Chapter 13 - The Fire in the Bone
By the following Monday, a fragile, hard-won peace had settled over Blackwood Manor, but the battle inside my own body was only beginning.
The basement gym smelled of rubbing alcohol, wintergreen liniment, and raw sweat.
The temporary splints had been stripped from my legs three days prior, leaving my bare limbs free of mechanical braces.
Faith stood at the far end of the twelve-foot parallel bars, holding a black leather stopwatch in her left hand.
"No straps today, Dominic," she said, her voice completely stripped of sentimentality.
"No chemical patches."
"No adrenaline rushes to carry your motor cortex through the pain."
"Just your own neural pathways."
I stood at the beginning of the bars, gripping the cold steel pipes with white knuckles.
My bare feet rested flat on the black rubber mats.
The atrophy of six months in a motorized chair had thinned my calves, but the color had returned to the skin, warm and flushed with blood.
Beneath the surface, my femoral nerves throbbed with a persistent, buzzing heat—the sensation of damaged wiring slowly re-establishing its electrical current.
"Take the first step," Faith commanded, her eyes locked onto my hips.
"Shift your weight to the left heel."
"Clear the right knee."
I took a deep breath, closed my eyes for a fraction of a second, and visualized the signal traveling down my bruised spinal column.
I shifted my center of gravity.
The left hip took sixty percent of my weight, the muscle burning like a brand against the bone.
Then, with an agonizingly slow, deliberate effort of will, I lifted my right foot from the rubber.
The toe cleared the mat by two inches.
The knee joint trembled violently, shaking like a dry leaf caught in a gale, but it did not buckle inward.
I drove the right heel forward and planted it twelve inches ahead of the left.
The impact sent a sharp jolt of raw sensation up through my tibia into my lower spine.
It wasn't numbness.
It wasn't phantom paralysis.
It was real, clean, unfiltered physical impact.
"Good," Faith said softly, her voice tightening with suppressed emotion.
"Now bring the left."
"Don't pull with your shoulders."
"Make the spine do the work."
I locked my jaw, sweat stinging my eyes as my shirt plastered against my ribs.
I dragged the left foot forward, forcing the quadricep to contract against the dormant weight of six months of silence.
The foot dragged along the rubber with a dull scrape, then swung forward and planted itself parallel to the right.
Two steps.
Unassisted by steel braces.
Held upright only by the frayed, rebuilding cords of my own nervous system.
"Again," she urged, taking a step backward to keep the distance between us.
"Don't stop on the momentum."
I pushed forward.
Third step.
Fourth step.
By the fifth step, a sudden, blinding spasm of lactic acid flared through my right hamstring.
My knee gave out with a sudden sickening jerk.
I began to fall forward toward the floor.
Faith didn't run away.
She didn't let me hit the concrete.
She stepped directly into the center of the parallel bars, catching my broad shoulders against her chest, her arms wrapping tightly around my ribs as our combined weight carried us down to our knees onto the thick rubber mats.
We sat together on the floor, breathing heavily in the quiet basement.
My chest heaved against hers, our foreheads nearly touching as sweat dripped from my chin onto her gray fleece sweater.
"Five steps," she breathed, a genuine, radiant smile breaking across her tired face for the very first time since she had walked into my house.
"Five full steps, Dominic."
"It felt like walking on broken glass," I admitted, a low, exhausted laugh rumbling in my throat.
"Broken glass is good," she whispered, her hands lingering on my shoulders, her fingers warm and strong against my skin.
"Dead men don't feel broken glass."
She looked into my eyes, and for a long moment, the distance between mob boss and broke caretaker vanished into thin air.
There was only two survivors who had pulled each other out of separate graves.
"Why did you do it, Dominic?" she asked softly, her gaze searching the scars on my temple.
"Why did you choose this life?"
"You could have been an engineer, a doctor, an executive."
"Why the docks?"
I looked down at the callouses on my palms, remembering thirty years of blood and cold lake wind.
"Because my father was an honest longshoreman," I answered, the memory tasting like copper in my mouth.
"He worked forty years on the Calumet slips."
"When a crane cable snapped and crushed his ribs, the shipping company gave him two hundred dollars and told him to sign a liability waiver or starve."
"I watched him die in a rented room in Bridgeport because he couldn't afford penicillin."
I looked back into her gray eyes.
"I decided right then that nobody in Chicago would ever hold my leash."
"I built an empire so big that even the men who owned the banks had to ask my permission to cross the bridge."
"And look where it brought you," Faith said gently, resting her palm against my cheek.
"Trapped in a fortress, poisoned by your own friends, waiting to die alone."
Her touch was warm, soft, and completely devoid of fear.
For fifteen years, every hand that had touched my body had carried a weapon, a contract, or a price tag.
Faith Willis touched me as if I were a human being who was worthy of being saved.
"I am not alone anymore," I said, my voice barely louder than a whisper.
She held my gaze for three heartbeats, her breath hitching slightly, before she slowly lowered her hand, her cheeks coloring with a delicate blush.
"No," she murmured, looking down at the mat.
"You're not."
Before the silence could deepen, the heavy basement door opened at the top of the stairs.
Leo’s small face peeked over the wooden railing, holding a cardboard tray filled with warm chocolate chip cookies.
"Mrs. Gable made these!" Leo called out, his voice echoing cheerfully off the concrete walls.
"And she said if Dominic doesn't come upstairs for lunch, she’s going to feed his portion to the neighborhood crows!"
Faith laughed, a clear, melodic sound that seemed to shatter the dark shadows of the basement gym once and for all.
She offered her hand to me, bracing her feet against the mat.
"You heard the boss, Mr. Carter," Faith smiled, her eyes dancing with light.
May you like
"On your feet."
I took her hand, gripping it tightly, and pulled myself upward until I was standing once more on my own two legs.
