After three Years in Prison, I Became a Billionaire

Chapter 2: Bottom-Feeder

Francis pushed himself up off the tile before the nurse could enjoy the sight of him down there any longer, his palms stinging, his knees threatening to fold again beneath him. He did not let them.

"Wait." His voice came out rougher than he meant it to. "Please. Just wait. Tina promised she'd cover the bills. My wife,she said she'd handle it, all of it, every month I was gone. There has to be some mistake."

The head nurse turned to look at him properly for the first time, and something in her expression shifted from irritation into something closer to contempt, the particular contempt reserved for men who did not know they were already a joke.

"Your wife." She said the word like it tasted bad. "Sir, not one cent has been paid on this woman's account in over a year. Not one. We kept her here out of charity, and charity has limits. So no, there is no mistake, except whatever mistake you made trusting a woman who stopped paying for her own mother-in-law's oxygen twelve months ago."

The words landed somewhere low in his chest, sharper than the fall had been. A year. Tina had promised him, the week before sentencing, that she would take care of everything, that his mother would want for nothing while he was gone, that this was the one thing he did not need to worry about inside. He had believed her. He had built three years of survival on the back of that single promise.

He fumbled his phone out of his jacket pocket, hands shaking harder now than they had signing his release forms, and dialed Tina's number standing right there on the lobby floor while his mother watched him with frightened, apologetic eyes from the wheelchair the nurses had not yet finished dragging toward the doors.

It rang twice. Then it picked up.

"Well, well." The voice on the other end was not Tina's. It was smooth, amused, unmistakably male, and it took Francis's mind a full second to place it because some part of him refused to believe what his ears had already understood. "Look who finally got let out of his cage."

"Andrews." Francis's grip on the phone tightened until his knuckles went white. "Where is Tina. Put her on."

"She's a little busy right now, actually." Andrews's tone carried the particular lightness of a man enjoying himself immensely. "In the shower, if you must know. Long night. She said yes, Francis. Can you believe that? Finally said yes, after three long years of me waiting for her to be free of you. We're celebrating properly. I imagine you saw the post."

"I saw it." Francis's voice had gone very quiet, the stillness of a man holding a great deal back with both hands. "I need to talk to her about my mother's medical bills. The hospital says nothing has been paid in a year. I need that fixed today, Andrews, I do not care what is happening between the two of you"

"Oh, that." Andrews laughed, an easy, unbothered sound that made something in Francis's chest go cold in a way the morning air had not managed. "That's not really a priority anymore, is it. A bottom-feeder like your mother doesn't need that kind of money spent keeping her alive a few extra months. Tina's assets are mine now, Francis, all of them, every account, every card. And I decide what they're spent on."

Francis said nothing for a moment, the phone pressed so hard against his ear that it hurt.

"She's dying, Andrews."

"Then I'd go beg on the street corner while there's still time to say goodbye." The amusement in Andrews's voice had not shifted at all, not even slightly, as though he were discussing the weather rather than a woman's life. "Best of luck out there, Francis. Truly. It was fun while it lasted."

The line went dead.

Francis stood in the middle of the lobby with the phone still pressed to his ear long after the call ended, the dial tone humming against his skull, his mother's frightened eyes on him, the head nurse already moving again, already dragging the wheelchair the last few feet toward the doors as though his entire conversation had simply been a delay she was owed back.

"Please." He crossed the distance and caught the wheelchair's handle, and his voice cracked in a way he had not allowed it to crack once in three years. "Please, just give me a few days. I will find the money. I do not know how yet, but I will find it, I swear to you, just do not put her out in the cold."

The nurse shoved his hand off the chair without looking at him. "We are not a bank, sir, and you are not our problem. Move."

He staggered back and let his hand fall, and for one long, terrible moment he simply stood there in the middle of the lobby with nothing left in him to fight with, watching them wheel his mother toward the doors, toward the cold he had walked out of only hours before, and understanding fully, for the first time, exactly how completely alone he was.

It was the television bolted above the waiting room chairs that caught him, a burst of color and motion at the edge of his vision, loud enough to cut through even this. A news anchor's voice, urgent, almost breathless.

" unprecedented developments out of Skyward Technology this afternoon, the company once dismissed as one of the biggest scams in tech history has just unveiled what analysts are calling a world-leading breakthrough in artificial intelligence, sending its market valuation past one hundred billion dollars in a single trading day—"

Francis's feet stopped moving before his mind caught up to why.

He knew that name. Skyward Technology. Three years ago, back when it had been nothing but a struggling startup and a desperate pitch deck, it had offered eighty percent of its equity through a public crowdfunding round, begging for anyone willing to bet on something the rest of the market had already written off as a joke. He remembered because he had been one of the very few who said yes.

"—after two years without results, nearly every early investor pulled out entirely, leaving a single remaining shareholder holding the majority stake, now worth, by our estimates, in excess of eighty billion dollars. Skyward's board has yet to confirm the shareholder's identity—"

The lobby around him had gone strange and distant, sound narrowing to a single point. Behind him, the nurse's voice was still rising, still shouting something about ambulances and curbs and other people's problems, but it had become background noise, meaningless, replaced entirely by the anchor's voice and the number sitting behind his ribs like something he did not yet dare to believe.

With hands that would not quite stay steady, Francis opened the banking app he had not touched in three years, the one Tina had never once asked about because she had never imagined there was anything in it worth asking for.

The screen loaded slowly on the weak connection. A single holding. A single number, so large it took him three full seconds to count the zeroes correctly.

Eighty-seven point nine billion dollars.($87.900000000000)

He had never had the chance to sell. Three years locked away with no access to a phone, no access to a market, no access to anything but a cell and a plastic spoon, and the one investment everyone else had run from had simply sat there, quietly, patiently, becoming the largest fortune in the country.

Behind him, the nurse's voice cracked through the air one final time. "Out! Now! Both of you, out on the curb where you belong."

Francis turned around slowly, the phone still glowing in his hand, and for the first time since the gate had closed behind him that morning, something other than grief moved across his face.

It looked almost like a smile.

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