After three Years in Prison, I Became a Billionaire

CHAPTER 3: The Fleet at the Curb

"Actually, I think you're going to want to look at this first."

Francis crossed the lobby with the phone held out in front of him, the banking app still open, the number still sitting there glowing against the screen like something that might vanish if he blinked. "I have money. I can pay whatever she owes, right now, all of it. Please. Don't throw us out."

The head nurse glanced at the screen for exactly one second before her face twisted into something between disgust and delight, the particular delight of a woman who thought she had caught him in something pathetic.

"Oh, that's rich." She let out a short, sharp laugh, and two of the other nurses behind her laughed with her, quick and cruel. "You saw the news report same as I did, sweetheart, and now you're holding up a screenshot you edited in the elevator. Eighty-seven billion dollars." She said the number like it was the punchline to a joke only she understood. "Do you think we're stupid? Do you think this is the first time some broke man's tried to talk his way out of a bill with a fake bank app?"

"It isn't fake." Francis's voice stayed low, steady, though something in his chest had started to shake in a way his hands had not. "Check it yourself. Call the number on the account."

"I don't have time for this." She shoved him, harder than before, both hands flat against his chest, and his weakened legs betrayed him a second time, sending him back down onto the tile with a crack of pain through his tailbone that stole the breath out of him. "Keep this up and I will call security, and then I will call the police, and you can explain your little photoshop project to them instead of me. Get her out of here."

The other nurses moved fast now, rougher than before, half-lifting his mother out of the wheelchair to carry her the last few feet toward the doors, her thin arms hanging weakly at her sides, her head lolling against a stranger's shoulder in a way that made something in Francis break all over again, watching from the floor, unable to make his own legs hold him.

"Mom…" He got a hand under himself and pushed up just as the glass doors slid open onto the gray afternoon, cold air rushing in ahead of whatever was coming.

A line of black cars had pulled up along the curb outside, four of them, sleek and silent, each one bearing a small silver emblem on the door that Francis recognized instantly because he had just spent the last ten minutes staring at that same logo on a lobby television screen. Skyward Technology.

The rear door of the lead car opened, and a woman stepped out into the cold with the kind of unhurried composure that made the entire sidewalk seem to adjust itself around her. Tailored coat, dark hair pinned back, the sort of stillness that came from never once in her life having to raise her voice to be heard. Her eyes swept the scene once, the nurses, the wheelchair, the man climbing shakily up off the ground behind them, and stopped on Francis.

Something shifted in her expression, recognition arriving fast and certain.

She crossed the sidewalk directly to him, ignoring the nurses entirely, and inclined her head with a respect that looked almost out of place given how he must have looked standing there, three years of prison still clinging to his frame, his jacket thin, his knees scraped from the fall.

"Mr. Cole." Her voice was low, careful, pitched for him alone. "My name is Naomi. I'm the Executive Secretary of the Board at Skyward Technology." A pause, her gaze flicking once toward his mother, still held upright by two startled nurses who had gone very quiet very quickly. "We've been trying to reach our majority shareholder for the better part of an hour. We know what happened to you. Everything. We're here to help."

Francis stared at her, his mind still catching up to the last twenty minutes, the nurse's laughter, the shove, his mother's slack face. "My mother," he said, the words coming out cracked and urgent, all pretense gone. "Please. She needs help now, not later, I don't care about any of the rest of it, just help her—"

Naomi did not even turn her head. She simply lifted one hand, and the doors of the trailing cars opened in near-perfect unison. Men and women in immaculate suits stepped out onto the sidewalk, moving with the calm, unhurried precision of people who had done this before, medical bags in hand, one of them already snapping on gloves as she crossed toward the wheelchair.

Behind Francis, one of the nurses made a small, strangled sound. "That's — that's the Hands of God team. That's not possible, they don't take patients, they don't even take referrals, they only treat." She stopped herself, but not before Francis understood exactly what she had almost said. The world's elite. People whose names ended up on hospital wings, not on unpaid ledgers.

The commotion had drawn attention now, a man in a gray suit hurrying out through the sliding doors, badge clipped crookedly to his lapel, silver hair disheveled as though he'd run straight from a meeting. He took in the black cars, the medical team, the woman standing calm and untouched in the middle of it, and his face went through several fast calculations before settling on something close to panic.

"I'm Peter Whitfield, hospital Dean, is there — is everything alright here, is there something I can—" He stammered.

"You can step aside," Naomi said, without particular unkindness, though there was nothing warm in it either. "We're only here to retrieve a patient."

"Retrieve —" Peter's eyes landed on the wheelchair, on the nurses frozen around it, and something in his expression sharpened into suspicion. "What exactly is going on here. Someone explain this to me right now."

The lead nurse's composure, so absolute moments before, cracked instantly under his stare. "Sir, we were — she's a defaulted patient, a year unpaid, we were simply discharging her according to policy, that's all, nothing irregular."

"I tried to pay." Francis's voice cut through hers, quiet but unmistakably furious now, three years of restraint finally giving way at the edges. "I offered to pay in full, right there, and she called me a liar and shoved me to the ground rather than even look at the screen."

"He looked—" the nurse started, then seemed to realize too late what she was about to say, "—he looked dirty. And frankly he smelled like he'd walked out of a cell, which as it turns out he had, so forgive me for not taking a stranger's word about eighty billion dollars."

Peter's hand moved before the sentence finished, a sharp crack across the nurse's cheek that silenced the entire sidewalk. She staggered back, hand flying to her face, too stunned even to cry out.

"You struck a dying woman's son on hospital property," Peter said, low and shaking, "and insulted him for the state prison left him in. Do you have any idea what you've done?"

Naomi watched the exchange with an expression that had not changed once, cool and faintly unimpressed, as though she had seen this particular kind of theater performed for her a hundred times before and found it tiresome rather than moving.

"We'll settle the bill," she said finally, into the silence Peter's hand had left behind, "and we'll be taking the patient. Immediately."