The empty glass vial slipped from Aron's slackening fingers and shattered against the marble floor in a spray of glittering fragments.
Less than ten seconds passed.
Suddenly, Aron's chest heaved—a violent, convulsive expansion. He sucked in a ragged, tearing breath that sounded like fabric ripping.
The life-support monitors behind him erupted into chaos. The steady green lines spiked into jagged, screaming red peaks. A high-pitched, continuous alarm shrieked through the room, piercing the eardrums.
Morgan ripped his gun from its holster and leveled it dead at Ayla's chest. His finger tightened on the trigger, the knuckle going white. "What did you do to him?!" he roared, his voice cracking with fury and terror. "I'll blow your head off!"
Ayla didn't even glance at the gun. She didn't flinch. The barrel aimed at her heart might as well have been a toy.
"Put it away," she said, her voice dangerously calm. "Unless you want to explain to him why you shot the only person who can save him."
Aron let out a guttural, animal groan that seemed to tear itself from the depths of his chest. The veins in his neck bulged against his skin, thick and dark as cords. His entire body went rigid, muscles locking.
He gripped the armrests of the wheelchair so hard the leather tore beneath his fingers, his knuckles standing out stark white against his clenched fists. A sheen of cold sweat broke across his forehead and temples, beading and rolling down his face.
"His heart rate is at one-eighty! He's going into cardiac arrest! Get the crash cart!" the chief physician screamed, lunging toward the defibrillator, his face a mask of vindicated terror.
"Back off!"
The command tore from Aron's throat like a gunshot. It was raw, shredded with agony, but it carried the absolute, unquestionable authority of a king. The kind of voice that had ended men's lives with a single word.
The doctors froze in their tracks as if they'd hit an invisible wall.
Aron was panting, his chest rising and falling in deep, heaving waves. He slowly lowered his chin, his dark, pain-filled eyes staring down at his own legs as if seeing them for the first time.
Tears of pure, unadulterated shock welled in his eyes. They didn't fall, but they glittered there, unmistakable.
He looked up at Ayla. His voice shook—actually shook. "I feel... pain."
For six months, his lower half had been a dead, numb weight. A corpse attached to a living body. Pain meant the nerves were screaming. Pain meant they were alive, firing, fighting.
Morgan stared at Aron's legs. The gun slipped from his suddenly nerveless grip, clattering loudly onto the marble floor. Morgan's knees buckled, and he dropped to the ground beside the wheelchair, his massive hands hovering over his boss's knees, trembling, afraid to touch them, as if they might shatter.
The private doctors stood in horrified, mute silence, their expensive medical degrees suddenly feeling like worthless scraps of paper.
Ayla turned back to her case, her movements brisk and all business. She pulled out a set of specialized micro-current neural stimulation patches—thin, silver, glinting under the lights.
"Put him on the bed," Ayla ordered Morgan without looking up.
Morgan scrambled to his feet, wiping his eyes with the back of his hand. He gently, almost reverently, lifted Aron's massive frame from the wheelchair and laid him flat on the pristine white sheets of the medical bed.
Ayla walked over, the patches in her hand. She methodically rolled up the legs of Aron's trousers, exposing his pale, heavily muscled calves—muscles that had atrophied only slightly thanks to aggressive physical therapy. She peeled the backing off each patch and pressed them precisely onto the deadened nerve clusters along his lower spine and the backs of his legs.
She leaned over him to adjust the main dial on the portable machine, her fingers finding the exact frequency.
A few stray strands of her dark hair slipped loose from her tight bun, brushing feather-light against Aron's bare knee.
Aron looked down at her, his breathing still unsteady. She was so close he could see the faint, steady pulse beating in the hollow of her throat. A crisp, clean scent of mint and cold rain drifted up from her skin, cutting sharply through the sterile, antiseptic smell of the medical room.
Ayla flipped the switch.
A low, resonant hum filled the air. Instantly, the muscles in Aron's legs began to twitch and spasm uncontrollably, jumping beneath the skin.
For thirty agonizing minutes, Ayla didn't move from his side. She adjusted the frequencies with minute precision, her eyes locked on his muscle responses, her face a mask of intense, unwavering focus. A thin layer of sweat formed on her forehead, but she didn't wipe it away.
Finally, she clicked the machine off.
She let out a long, slow breath that seemed to come from the very bottom of her lungs.
Aron lay perfectly still on the bed, his chest still heaving. He focused every ounce of his formidable willpower on his right foot.
Slowly, agonizingly—like watching a statue come to life—his big toe twitched. It moved. A fraction of an inch, but it moved.
Morgan let out a choked, broken sob. The doctors gasped collectively, one of them actually stumbling backward.
Ayla began pulling the patches off his skin, her movements efficient and detached. "The toxin is neutralized. The nerve pathways are open. There will be significant muscle weakness, but with aggressive physical therapy, I'll have you walking in two months."
Aron stared at her. The raw gratitude in his eyes was rapidly shifting into something darker, heavier, more consuming. It was the look of a man who had found something he had thought lost forever—and had no intention of ever letting it go.
"Name your price," Aron said, his voice dropping a full octave, rough and intense. "Money. Property. Lives. Anything you want—anything in this world—the Lawrence Group will give it to you."
Ayla zipped her leather case shut with a sharp, final sound. She looked up, meeting his burning, possessive gaze without flinching.
"I don't want your money," Ayla said.
