Chapter 63 Chapter 63
Chapter 63 Chapter 63
Lisette felt a subtle shift in the air, a minute displacement of weight at the side of her mattress. She had surfaced from the anesthetic haze hours ago into a living nightmare, only to find her mother keeping a tearful, silent vigil. Even then, the disappointment had been a dull ache; it wasn't Reno. Now, as the presence beside her stirred again, her body remained stubbornly mute.
There was no electric jolt to her pulse, no dampening of her palms, no ethereal sense of levitation that usually signaled his proximity. Her broken frame felt heavy, pinned to the hospital bed by the cruel laws of gravity.
She cracked one eyelid open, hoping for a miracle, but she missed her chance to play dead. Instead of Reno’s warmth, she was met by a pair of eyes that dripped with a familiar, oily malice.
“I was hoping you had died,” Michael Mathews hissed, his voice a jagged blade. “After the beating that ogre you call a boyfriend gave me, it would only be justice.”
The audacity of the man was breathtaking. Michael, as always, viewed the world through a lens where he was the eternal victim, holding the universe accountable for the consequences of his own rot. Lisette felt a ghost of a grin pull at her cracked lips. She found a dark, flickering joy in imagining Reno bludgeoning the fool—she only wished she’d been conscious to hear the sound of bone meeting fist.
“Twice!” he whined, his ego clearly more bruised than his face. “Once when he found the two of us in bed together, and then again here at the hospital.”
In that moment, Lisette would have traded her soul for a deeper coma—anything to escape the sight of Michael’s triumphant, sickly glow. She would have welcomed the cold embrace of death if it meant she didn't have to carry the weight of Reno’s doubt. She knew how it looked, but Reno should know her. He should know she wouldn't betray the ground he walked on. One slip, one rare moment of letting her guard down with a drink, and she had ended up foxed, her limbs turning to lead, unable to shove Mathews’ suffocating weight off her. She burned with the need to tell Reno the truth, to watch him and AJ dismantle Michael until there was nothing left but a memory in a vegetative state.
“I know that look,” Michael cackled, leaning in until his breath, smelling of coffee and spite, fanned over her face. “You won’t tell your boyfriend a damn thing. In fact, you are going to tell him that I am the best fuck you ever had.” His eyes gleamed with a predatory light. “You are going to dump him. And do you know why?” He lowered his voice to a conspiratorial venom. “You’ll do exactly what I say because your sister has cancer. I happen to be the only person legally allowed to make decisions on her behalf. I could just decide to let her slip away in her sleep.”
A cold, paralyzing alarm racked Lisette’s battered nerves. She wanted to scream, to reach out and claw the smirk off his face, to summon every foul word she had ever learned. But her vocal cords were a ruined instrument. Only a single, strangled syllable managed to escape the sandpaper of her throat: “No.”
“Blink twice for ‘yes’ if you understand the stakes, Lisette.”
She glared daggers at him, her eyes promising a thousand deaths, before finally, agonizingly, conceding. What choice was there? Catalella had been her heart’s burden from the second she had watched that tiny, fragile body take its first breath. Lisette would lay down her life for her sister. By lying to Reno, by poisoning his memory of her with the filth Michael demanded, she was committing a slow, spiritual suicide. She prayed her love would somehow sense the lie, or at least forgive the girl she was about to become. Michael’s laughter as he sauntered out of the room chilled her blood; it was a sound more hollow and terrifying than any demon’s howl.
Reno will understand. He loves me. He has to understand.
By midday, the world had shifted again. Thanks to AJ’s obsessive care, her throat felt less like a raw wound, and she could finally form words, though sitting up remained an impossible dream. Her eyes, weary and sharp, tracked the movement of the medical team. They adjusted the IV drips, loosened the screws of the rigid brace holding her together, and massaged her unresponsive limbs with clinical detachment. Every few minutes, they’d offer a hollow "How are we feeling?", a verbal tick to remind themselves she was a person and not just a puzzle of broken biology.
When the doctors huddled in the far corner, their voices dropping into a heated, staccato rhythm, Lisette watched the lines of tension deepen in AJ’s forehead.
“What is it?” she croaked. No response. “AJ! What’s the matter?”
AJ rushed back to her side, his trademark ‘devil-may-care’ grin plastered on his face like a cheap mask. Lisette had spent decades learning to dismantle that mask. She knew the way he used his cavalier shrug and lecherous teasing to deflect the truth, but his eyes were screaming.
“I’m your sister. Tell me what’s going on, AJ. It’s my body.”
“Maybe we should wait for Reno to come back,” AJ said, his gaze fixed firmly on her forehead—his classic trick for avoiding someone’s soul while pretending to look them in the eye.
“Reno,” Lisette breathed, the weight of the name hitting her. It had to be catastrophic. AJ hadn't suggested waiting for their parents; he had invoked the man who held her heart. “I get to decide what Reno knows. If you won’t tell me, I’ll fire you and find a doctor who will.”
“You didn’t respond,” he whispered, the mask finally cracking.
“Are you crazy? I am responding right now. We are having a conversation, Adrian Jackson Ross Junior!”
“I meant…” AJ swallowed hard, and for the first time in twenty years, Lisette saw tears welling in her brother’s eyes.
A sliver of pure, unadulterated fear sliced through her. She searched her memory for a single instance of AJ crying—through childhood scrapes, their father’s sternness, the rigors of med school—and found nothing. She stilled the panic rising in her chest, forcing her face into a calm, expectant smile. “I meant your legs, piggy. They didn’t respond to the stimuli.”
“Are you sure?”
Keep calm. Just breathe. Don’t let the heart monitor betray you.
One, two, three…
“We pricked the soles of your feet with a needle. You didn’t flinch, piggy.” A single, rogue tear escaped AJ’s eye and rolled down his cheek.
“I’m… you mean to say… I can’t walk.”
Four, five, six…
“I didn’t notice,” she whispered, her voice trembling. “Everything else hurt so much. I just assumed the numbness was part of it.”
Seven, eight, nine…
“But—I can’t walk.”
“What do you mean you can’t walk?”
Reno’s roar filled the room, a thunderous sound that bounced off the sterile white walls and settled like lead in Lisette’s chest. He looked like a man possessed as he stormed toward the bed.
“You made a mistake, right, AJ? Tell me it’s a mistake!”
“No, Reno. It’s not. She didn’t respond to the stimuli.”
While the two men stood locked in a silent, agonized confrontation, Lisette took a private, jagged second to shatter. I can’t walk. I’m paralyzed. A prisoner in my own skin. Wait—can I move my hands? She wiggled her fingers, a tiny, desperate fluttering of life. AJ’s startled look confirmed she wasn't imagining it.
“Repeat the test,” Reno demanded, his voice trembling with a desperate, frantic hope.
Reno took AJ’s place, gripping her hand as AJ moved to the foot of the bed. Lisette stared at the acoustic tiles of the ceiling, offering a silent, frantic prayer to a God she wasn't sure was listening: Please, let me feel pain. Give me the worst, most agonizing sting in the world. Just let me feel.
Seconds ticked by. Nothing. No sting, no tickle, no pressure. Just a vast, terrifying silence where her lower half should be.
“I’m paralyzed,” Lisette said aloud, the words tasting like ash. She needed to say it, to own the reality before it owned her. She was alive—that was the miracle. She would just have to learn to live without her legs.
“We are going to do more tests—” AJ began.
“More tests for me to fail? Yippee!” The sarcasm was a defense, sharp and bitter. “Whatever you do, just make sure I’m still healthy enough to donate bone marrow to Catalella.”
“I don’t think—”
“Then don’t! Don’t think, AJ. Whatever happens, I am giving my sister those cells. I won’t fail her, too. God knows I’ve already failed at everything else.”
“You haven’t—”
“Can I just have some time alone? Please?”
“I don’t want to leave you,” Reno said, his voice breaking with a tenderness that made her want to weep.
Lisette turned her face away, closing her heart to the earnestness in his tone. He was breaking, and she couldn't be the one to pick up the pieces—not when her own soul was in shards. “I don’t want to be paralyzed, Reno, but here I lie. I just need a few minutes.”
Reno nodded, the pain in his eyes almost too much to bear. “I’ll be right outside. I love you.”
“I love me, too,” Lisette teased, but the hitch in her voice turned the joke into a sob.
She watched the door click shut behind the medical team. Enveloped in the heavy, sterile silence of the room, Lisette felt the walls of her life closing in, much like the car in her nightmares.
“You are going to dump him, and you know why?” Michael’s voice echoed in the silence, cruel and prophetic. But as she looked down at the motionless sheets covering her legs, she realized she finally had a reason of her own to let Reno go. A reason that had nothing to do with Michael, and everything to do with the man she loved too much to burden.