Ninety-Two Days Before the Ice

Five Hundred Million

Lexi tossed her phone onto the couch with a click of her tongue.

Marrying Rhys had never been love. It had been convenience: a hasty shield against the scandal of an unmarried pregnancy, and a way to keep her real lover's reputation spotless. And Rhys had been so easy. A live-in servant who cooked, cleaned, raised the child, and handed over nearly every dollar he earned.

Now that Chris was eight, the scandal had long since faded. It was only a shame to lose such reliable, free labor.

Still, she had no intention of letting him go cheaply.

The next morning she arrived at the county courthouse in a pale, flattering dress and found Rhys already waiting outside, hands in his pockets, bathed in morning light.

"Don't think a divorce is this simple," she warned, trying to pull the old leash tight again. "There's the house, the savings, custody. It's a mess."

Rhys met her eyes with chilling indifference. "I don't want the house or the savings. You keep the boy. And I won't pay a cent in child support."

"What?" For a second, Lexi thought she had misheard.

He had the DNA report. He could have claimed his share of everything, even sued for damages over nine years of deception. Instead, the fool was offering to walk away with nothing?

Just as she had always thought. Hopelessly weak.

"If that's really what you want..." She lowered her eyes and pretended to hesitate. "I suppose I could agree."

Rhys saw through the performance and said nothing, because his surrender was deliberate.

The house hurt the most. His parents' home, where his mother's voice still seemed to linger in the walls. Signing it away felt like cutting off a finger. But he remembered what small battles had cost him in his first life, and he needed this divorce finished today. A contested case could drag on for weeks, and the Stowes would be waiting with open mouths when the jackpot arrived.

So he gave them everything. For now. When the world ended, there would be plenty of ways to collect.

With every claim waived, no minor child of his, and an expedited filing f*e that made the clerk very cooperative, the uncontested paperwork was stamped before noon. Barely hiding her glee, Lexi signed where she was told.

Just like that, their nine-year marriage was over.

Rhys stepped outside, and a crushing weight lifted off his chest. For the first time in nine years, the sun was shining on a free man.

At two in the afternoon he pushed open the glass door of a lottery retailer two blocks away. He didn't hesitate. He took a slip from the rack and shaded each bubble with mechanical precision. It was a sequence burned into his memory through ten years of apocalyptic hell, a headline he had read until the paper wore thin: one winner, five hundred million dollars, nobody else even close.

He bought a single ticket, and he paid in cash. He didn't need more than one. He only needed the right one.

The timestamp on the slip, the camera over the register, the registry record: his timeline was ironclad. He had bought this ticket as a single man. Not one cent of it would belong to Lexi.

He crossed the city to Sydvale's wealthiest district and set his ID on the marble counter of its most extravagant hotel.

"The penthouse suite, please."

Fifteen hundred dollars a night. In his first life, that number would have twisted his stomach into knots. He had lived on a hundred dollars a month, bleeding himself dry for a wife who despised him and a son who wasn't his.

Never again.

That evening he sat at the window, a legal pad on his knee, and watched Sydvale glitter below him, a bright, busy map of lives with only ninety-one days left. On the pad he wrote the first line of a list he would add to for weeks: Rice. Antibiotics. Fuel. Generators. Steel.

Across the room, the ten o'clock drawing flashed onto the television. Colored balls tumbled in their glass drum.

First number: match. Second: match. Third, fourth, fifth, each falling exactly where his memory had put it.

The final ball rolled into place.

Match.

Rhys looked down at the slip in his steady hand.

Five hundred million dollars.

He felt no urge to shout or celebrate. Only that same cold clarity that had settled over him when he read the DNA report. Outside the window, Sydvale shone on, unaware that its future king had just claimed his first weapon.

He picked up his phone and called the luxury real-estate agent he had spoken to that afternoon.

"I want Estate Number Eight in Maple Grove," he said.

A short pause. "Of course, sir. I should tell you, though, that the property sits directly across from one owned by the Darby and Stowe family."

Rhys's smile never reached his eyes.

"I know," he said softly. "That's exactly why I want it."