Chapter 4 - The Lower District
Wren didn't waste a second. She grabbed the handles of the wheelchair, pushing Leo deeper into the dense, overgrown foliage of the greenhouse toward the back wall.
"The gate is right there!" Leo whispered, pointing toward a small iron door covered in thick ivy.
Wren slammed her shoulder against the rusted iron latch. It groaned, resisted, and then snapped open with a sharp crack. Beyond lay a steep, muddy slope dropping down toward the dark, industrial outline of the city's lower district.
"Hang on!" Wren yelled.
She grabbed the front frame of the wheelchair, leaning back with all her weight to prevent it from flipping as they slid down the muddy bank, plunging into the dark woods below the estate walls.
Shouts and gunfire echoed from the greenhouse above, but the heavy canopy of rain and trees swallowed them whole.
An hour later, the torrential downpour had turned the lower district into a maze of shining asphalt, neon signs, and rising steam from sewer grates. This was a world far removed from the pristine marble halls of the Sterling estate—a place where the police rarely came, and where the poor, the forgotten, and the desperate lived in the shadow of the city's towering skyscrapers.
Wren pushed the wheelchair down a narrow alleyway, stopping beneath the overhang of an abandoned warehouse.
Leo was shivering violently, his expensive suit soaked through and caked in mud. His legs hung limp from the chair, entirely devoid of sensation.
"Here," Wren said, stripping off her dry wool shawl—the only warm thing she owned—and wrapping it around his shoulders.
"I'm sorry," Leo mumbled, looking down at his useless legs. "I'm... I'm just a burden. I can't even run."
Wren knelt down in front of him, her dirty hands resting gently on his knees. "Don't ever say that. You survived a crash that was meant to kill you, Leo. You are alive. That makes you a fighter."
"Why did you tell them you could make me walk?" Leo asked, staring at her with a mixture of confusion and hope. "The best doctors in the country said my spinal cord was severed. They said I'll never stand again."
Wren looked at him, her expression dead serious. "Because the doctors Julian hired lied to you."
Leo blinked. "What?"
Wren reached into her dress pocket again and pulled out a small glass vial filled with a dark, amber liquid.
"I stole this from the clinic where your mother is being held," Wren explained softly. "I showed it to a friend of mine—an old street doctor who used to work for the university. He tested it. It’s a concentrated nerve-blocker. Julian’s nurses have been injecting it into your daily IV treatments for two years."
Leo’s jaw went slack. "They... they were drugging me?"
"They weren't fixing your legs, Leo," Wren said, her eyes burning with fury. "They were keeping you paralyzed so you would feel helpless, so you would depend entirely on Julian, and so no one would question why you couldn't leave that house."
Tears spilled over Leo's lashes, trailing through the dirt on his cheeks. A profound, terrifying rage began to build deep inside his small chest—a rage that replaced the fear he had carried for two years.
"My mom..." Leo choked out, his small fists clenching until his knuckles turned white. "We have to save her."
"We will," a new voice spoke from the shadows of the alley.
Wren stood up instantly, stepping in front of Leo's chair with her fists raised.
An old man with a thick gray beard, wearing a patched trench coat and carrying a battered leather medical bag, stepped out from the rain.
"Relax, Wren," the old man said softly. "It's just me."
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"Doc," Wren exhaled, her shoulders relaxing slightly. "Did you set up the room?"
"It's ready," Doc replied, his sharp eyes examining Leo. "So this is the Sterling heir. He looks just like his mother."
