Frozen Retribution

Chapter5

CHAPTER 5 — The House Across the Street

Bagas started his new life the way any sensible man with four hundred million dollars would: with an obscenely expensive breakfast he barely noticed eating, and a trip to the state lottery office to make the win official.

The paperwork took most of the morning. After taxes and a mandatory charitable donation the lottery board insisted on for publicity purposes, the number that finally hit his account read $398,000,000.

He stared at it for a long moment, feeling nothing like triumph — more like a soldier finally handed the weapon he'd been begging for his whole life, one war too late.

Three private banks called before lunch. He chose the fourth, mostly because their downtown branch had the shortest wait, and found himself seated across from a woman whose nameplate read Vania Halim, Senior Relationship Manager.

She reviewed his transfer instructions with the calm efficiency of someone twice her age, then looked up with open, unhurried interest. "Most new clients in your position spend the first hour asking me to confirm the number is real."

"I believe it," Bagas said.

"You don't seem particularly happy about it."

"I have a lot of work to do with it."

She smiled — genuine, unbothered by his flatness — and slid a card across the desk with her direct line. "Dinner, sometime. Purely to discuss diversification strategy, of course."

"I'll need your help moving large amounts of money quickly over the next few months," Bagas said, taking the card without a flicker of the interest she was clearly offering. "Strictly business, Ibu Vania."

If she was disappointed, she didn't show it. "Strictly business, then."

He left with an account, a contact, and the first outline of a plan already sharpening in his mind: use everything he remembered of the coming market collapses to grow four hundred million into two billion within two months, then liquidate everything in the final thirty days before the sky came down, and pour every rupiah into supplies the dimensional space could hold.

But first — the house.

The agent met him at the gates of Green Hills Residence with the nervous energy of someone still not entirely sure the sale was real. "Estate Eight is... unconventional, Pak Bagas. May I ask what draws you to it specifically?"

"The neighbors," Bagas said, stepping out of the car.

Estate Eight rose behind wrought iron gates exactly as he remembered it from a lifetime he'd never actually lived in this body — pale stone, a wall of glass facing the garden, a long gravel drive that curved past a fountain no one would ever bother fixing once the world froze. Directly across the quiet residential street, close enough that a light left on late would spill straight into its windows, sat the Kusuma family home.

Marwan's home. Ratna's home. The house where a girl who used to be his wife would wake up every morning and see, from her bedroom window, the exact size of what she'd lost.

There was something else the agent didn't mention, something Bagas had already confirmed with a quiet payment to a city records clerk that morning: Green Hills Residence's underground parking network ran beneath every property on this block, unbroken, connecting basement to basement in a single continuous garage.

A door no one else knew he'd need. Yet.

"I'll take it," Bagas said. "Today. Full payment."

The agent blinked. "The full twelve billion rupiah, today?"

"Today." He signed the deposit slip for one million dollars on the spot, the pen moving without a single hesitation. "I don't like waiting."

By evening, the sale had already slipped past the agency's discretion and into the mouths of every resident on the block, the way expensive news always does — quietly at first, then all at once, until it reached the one household on the street that had the most reason to choke on it.