Chapter 6 - Breakthrough in Secret
The surgery took place at three in the morning in the fortified basement beneath the wine cellar.
Dr. Evans was a disgraced former chief of neurosurgery from Rush University whose gambling debts had long ago made him an asset of the Lombardi family. His hands were weathered, but when he held a scalpel, they were steady as rock.
There was no general anesthesia. Sebastian had refused it.
“If Vance or Dominic gets word that I’m unconscious, they make their move tonight,” Sebastian had rasped, biting down on a leather strap as Evans injected high-dose lidocaine along the T-10 vertebra. “Do it awake.”
I stood beside the operating table, holding Sebastian’s hand. His grip was bone-crushing, the veins in his forearm bulging like thick cables, sweat pouring off his forehead and soaking the sheet.
Evans worked with surgical loupes strapped to his eyes. For forty-five minutes, the only sounds were the soft clinking of titanium retractors, the hiss of the suction tube, and Sebastian’s ragged, brutal breathing.
“Found it,” Evans muttered suddenly, his forceps clicking deep within the incision. “Sweet Mother of God. Clare was right. It’s a standard surgical clip. It’s buried in nineteen years of calcified scar tissue, wedged right against the thecal sac.”
“Take... it... out,” Sebastian ground out through the leather strap.
“Steady, Sebastian. If I tear the dura, you leak CSF and stroke out on the table.” Evans leaned in, his hands moving with microscopic precision. *Snip.* *Crunch.*
The tiny piece of metal dropped into a stainless-steel kidney dish with a sharp, ringing *clink.*
Sebastian’s entire body arched off the table. A guttural, agonized roar tore from his throat—a sound of pure, unadulterated primal shock. Both of his legs—limbs that had hung flaccid and lifeless since 2005—shot out straight, the quadriceps locking into violent, iron-hard extension.
“Close him,” I told Evans, stepping in with sterile gauze. “Close him now!”
***
The next four days were a blur of sweat, agony, and madness.
We kept Sebastian hidden in the basement gym, telling the household staff that he was suffering from a severe bout of pneumonia and was not to be disturbed under any circumstances. Vance was turned away at the front gate by Marco, who told him coldly that Mr. Lombardi was sleeping off a high fever.
Every waking hour was dedicated to neuro-muscular re-education.
A nerve that has been compressed for nineteen years does not wake up like a light switch. It wakes up like a raging fire.
Sebastian’s lower half was flooded with agonizing sensations. Hyperesthesia. Burning, crawling phantom fires that made him vomit into a bucket beside the mat. Every touch felt like a blowtorch against raw skin.
“Again,” he would growl, dragging his heavy frame across the floor using his elbows. “Again, Bennett!”
“You have to engage the glutes, Sebastian!” I shouted, kneeling beside him, my voice hoarse, my shirt soaked with sweat. “Your brain is bypassing the lumbar plexus! Stop pulling with your shoulders! Think about your feet! Push through the floor!”
On the fifth day, we moved to the parallel bars.
Sebastian gripped the heavy steel pipes, his knuckles white, his biceps trembling with the strain of holding his two-hundred-and-twenty-pound frame upright. His legs dragged beneath him, knees buckling like wet cardboard.
“I can’t,” he whispered, his head hanging, sweat dripping from his chin onto the mat. For the first time, I heard a crack in his armor. The invincible boss of Chicago sounded like a broken, defeated little boy. “It’s been too long, Clare. The nerves are dead. You were wrong.”
I walked around to the front of the bars. I stood two feet away from him, looking him dead in the eye.
“Don't you dare give up on me now, Sebastian Lombardi,” I said, my voice fiercely steady. “My son is sleeping upstairs because of you. For five years, I watched Oliver struggle for every single breath while the world told me to accept that he would die young. I didn’t accept it. And I am not going to let a grown man with an empire cry about a little fire in his legs!”
His amber eyes flared with sudden, dangerous fury. “You dare speak to me like that?”
“Yes!” I yelled back, stepping inside the bars, pressing my chest right up against his, our faces inches apart. “Because you didn't survive a bomb, twenty years of betrayal, and a poisoner at your table just to die in that titanium chair! Stand up, Sebastian! Look at me and stand!”
He glared at me, his teeth bared in an animal snarl of pure defiance.
He didn't just lean on his arms.
I saw the change happen in his eyes—a violent, concentrated focus that pulled every ounce of his legendary will into his lower spine.
Beneath his linen trousers, his vastus lateralis fired.
His knees locked.
His hips thrust forward.
Slowly, agonizingly, the daylight appeared between his thighs and the wheelchair behind him.
Sebastian Lombardi stood on his own two feet.
He was massive—nearly six-foot-three. He towered over me, his chest heaving, his body shaking with the titanic effort of defying two decades of paralysis.
He looked down at me, his breath hot against my face. Then, very slowly, his trembling right hand released the parallel bar and reached out, his rough, scarred fingers gently cradling the side of my cheek.
“You,” he whispered, his voice thick with an emotion he had never allowed himself to feel. “You magnificent, stubborn girl.”
Before I could answer, the red emergency alarm on the wall flashed to life.
Marco’s voice crackled through the intercom, tight with panic.
May you like
*“Boss! We have a breach at the west wing! Dominic just arrived with twenty armed men. He took the boy.”*
***
