Reborn As The King Of Wealth

The Cell

"You have the right to remain silent."

The officer's voice was bored, mechanical, as he snapped the handcuffs shut around William's wrists hard enough to bruise. William barely registered the words. He was still trying to process how he had gone from studying alone in the library, notes spread across the table, highlighter still uncapped in his hand, to being dragged out in front of the entire building in under ten minutes.

"I didn't take anything," he said, for the fifth time, his voice cracking. "I don't even go near the finance office. Please, just check the — "

"Save it for the station," the officer cut in, not unkindly, just tired, the way a man sounds when he's processed too many petty accusations to care whether this particular one holds any weight.

Behind him, through the crowd that had gathered to watch, William caught a glimpse of Dimas's smug expression and Rani's phone, already raised, already recording his humiliation for an audience that would laugh about it over lunch tomorrow, already composing the caption in her head. He didn't need to hear the whispers to know what story they'd already planted: poor scholarship kid finally showed his true colors. It was almost impressive, he thought distantly, how quickly a lie could calcify into common knowledge if enough people repeated it at once.

"I want a lawyer," William said, as the officer marched him down the hallway, past a wall of fluorescent lights that buzzed and flickered in a way that made his skull throb. "I have a right to a lawyer, don't I?"

"You'll get your phone call," the officer said. "Relax."

Relax. William almost laughed at the word, if he'd had the breath to spare for it. He thought of the finance office he'd never once set foot inside, of the security footage that would eventually clear him and be conveniently unavailable for review until three days after the damage was already done, of the particular, practiced ease with which Dimas's cousin had apparently spread the rumor to exactly the right ears. Somebody had planned this. He didn't yet understand who, or why a simple bully would bother orchestrating something as elaborate as a false theft accusation, but some small, cold part of him had already started to suspect that not everything happening to him lately was simple cruelty. Some of it felt engineered.

He was given one phone call. He used it to dial Natasya's number from memory, his fingers trembling so badly it took him three tries to get the digits right.

"I'm at the station," he said, when she picked up, his voice cracking on every other word. "They think I stole from the finance office. I didn't do it. I swear I didn't do it."

"I believe you," she said instantly, without a single second of hesitation, and something in her certainty was almost enough to make his knees give out right there in the hallway. "I'm coming. Don't say anything else to anyone until I get there, okay? Promise me."

The holding cell was small, concrete, and smelled of bleach that didn't quite cover something worse underneath — old sweat, old fear, the accumulated residue of a hundred other men who had sat on that same metal bench and stared at that same water-stained ceiling. William sat with his wrists raw beneath the cuffs even after they were removed, staring at nothing, his mind circling the same useless question over and over: why me, why always me, what did I ever do to deserve being the easiest target in every room I walk into.

Two other men were locked in with him — bigger, harder, with the kind of eyes that had long since stopped looking for anything to fear. One of them sized him up within seconds, the way a predator sizes up which animal in the herd is limping.

"Look at this one," he said, grinning at his cellmate. "Soft. Rich boys never last a night in here."

"I'm not rich," William said quietly, which was, in hindsight, exactly the wrong thing to say, because it only confirmed that he was exactly the kind of person nobody would come looking for — no family to post bail, no lawyer on retainer, no name that would make anyone hesitate.

He didn't fight back when the first fist connected with his jaw. He'd learned long ago that fighting back only made things last longer. He curled into himself instead, absorbing blow after blow in near silence, counting his own heartbeat to keep from screaming, tasting copper at the back of his throat, thinking — almost calmly, in the strange detached way pain sometimes allows a mind to drift — this is fine, this is just another Tuesday, this is just what happens to people like me.

"Not so tough now, huh," the man said, breathing hard, more from exertion than from any real anger. "Nothing to say?"

William said nothing. There was nothing left to say that hadn't already been said, screamed, whispered, and ignored a hundred times before.

By the time an officer finally checked the cell hours later, William was slumped against the wall, one eye swollen shut, lip split, a cracked rib making every breath a small negotiation with agony.

"Someone's here for you," the officer said, sounding almost annoyed by the inconvenience, as though William's beaten body were merely paperwork he now had to process.

Natasya was waiting at the front desk, having spent every last bit of her part-time job savings on a lawyer just competent enough to point out that the accusation had no actual evidence behind it — only a rumor conveniently started by Dimas's cousin, who worked in the finance office and had, according to the security logs no one had bothered to check, never even been on shift the day the money went missing.

When she saw William being led out, bruised and barely upright, something in her composure finally cracked. She rushed forward and caught him before his knees gave out completely, his full weight sagging into her much smaller frame, and for a moment neither of them moved, just breathing against each other in the flickering fluorescent light of the station lobby.

"I've got you," she said, voice shaking. "I've got you, okay? I've got you."

William didn't cry. He had long since run out of tears for things like this. He simply let himself be held up, let himself be walked slowly to the bus stop, let himself, for one small moment, believe that maybe the world still had exactly one person left in it who wouldn't let him fall all the way to the ground.

What neither of them saw was the black sedan idling half a block away, its rear window cracked just enough for a woman to watch the whole scene through a pair of binoculars, murmuring into her phone once more, voice utterly without emotion.

"Emotional anchor confirmed," she said. "Proceed to final phase."