Reborn As The King Of Wealth

The Girl Who Wouldn't Look at Him

"I don't want to be your friend."

Natasya said it flatly, without looking up from the book in her lap, sitting alone on the same library steps where William used to eat lunch by himself before the days when even those steps stopped feeling safe. The late afternoon light caught the edge of her hair, turning it faintly gold, and Alexander found himself staring a half-second too long before catching himself.

Alexander stood a few feet away, hands in his pockets, momentarily thrown off balance by the simple, unwavering force of her rejection. He had approached carefully — a casual excuse about a misplaced textbook, an offer to walk her to her next class — and been shut down within ten seconds flat, with a precision that suggested she'd had plenty of practice turning people away.

"I wasn't asking to be your friend," he said carefully, though the truth was he had been hoping for exactly that, in whatever twisted, secretive form he could manage. "I just noticed you sitting alone."

"People sit alone for a reason," Natasya said, finally lifting her eyes to meet his, and something in her gaze was so raw, so exhausted, that it struck him harder than any of Berta or Dimas's downfalls had. "Everyone who tries to get close to me either wants something or leaves the second things get difficult. I'm not interested in finding out which one you are."

Alexander felt something twist painfully behind his ribs — an old, familiar ache that had nothing to do with the system and everything to do with the boy he used to be, the one she'd bandaged and fed and sat with in dark stairwells without ever once asking for anything back, without ever once treating his gratitude as a debt she was owed.

"I lost someone," he said instead, the closest thing to the truth he could risk giving her. "Recently. Someone who mattered. I think that's why I keep — " he stopped, searching for words that wouldn't shatter the fragile disguise he'd built brick by careful brick. "I keep looking for him in other people. It's not fair to you. I'm sorry."

Something flickered across Natasya's face — surprise, maybe, at the honesty she hadn't expected from someone who looked like he'd never lost anything in his life, someone whose face belonged in advertisements rather than in the quiet grief of an ordinary afternoon.

"William," she said quietly, and his entire body went rigid at the sound of his own old name in her mouth, the word landing like a physical blow he hadn't braced for. "That's who you remind me of. Not how you look. Just — " she shook her head, frustrated with her own inability to explain it, fingers tightening on the edge of her book. "Never mind. He's gone. It doesn't matter."

"Tell me about him," Alexander said, before he could stop himself, desperate and reckless in a way the system's cold arithmetic had never accounted for, had never once given him a number for.

"Everyone keeps telling me to move on," she added, quieter now, more to herself than to him, her arms wrapping around the book pressed to her chest like a shield. "Like grief has a schedule. Like there's a version of this where I just wake up one day and stop wondering if there was something else I could have done." Her voice cracked slightly on the last word, and she pressed her lips together, visibly annoyed at herself for letting this stranger see even that much.

Alexander wanted, more than he had wanted almost anything since waking up on that rocky shore, to simply tell her the truth right then — to close the distance between them and let her see exactly who was standing in front of her. But some cautious, calculating part of him, the part that had already watched two people's lives unravel because of what he now knew he could do, held him back. If the people who had engineered his death were still watching, still circling somewhere in the shadows the way that black sedan once had, then the truth might not just be a relief to her. It might be a target painted on her back.

Natasya studied him for a long, silent moment, as if weighing whether he deserved the truth, whether anyone deserved it anymore.

"He was the kindest person I ever met," she finally said, voice thick, "and everyone around him decided that made him worthless. I couldn't save him. I tried, and it wasn't enough, and now I don't know if he's alive or dead, and nobody else even cares enough to ask." She closed her book and stood abruptly, blinking hard, refusing to let the tears actually fall in front of a stranger. "So no. I don't want a new friend. I already have enough ghosts."

He almost told her anyway. The words rose in his throat, dangerously close to the surface — it's me, Natasya, it's William, I never left you, I just don't know how to come back without breaking you first — and for one suspended second he thought he might actually say it, consequences and cautious plans forgotten entirely. But she was already turning, already gathering her bag onto her shoulder, and the moment closed over as quickly as it had opened, leaving him with nothing but the after-image of her face and the bitter taste of a truth he'd swallowed back down.

She walked away before he could find a single word to call her back, her footsteps quick and final against the stone steps, and Alexander stood alone on the library steps, hands clenched at his sides, the golden balance glowing uselessly in the corner of his vision — richer than he had ever imagined being, and utterly powerless to say the one true thing that might have actually mattered.

I'm right here, he thought, watching her disappear around the corner. I never left. I just don't know how to tell you without losing you for good.