Frozen Vengeance: The Last Meal

chapter 2

 Ninety-One Days

The torn agreement lay in two clean pieces between them, and for a moment nobody in the office moved — not the branch manager, whose pen had frozen mid-signature line, not Isabel, whose mouth was still open around the tail end of her outburst.

Rafi set the pen down with deliberate care and turned to the manager, his voice steady in a way that surprised even him.

"Ma'am, I need you to remove every authorization my wife has on all my accounts. Effective immediately. No withdrawals, no transfers, no changes of any kind unless I'm here in person with valid ID."

The manager glanced between them, hesitated exactly one second, then reached for her keyboard. "Right away, sir."

"Excuse me?" Bel rounded on the desk like she could physically block the request from being typed. "Don't listen to him, he's clearly not thinking straight — Rafi, what is wrong with you?"

"The accounts are solely under Mr. Villaroman's name," the manager said, apologetic but unmoved. "I'm required to follow his instructions."

Bel spun back to face him, and for the first time in nine years, Rafi watched real, unguarded panic flicker across her face before she smoothed it back into fury. "How am I supposed to cover Miguel's tuition? My mother's maintenance meds? You want us to just — what, starve?"

The word landed strangely, given where Rafi had just come from. He almost laughed.

"Ask Marco," he said instead, flat and quiet. "I hear he's very resourceful."

Whatever color remained in Bel's face drained out completely. "What did you just say?"

"You heard me."

She opened her mouth to respond, but the office door swung open again before she could, and Paolo strode in without knocking, dressed in a blazer two sizes too expensive for a man with no income, phone clamped to his ear until he saw the scene in front of him and lowered it.

"What's going on?" Paolo demanded, looking between his sister and brother-in-law. "And more importantly — kuya, where's my capital? The exchange launches in three weeks, I told the investors—"

"There is no capital," Rafi said. "There never should have been."

"We had a deal!" Paolo's face twisted, the practiced charm falling away to reveal something uglier underneath. "You promised—"

"I promised a family that never existed outside of my own imagination," Rafi cut in, and something in his voice — flat, final, utterly without the deference he'd worn for nine years like a second skin — made both siblings go still. "I'm done being the ATM this household forgot had feelings."

Paolo took a step forward, hand rising, face red with the particular entitlement of a man who'd never once been told no by someone he considered beneath him. "You ungrateful—"

"Think very carefully," Rafi said quietly, "about what you do with that hand."

Something in his tone stopped Paolo cold — not fear exactly, but the sudden, primal recognition that the man in front of him was not the same Rafi who used to apologize for existing too loudly in his own house.

Rafi buttoned his coat, turned, and walked out without another word, Bel's voice chasing him down the marble hallway — first his name, then accusations, then something about Miguel needing his father, a claim that would have gutted him yesterday and now barely registered as noise.

Ninety-one days.

He said the number to himself over and over as he crossed the plaza outside the tower, the Manila heat pressing down familiar and ordinary, joggers and delivery riders and office workers moving around him with no idea that in exactly ninety-one days, none of this would exist the way they knew it.

He needed capital. He needed supplies. He needed a fortress that could survive what was coming, and right now all he had was a modest savings account, a six-year-old sedan parked two blocks away, and a memory of the apocalypse so vivid it still tasted like blood in the back of his throat.

And one more thing.

His hand rose to his collar almost without his permission, fingers closing around a small, cool shape resting against his sternum — a pendant he hadn't worn in years, something his late Lolo Bert had pressed into his palm as a child with strange, urgent instructions Rafi had never fully understood. Keep this close. When the world goes dark, it will remember you.

He'd assumed it was sentimental nonsense from a dying old man. He'd worn it anyway, out of guilt, tucked under his shirts for two decades without ever really looking at it.

Rafi found a quiet alley near the plaza, pressed his thumb hard enough against the pendant's edge to draw a bead of blood, and let it fall onto the metal.

Light exploded across his vision, blinding and total.

When it faded, he was standing in the middle of an empty condominium unit that had absolutely no business existing anywhere in the physical world.

There was no furniture. No electricity humming through the walls, no traffic noise bleeding in from outside, nothing but pale morning light pouring through floor-to-ceiling windows onto raw concrete floors — two bedrooms, a wide living area, close to a hundred and thirty square meters by his rough estimate, ceilings almost three meters high, and beyond a sliding glass door, a private balcony garden that shouldn't have been able to fit inside whatever this space actually was.

"This is—" Rafi turned in a slow circle, breath catching. "This is impossible."

He'd read about spatial preservation technology once, years ago, some obscure defense-ministry pilot project that never made it past testing before funding dried up. In his previous life it hadn't mattered — by the time anyone perfected it, there had been nothing left worth preserving.

This time would be different.

Anything stored inside, he suspected, would stay exactly as it was the moment it entered — food that never spoiled, water that never evaporated, medicine that never expired past its shelf life. In a world about to freeze solid and starve, that wasn't just useful. It was the single greatest advantage a human being could possibly own.

A soft chime sounded behind him, and Rafi turned to find a glowing timer suspended in midair near the entrance, counting down from twenty-six minutes and change.

He understood instinctively, the way you understand a rule someone whispered to you in a dream. Thirty minutes inside per entry. Twenty-four hours before he could return.

For now, that was more than enough.

Rafi stepped back out into the alley a few minutes later, blinking against the ordinary Manila sunlight, his pulse hammering not with fear but with something colder and far more purposeful — the specific, focused calm of a man who had just been handed exactly what he needed, one minute before the war he alone knew was coming.

He had ninety-one days.

And this time, he intended to be the one holding every advantage when the sky finally came down.