Frozen Retribution

Chapter2

CHAPTER 2 — Torn in Front of the Notary

The shredded paper fluttered onto the mahogany desk between them.

Bagas didn't look at it. He looked at the bank manager instead, his voice level in a way that surprised even him. "Miss, please remove every authorization my wife currently holds on my accounts. No withdrawal, no transfer, no account change is to be approved unless I appear here personally, with valid ID."

The manager hesitated only a second before nodding. "Right away, Pak Bagas."

"No — don't listen to him!" Lara lunged toward the desk, heels skidding on marble. "He's confused, he doesn't know what he's saying —"

"The accounts are registered solely under Mr. Wirawan's name, Ibu Lara," the manager said, apologetic but immovable. "You have no legal authority to stop this."

She turned back to Bagas, pen still hovering. "Sir, shall I process it now?"

"Now," Bagas said.

Lara went very, very still.

For nine years she had spent his salary like it was a family fund with her name at the top. He had paid her parents' rent, funded her brother's delusions, absorbed every crisis without complaint. So why, today, of all days, had something inside him simply — stopped?

She didn't try to understand it. She just turned her confusion into fury the way she always did.

"What is wrong with you?" she hissed. "What are you trying to prove? How am I supposed to cover Kenan's tuition? My mother's medical bills?"

Bagas looked at her — really looked, the way you look at a stranger wearing a familiar face. Once he had seen a wife there. Now he saw only a leech that had learned to smile.

"I don't know, Lara," he said flatly. "Ask Kurnia. I'm done."

Something flickered behind her eyes — one raw, unguarded second of panic — before she buried it under practiced outrage. "How many times do I have to say it? There is nothing between me and Kurnia! Stop acting like some jealous, insecure —"

The office door banged open again. Handoko shoved past the manager, scowl already loaded. "What's going on? And more importantly —" his eyes cut straight past his sobbing sister to Bagas — "where's my hundred million?"

Bagas studied him the way you'd study something you'd scraped off a shoe. "If you want money, earn it. Like everyone else on this earth has to."

"Are you seriously backing out on me? We had a deal!"

"There was no deal." Bagas's voice had gone hollow, stripped of nine years of deference in the space of one sentence. "There was only a family that convinced itself it had the right to my money whenever it pleased."

"You son of a —" Handoko stepped forward, hand rising.

"Careful," Bagas said. Just one word. Something in it made Handoko's hand freeze mid-air.

Bagas buttoned his coat, turned, and walked out. Behind him the shouting chased him down the hallway — his name, threats, something about the business — none of it landing. None of it mattered.

Ninety-two days. That was the only number that mattered now.

He found an empty alley three blocks from the bank, breath fogging in air that was still, mercifully, warm. His fingers found the pendant under his shirt — the one thing that had somehow followed him back through death.

He'd never imagined it would still be here.

The pendant had been built in the final desperate months of the old world, when governments poured their last resources into any technology that might keep a handful of people alive. He bit the tip of his finger and let one drop of blood fall onto the cold metal.

White light swallowed the alley.

When it faded, he stood in an empty apartment — two bedrooms, a bare living room, roughly a hundred and twenty square meters, ceilings almost three meters high, a small overgrown garden past sliding glass doors. No electricity. No running water. No furniture.

The dimensional space.

"I can't even imagine how much I could store in here," he breathed.

Food that would never spoil. Water that would never run dry. Anything sealed inside stayed exactly as it entered — frozen things frozen, hot things hot, forever, until he chose to take them out.

In his old life this technology had arrived three weeks before the end, when there was nothing left worth saving. This time, he had ninety-two days to fill it to bursting.

A timer glowed midair above the empty living room: 26:20, counting down.

Thirty minutes inside. Twenty-four hours before he could return.

Bagas smiled — the first real smile since he'd woken up in that chair.

For now, that was hardly a problem.

He stepped back out onto the street, and the city moved around him exactly as it always had — cars, arguments over lunch, a delivery boy jogging past with a stack of still-warm meals, a sky so blue it looked like it might stay that way forever.

Bagas knew better.

He had ninety-two days to prepare for the moment that sky came down. And when it did, he intended to be the only one holding the key to what came after.