A SON IN LAW TURNS BILLIONAIRE AFTER DIVORCE

Chapter 10

The looks aimed at the Millers changed instantly. Whatever faint sympathy they had enjoyed moments ago vanished in a heartbeat, replaced by raw, open disgust.

Michael and Magret stood frozen under the heavy, silent contempt of the entire neighborhood.

“No!” Magret finally snapped out of her shock, her voice cracking as she shrieked. “That’s bullshit! Complete bullshit! Susan would never do something like that!”

Leonard gave her a cold, terrifying smile.

“Really?” He calmly pulled his phone out of his jacket pocket. “Then how about I show everyone the videos right now?”

Truthfully, while Leonard had concrete proof of the affair and Mark’s official DNA report, the "videos" were mostly a bluff.

But the Millers had no way of knowing that. And judging by the utter panic washing over their faces, none of them were willing to call it. If Leonard actually started playing explicit footage in front of the entire neighborhood, the Miller family would never be able to show their faces in this city ever again.

“Let’s go,” Magret hissed, her face turning pale.

Michael and Joseph still looked ready to tear Leonard apart with their bare hands, so she grabbed both of their coat sleeves and yanked hard.

With no other choice, Joseph jabbed a shaking finger at Leonard and snarled through his teeth, “This isn’t over! When our lawyer is done with you, you’ll be sleeping on the fucking sidewalk!”

Then, turning on their heels, the Millers stormed off down the street. They needed to get home immediately and demand the truth from Susan.

“It’s true. Mark isn’t Leonard’s son.”

Inside the Miller living room, there was no point hiding it anymore. With Michael, Magret, and Joseph storming back through the front door looking ready to murder someone, Susan had no choice but to admit the truth.

Yet the moment those words left her mouth, a surge of deep resentment boiled in her chest.

She had explicitly told them not to go looking for Leonard! But had they listened to her for even one second? Of course not. Even if they absolutely felt the desperate need to confront him, they could have pulled him aside quietly. Instead, they had gone and screamed at him in front of half the neighborhood!

Now, every single family in Maple Grove knew. Susan Miller had cheated on her husband and passed off another man's kid as his. How the hell was she supposed to step foot outside now?

“You… how could you?!”

Michael’s face turned a dangerous crimson. His hands trembled, too furious to even get the words out at first.

“How could you be so damn careless?!” he finally spat. “You actually let that bastard figure it out!”

He wasn't angry about her cheating or the fake paternity—he was only furious that she hadn't covered her tracks well enough to keep the money coming in!

This family, Susan thought bitterly. Birds of a feather, truly.

“Exactly!” Magret immediately piled on, looking even more deeply offended than her husband. “Why did you have to lose Leonard?! One was your lover, the other one paid the bills! Those two things didn’t interfere with each other at all!”

Joseph, however, couldn't care less about the family drama or the paternity lies. “I don’t give a damn whose kid Mark is! You’re the one who screwed this whole thing up, Susan, so you’re the one who needs to fix it!”

“What?” Susan glared at her brother.

“You heard me!” Joseph leaned forward, his eyes burning with greed. “I’m completely broke right now! I was already planning to hit Leonard up for another hundred grand in a few days. So whatever money I would’ve gotten from him? You owe me now!”

Susan's face darkened with every word dropping from their lips.

“OK, OK! Jesus fucking Christ!” she finally screamed at the top of her lungs, slamming her purse onto the table. “Just listen to me, okay?!”

Susan drew in a long, ragged breath, forcing down the rage in her chest.

“I just got off the phone with Jonathan,” she said, her voice dropping into a sharp, calculated tone. “He recommended a lawyer to me. A very good one. And the lawyer thinks something is deeply wrong here.”

That immediately caught everyone's attention. The room went quiet.

“Think about it,” Susan said, her eyes narrowing. “Leonard bought that mansion across the street for twelve million dollars in cash. He didn’t even bargain. A man doesn’t casually throw twelve million dollars at a house unless twelve million means very, very little to him.”

Michael blinked, stunned. “You mean... twelve million might only be the beginning?”

“Yes.”

That single word completely obliterated whatever remained of everyone's anger.

Twelve million had already sounded like an unfathomable fortune. More than twelve million?

“How much more?!” Joseph blurted out, his eyes practically lighting up like dollar signs.

“We don’t know yet,” Susan said smoothly. “That’s the whole point. The lawyer thinks we need to investigate where Leonard suddenly got that kind of insane capital.”

Michael began pacing the floor again, his brain racing. “So if he has fifty million...”

“What if it’s a hundred million?!” Magret gasped, clutching her chest.

For a moment, all four of them could practically see mountains of cash piling up right in front of their eyes. The naked, sickening greed on their faces was impossible to hide.

We're going to be rich!

Susan firmly warned them to lay low, keep their mouths shut, and simply wait for the courts to hand them their massive payday. Mollified by the promise of immense wealth, the previously furious trio nodded like obedient children.

Across the neighborhood, Leonard had already moved on to something far more important than the Millers.

James Svard stood in the middle of Leonard's new mansion living room with a thick roll of detailed blueprints spread across the grand dining table.

He and Leonard had served in the same military unit years ago. After leaving the service, James had gone into high-end structural reinforcement and bunker construction, making him precisely the man Leonard needed.

James was meticulously reviewing the custom blueprints Leonard had drawn up to convert the luxury home into an impenetrable, armored survival shelter, occasionally pacing around the grounds to assess the perimeter.

Eventually, James looked up, rolling his shoulders. “This is a serious job, Leo.”

Leonard leaned against the table, his arms crossed. “I know.”

“If you want this level of armor done in two months, the timeline is brutal,” James said, his expression dead serious. “Labor costs are going to skyrocket because I’ll need to arrange rotating shifts working around the clock, twenty-four seven.”

Leonard just smiled calmly. “Just give me a number, James.”

“Eighty million,” James replied, wincing slightly as he said it. The mansion itself was only worth around ten million, making an eighty-million-dollar renovation quote sound completely insane. But for a two-month turnaround on this massive, military-grade scale, it was genuinely a fair price.

“Deal,” Leonard nodded without a second of hesitation. “In fact, I'll give you ninety million. But the materials you use must be the absolute best grade on the market, and it must be completed within sixty days. Let's sign the contract.”

“What?!” James stood there, completely stunned. In all his years of contracting, he had never met a client who not only refused to haggle down, but actually added ten million dollars to the asking price on the spot.

A few taps on his phone later, Leonard wired a five-million-dollar non-refundable deposit directly to James’s business account.

“And if you’re ever forced to stop work because I’m late transferring funds,” Leonard added smoothly, “the delay counts against me. You still get the full ninety million.”

James stared at him for several long seconds, entirely speechless.

Finally, he let out a helpless, astonished laugh. “Man... you rich people are fucking weird.”

After James left to gather his crews, Leonard turned his attention to the next immediate problem. Once construction began on the mansion, he couldn’t keep living there due to the noise and heavy machinery. More importantly, the massive shipments of supplies he planned to order needed a secure place to be delivered.

Leonard immediately called the real-estate agent who had sold him the estate. Within two hours, he had signed a short-term, three-month lease for another private house nearby.

At twelve thousand dollars a month, the rent was steep, but the temporary house was massive, freshly renovated, and completely private. Most importantly, it was still inside Maple Grove.

Another problem solved.

Now, Leonard had an overwhelming amount of shopping to do. However, the vast bulk of his capital was still tied up in the stock market. His rapid day-trading investments had not yet hit the massive peaks he remembered from his previous life, so for the moment, he had to place smaller advance orders first.

By evening, Leonard sat behind a wide desk in his rented home, his laptop screen illuminating his face as he drafted a master spreadsheet of essential survival gear.

He had just typed in another line item when his phone on the desk began to vibrate violently.

BZZZ! BZZZ!

Leonard glanced down at the glowing caller ID.

Wife

A dark, cold smirk spread across his face as he let it ring.