A beggar who became a billionaire

Chapter 8: Borrowed Skin

Three days was not much time to become someone else.

Andre spent the first morning simply walking past the Harwick Gallery, keeping his head down, studying it from across the street like a man who had no business being there at all. Which, at that moment, he did not.

The building rose tall and white, all glass and polished stone, with a doorman in a dark uniform checking names against a list before letting anyone through the front entrance. Expensive cars lined the curb. Andre watched a woman step out of one wearing a coat that probably cost more than he had earned in the last two years combined.

He would never get through that door looking like this.

He found Felix at the electronics shop that afternoon, sweeping broken glass from where a delivery box had shattered near the entrance.

"You look like a man with a plan," Felix said without looking up. "That is usually dangerous."

"I need a favor," Andre admitted.

Felix straightened, wiping his hands on his apron. "You paid me back for the tomatoes already. We are even."

"This is different." Andre glanced around the small shop, empty except for the two of them. "I need to look like I belong somewhere I do not."

Felix raised an eyebrow, curious despite himself. "What kind of place?"

"The Harwick Gallery."

Felix let out a low whistle. "That is not a shoe shop, boy. Rich people do not simply let strangers walk in wearing a torn jacket."

"I know."

"Then what exactly are you asking me for?"

Andre hesitated, then pulled the remaining money from his pocket, laying it carefully on the counter between them. One hundred and seventy dollars. Nearly everything he had left in the world.

"You know people," Andre said. "People who sell things cheap. Suits. Shoes. Watches that look expensive even if they are not."

Felix stared at the money for a long moment, then at Andre's face, searching for something. Whatever he found there seemed to satisfy him.

"My cousin runs a shop two streets over," Felix said finally. "He sells suits that fell off delivery trucks, if you understand what I mean. Nobody asks questions there." He slid the money back toward Andre, keeping only a small portion. "Keep most of this. You will need it for the entrance f*e, and those places are never cheap."

"Felix, I cannot"

"You saved my register from getting robbed last month, standing outside my window at midnight like you did not have anywhere better to be," Felix said gruffly, already turning back to his broom. "Consider it repaid. Now go. My cousin closes early on Tuesdays."

The suit Felix's cousin found him was dark grey, slightly too large in the shoulders but close enough to pass a glance from across a crowded room. The shoes pinched at the toes. The watch on his wrist did not actually keep time, but it looked expensive enough that nobody would check.

Andre stood in front of a cracked mirror in the back of the tailor's shop and barely recognized himself.

For the first time since Claire's father closed that door on him, he looked like a man who might belong somewhere important.

He did not feel like one. Not yet.

That night, back in his room, the phone buzzed once against the small table beside the bed.

Andre sat up fast, reaching for it immediately.

[REMINDER: HARWICK GALLERY AUCTION.]

[TIME REMAINING: 26 HOURS.]

[ADVISORY: YOUR PRESENCE HAS BEEN NOTICED.]

Andre's blood ran cold.

"Noticed by who?" he said aloud, uselessly, knowing the phone would never answer a direct question.

He walked to the window and looked down at the street below, half expecting to see a black car parked in the shadows, or Grant's broad silhouette leaning against a lamp post.

The street was empty.

But across the road, in the window of the closed bakery, a single light flicked on, then off, then on again.

Andre's heart pounded.

It could be nothing. A timer. A worker checking inventory. A hundred harmless explanations.

Or it could be exactly what the phone had just warned him about.

He stepped back from the window, pulled the curtain closed, and sat down on the edge of the bed, the phone still glowing faintly in his hand.

Twenty six hours until the auction. Twenty six hours until he walked into a room full of people who could destroy him without even trying, chasing a familiar face that might belong to an ally, an enemy, or a woman he was terrified he had already gotten killed.

Andre closed his eyes and forced himself to breathe.

Whatever waited for him at the Harwick Gallery, there was no going back now.

He had already been seen.