Frozen Vengeance: The Last Meal

chapter 1

 The Last Meal

The knife wasn't sharp anymore. That was the worst part.

Rafael Villaroman felt it drag through the meat of his forearm instead of cutting clean, the serrated edge catching on tendon, and somewhere past the pain his mind noted, absurdly, that even in the end they couldn't be bothered to sharpen a blade for him.

"Easy," Elena murmured, the way you'd murmur to a nervous animal. "Easy, Rafi. It's almost over."

Above him, past the frost creeping along the ceiling of what used to be his own dining room, three faces watched with the particular hunger of people who had run out of anything else to eat. Don Ramon held the flashlight steady with hands that no longer shook from fear, only from the cold that had killed half of Makati by the third week of the freeze. Elena knelt beside him with a chipped ceramic bowl balanced on her knees. And behind them both, arms crossed, looking almost bored, stood Marco Dela Fuente — wearing Rafi's old barong, the one from his own wedding, because apparently even that hadn't been sacred enough to leave alone.

"You always said family takes care of family," Elena said, not quite meeting his eyes as she positioned the bowl. "We're just taking care of ourselves now. You'd have wanted that."

Rafi tried to speak. What came out was a wet, ruined sound, most of his voice gone the way most of his blood already had.

"Don't waste your breath," Marco said, crouching down with the same casual cruelty he'd worn like cologne for the last eleven months, ever since the world ended and pretending had stopped being necessary. "You should be flattered, actually. You're the last decent protein source in a two-kilometer radius. That's more use than you were to Bel in the last three years combined."

Bel.

Isabel. His wife. Nine years of marriage, and she was the one holding the door frame behind them, watching, her face doing absolutely nothing — no grief, no horror, nothing but the flat, exhausted patience of someone waiting for a chore to finish.

"Mama," she finally said, voice hoarse from cold and hunger both, "make it fast. Miguel's asking for food."

Miguel. His son. Eight years old, waiting in the next room, too young to understand what was about to be ladled into his bowl, too young to know that the man who'd carried him on his shoulders through SM malls and taught him to ride a bike along the Ayala Triangle had never actually been his father at all — a fact Rafi himself had never known, until this exact night, when Marco had said it out loud with the satisfaction of a man finally allowed to stop lying.

"He's not yours, by the way," Marco added, almost as an afterthought, wiping the knife on his sleeve — Rafi's sleeve, on Rafi's barong. "Miguel. Never was. Just so you go into this knowing the whole truth."

Something in Rafi's chest, already torn open in every literal sense, tore open one final time in a way that had nothing to do with the blade.

Nine years. Nine years of overtime at the office, of skipping his own father's death anniversary because Don Ramon needed help with a business loan, of handing his entire thirteenth-month pay to Paolo for a franchise that collapsed within four months, of driving through flooded streets during three separate typhoons because Elena refused to evacuate without her jewelry box. Nine years of believing that a boy raised without a father of his own could still learn, through sheer force of devotion, how to build a real family from nothing.

He had built nothing. He had fed a house full of strangers wearing his relatives' faces, and now, with the world frozen and dying outside, they had decided he made a better meal than a husband.

"I swear," Rafi forced out, each word costing him more blood than he had left to spare, "even as a ghost — I will come back for every one of you."

Elena's spoon was already moving toward the bowl when the darkness took him whole.

"Sir? Sir, are you feeling all right?"

The voice was gentle, professionally concerned, entirely wrong for a dying man's final moments. Rafi's eyes snapped open and his chair skidded backward across polished marble tile with a shriek loud enough to make the woman across the desk flinch.

There was no frost. No blood. No knife.

Only a bright, air-conditioned bank branch on the ground floor of a BGC tower, floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking a street full of jeepneys and delivery riders and ordinary, living people who had absolutely no idea the world was about to end.

Rafi's hands shook so violently he nearly dropped his phone twice trying to check the date.

July 3, 2026.

He read it four times before his brain accepted the numbers weren't going to rearrange themselves back into whatever nightmare he'd been living a second ago.

A laugh tore out of him — raw, disbelieving, half a sob and half hysteria. "I'm alive," he said, too loud for the quiet branch, drawing stares from the security guard by the door. "I actually came back."

Ninety-one days. That's what the countdown in his head told him, with a certainty that felt less like memory and more like something branded into his bones. Ninety-one days until the solar event that would tear through the ionosphere and plunge half the planet into a freeze nobody had prepared for, that would collapse Metro Manila's grid within a week and leave millions scavenging for canned goods in flooded, frozen streets.

But right now the sun was blazing outside the tinted windows, and the branch manager across from him was still waiting, visibly reconsidering whether to call for assistance.

"Mr. Villaroman," she said carefully, "should I proceed with processing your loan application?"

Right. This exact date, this exact branch. Rafi remembered it now with sickening clarity — the day he'd come in to mortgage his late mother's ancestral lot in Cavite, the only asset he owned outright, to cover Paolo's seed capital for a "guaranteed" crypto exchange startup that would evaporate within six weeks, taking Rafi's entire inheritance with it.

Before he could answer, the office door banged open.

"What's taking you so long? We don't have all day." Isabel swept in, hair perfectly blown out, phone still in hand mid-scroll, wearing the soft, entitled irritation of a woman who had never once in nine years waited for anything without complaint.

Rafi looked at her and, for one disorienting second, felt teeth close around his forearm all over again. Phantom pain lanced up to his shoulder, sharp enough to steal his breath.

"Rafi, sign it," Bel said, already sliding the loan agreement across the desk toward him, pen in hand like she was doing him a favor. "It's not like we're taking anything from you permanently. Paolo's business is going to blow up, you'll see. Think of it as an investment in the family."

The family.

Rafi picked up the pen. Bel's shoulders relaxed, the practiced sweetness returning to her face.

Then he tore the agreement clean in half.

The sound was small and precise — two neat halves of paper drifting onto the mahogany desk — but it landed in that room like a gunshot.

"Rafi!" Bel's voice cracked with genuine shock. "Have you completely lost your mind?"