Bloodline of Retribution: The Disowned Prodigy novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Chair

Lena meets the paralyzed Keir Kincaid, reads his scans and offers to make him walk.

The Kincaid house in Hyde Park had a stone wall and a gate that opened before the car stopped.

There were no lights on the front.

Two men in dark coats walked me through the door without touching me.

I had been raised in a townhouse with a staff of nine.

This was a different sort of rich, quieter, with more doors that locked.

The hall was lit by one lamp.

A man sat beside it in a wheelchair with a tablet on his knee.

He was thirty, maybe, with black hair and a pale scar through his left eyebrow.

His shoulders filled the chair and made it look small.

He didn't get up, because he couldn't.

He looked at me and waited.

"Miss Ashgrove," Keir Kincaid said.

"Donnelly."

"I heard." His voice was dry. "It was on three phones before you reached the curb."

"Then you know I'm not who you were promised."

"I was promised a signature. It's in my safe." He turned the tablet toward the lamp. "Your blood is on it."

An older man in a grey cardigan stepped out of the dark corner.

"Her own mother disowned her in front of the North Shore," the older man said. "She's worth nothing, Keir. Send her back and call the loan."

"Be quiet, Uncle."

"I'm saying what the family is thinking."

"You're saying it in my hall."

The uncle's mouth tightened, but he stopped.

Keir looked at me again.

"You signed at eighteen, and you knew what it was," he said. "My father paid your mother's debt for it."

"I thought it was a trust form," I said. "Adelaide held my hand while I signed."

"Everyone says that."

"Four months ago your brakes failed on the Skyway." I pulled Roxie's coat tighter. "I'd like to see your scans."

The hall went silent.

"Excuse me?"

"I'm a doctor," I said. "I finished medical school at twenty-two."

"I've done spinal cord research for three years, and every paper had Adelaide's name on the front."

"I want to see what your surgeons saw."

The uncle laughed once.

Keir didn't.

"Seven of them have looked at me," he said. "They agree."

"Then it won't take me long to disagree."

He studied me for a moment.

Then he slid the tablet across his knees toward me.

I sat on the arm of a leather sofa and scrolled.

The MRI was clean and well labeled.

The injury sat at the T11 vertebra, and the swelling had gone down since the first month.

The surgeons' notes said, "complete injury, no expected recovery."

I read the sagittal slices twice.

"Where is the transection?" I asked.

Nobody answered.

"They wrote complete, and there's no break in the cord."

"The first-month films are all swelling, so they wrote it off. The newest scan shows the cord whole, and nobody went back."

"Meaning what?" the uncle said.

I didn't look up.

"Meaning your nephew's spinal cord is whole."

Keir's face didn't move.

His hand on the arm of the chair closed into a fist.

"Don't be kind to me," he said. "I have had kindness from experts."

"I'm not being kind. I'm telling you what the picture says."

I stood and came toward him.

"Can I examine you?"

"Here?"

"Here is fine."

The uncle made a noise.

"Out," Keir said, without turning his head.

The uncle went.

I crouched beside the chair and took a cheap ballpoint from the coat pocket, the kind with a diner's name on it.

"Close your eyes."

"I know what you're going to do."

"Then it'll be easy."

He closed them.

"Tell me when you feel something."

I pressed the cap of the pen against his right thigh, through the cloth.

He said nothing.

I moved it to the left, just above the knee.

"There," he said sharply.

"Where?"

"Left. Above the knee. Something."

"Pressure or touch?"

"Pressure." His jaw had hardened. "Barely."

"Tell no one else that," I said quietly. "Not yet."

I slid my hand under the edge of his sweater and laid it flat against his lower back.

His skin was warm, and his muscles tightened under my palm.

His pulse jumped in his throat, and I looked at it and decided he was afraid.

"Lean forward for me."

He did.

I walked my fingers up the column, one bone at a time, and stopped where the ridge was too sharp.

"That's your injury," I said. "Your surgeons fused you above it and left the cord to heal alone."

"And it has."

"Partly. It can heal further with decompression and the right rehab."

"Not a miracle. Work."

He sat back, and his eyes opened.

They were dark blue, and not at all dull.

"Why would you tell me this?" he said. "You're in no position to bargain."

I rested my forearms on the arm of his chair and looked at him evenly.

"I'm in the only position there is," I said. "I can get you out of this chair."

"In exchange for what?"

"Ashgrove Marine," I said. "All of it, in the end."

"And a house in Bridgeport that doesn't owe you a cent."

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