beneath him.

Voss smiled.

“Meet Matteo Lombardi,” he said. “Your brother.”

Sebastian’s voice was almost inaudible. “My brother died at birth.”

“No,” Voss said. “Your brother was hidden at birth. Then damaged. Then preserved. Your father discovered the truth shortly before the bombing.”

The room spun around me.

The car bomb.

The false diagnosis.

My mother’s death.

Daniel.

Oliver.

All of it led here.

Voss looked at my hands.

“Your mother had the gift of listening to the body. So do you. Sebastian was only the test. Matteo is the prize.”

Daniel stepped closer to Oliver’s bed.

I moved between them.

“Touch him,” I said, “and I will kill you.”

For the first time, Daniel smiled like the man I had married.

“You were always more useful angry.”

Sebastian’s chair hummed.

Voss lifted one hand. “Careful. Matteo’s life support is connected to this room. Violence would be unfortunate.”

Sebastian stopped.

Voss turned to me. “Wake him, Ms. Bennett. Wake Matteo, and your son goes home.”

I looked at the duplicate face on the bed.

Then at Sebastian.

For twenty years, he had believed his body was the prison.

Now he had discovered it was only the lock.

I stepped toward Matteo because Oliver’s life was attached to my obedience. Because my mother had died carrying the truth. Because my hands had already opened one door tonight, and whatever waited behind the next one had been waiting for me all my life.

I placed two fingers against Matteo Lombardi’s ankle.

Nothing.

Voss leaned forward.

Daniel stopped smiling.

Sebastian watched me with burning eyes.

I moved my thumb higher, found the tendon, pressed beneath the scarred skin.

Matteo’s foot jerked violently.

The monitors screamed.

Oliver cried out.

Every light in the room went red.