2026-07-10 19:09:14Marco reached the lottery shop just as the same heavyset man from his memory was crossing the street toward the door. His pace quickened without him even deciding to move faster.
He pushed through the entrance first, his shoulder brushing past the fat man, and grabbed the last ticket off the counter before anyone else could touch it.
The fat man froze in the doorway, his round face twisting with annoyance, his breath still heavy from the walk.
"Hey, that was mine." His voice came out whiny and indignant, his thick eyebrows pulling together in a scowl. "I was already on my way over here. You can't just cut in front of someone like that."
Marco glanced at him with a flicker of something close to pity, though his face stayed perfectly calm.
"Bad luck, friend." His tone was light, almost careless. "Guess you'll have to settle for whatever's left on the shelf."
The fat man huffed and muttered something under his breath, but he turned away without pushing the issue further, his shoulders slumping as he wandered toward the magazine rack instead.
Marco felt no guilt watching him walk off. In two weeks, every bill and coin in this city would mean nothing once the toxic rain started falling and the streets turned into a battlefield. Better that this fortune ended up somewhere useful than rotting uselessly in a stranger's wallet.
He folded the ticket carefully and slid it into his jacket pocket, already counting down the hours until tomorrow's draw.
The next morning, Marco stood in front of a small television screen mounted above a coffee shop counter, his heart steady despite knowing exactly what was coming. The numbers scrolled across the bottom of the screen one by one, matching the ticket in his pocket perfectly.
One hundred million dollars.
He did not celebrate. He did not even smile. He simply finished his coffee, walked to the lottery office, and signed the paperwork with the same calm expression he had worn since waking up that morning.
By that afternoon, Marco was sitting across from the most respected divorce attorney in the city, a sharp eyed man named Dante Acerbi, whose office walls were lined with framed victories from cases far messier than this one.
Dante flipped through the documents Marco had handed him, his eyebrows lifting higher with every page he turned.
"You have screenshots, bank records, even photos of them together at a motel two towns over." He set the folder down and leaned back in his leather chair, studying Marco with newfound interest.
"If you want to wring even more property out of them, it's an absolute walk in the park—you won't even need me to step in."
"However... if I may be blunt, Mr. Ferretti," Dante sat up straight, a cynical smirk gracing his face. "While you have my sympathy, you handed all your money over to your wife. Do you even have enough left to hire me?"
"And don't bother saying you can just transfer twenty percent of whatever we wring out of your wife. How much could that possibly be? Ten grand? Twenty grand? I charge more than that just for a routine consultation..."
Faced with Dante’s curious gaze, Marco calmly pulled out his phone and flashed the screen in front of him.
His bank account showed a balance of $100 million.
"One hundred million dollars?!" Dante gasped in shock. Though a renowned divorce attorney, his own net worth was merely a few million dollars. "Mr. Ferretti, would you mind disclosing the source of these funds? Hiding marital assets is a rather severe offense..."
Marco shrugged non-chalantly. "Relax. I won the lottery. I bought and claimed it after signing the divorce agreement, so it doesn't affect the division of property."
Dante’s expression underwent a colorful series of transformations before he marveled in astonishment, "Mr. Ferretti, I must admire your incredible luck... Under our state’s laws, income acquired after signing a divorce agreement indeed does not count as marital property. Had you been in the neighboring state, you would've had to fork over a massive cut to that leech of an ex-wife."
Marco nodded calmly. He was no fool; he knew the local state laws inside out, which was the only reason he had been so eager to cash in such a massive prize.
Seeing how composed Marco was, a smirk of anticipation spread across Dante's face. "In that case," he said with supreme confidence, "what are your demands?"
Marco's lips curved into a faint, humorless smile, his hands folded calmly on his lap.
"I want her to walk away with nothing." His voice was quiet but firm, every word deliberate. "And I want her to pay me back for every year I spent feeding that family while they laughed behind my back."
Dante nodded slowly, tapping a pen against the edge of his desk, his expression turning thoughtful.
"From what I'm seeing here, her father knew about the affair. Her mother knew. Even her cousin was living under your roof the entire time." His voice sharpened with disgust as he listed each detail. "This entire family treated you like a paycheck with legs."
Marco's jaw tightened slightly at the memory, but his expression remained controlled.
"They treated me worse than that." His tone dropped lower, edged with something cold. "I was their dog. Fed them, sheltered them, never once barked back. They thought I'd stay grateful no matter how many times they kicked me."
Dante's eyes glinted with the kind of sharp satisfaction lawyers get when they smell an easy win.
"Well, dogs occasionally grow teeth, Mr. Ferretti." A thin smile spread across his face. "And from where I'm sitting, you're about to bite back hard enough to take their whole hand off."
Marco allowed himself a small nod, the closest thing to amusement crossing his face since he had woken up that morning soaked in cold sweat.
"How long will this take?" His voice stayed practical, businesslike, free of any emotion that might slow things down.
"With evidence this strong, and your new financial position backing you up, we can move fast." Dante closed the folder with a satisfied snap. "She and her parasitic little family won't know what hit them until the papers are already signed."
He leaned forward across the desk, his fingers steepled together, his eyes locking onto Marco's with absolute confidence.
"They spent years treating you like something to scrape off their shoes." His voice dropped into something low and certain, carrying the weight of a man who had never lost a case like this. "I promise you, Mr. Ferretti, by the time I'm finished, this family of parasites is going to pay every single price they deserve."
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CHAPTER 142
Twenty pairs of hungry eyes slowly turned toward Ashford. The shift was almost physical, like the temperature in the room had dropped another ten degrees.Every man in that corridor was starving. Every man in that corridor had watched Ashford eat portions slightly larger than theirs, sleep in a warmer spot, and talk endlessly about shared sacrifice while making none of his own."What's the matter, Mr. Brotherhood and Sacrifice?" Marco's voice dripped with amusement. "You told these men you'd give anything for the group. Here's your chance. One small personal contribution and every single one of your loyal soldiers eats tonight. Unless all that talk about shared sacrifice was just a speech you gave to keep the dogs in line while you kept the biggest bone for yourself."Ashford felt the weight of every stare in that corridor pressing down on his shoulders like concrete blocks.If he refused, his carefully constructed image of the selfless leader would shatter in front of the only people
CHAPTER 141
The silence that followed the discovery of the steel wall was the kind that breaks men from the inside out.Twenty three people stood in a cloud of concrete dust, staring at a seamless barrier of polished metal that reflected their own filthy, exhausted faces back at them like a mirror showing them exactly what they had become. Their sledgehammers hung at their sides like dead weight. Their shoulders sagged. Their breathing was heavy and ragged, and the freezing air turned each exhale into a ghost that disappeared before it reached the ceiling.Powell let his hammer drop to the ground with a dull clang. "We can't get through this. Not without a plasma torch or hydraulic cutters. And unless somebody's been hiding a welding shop in their apartment, we're done.""There has to be a weak spot." Briggs ran his palm across the steel surface, pressing hard, searching for a seam, a bolt, a weld, anything. His fingers found nothing. The metal was smooth, cold, and absolutely perfect. "This is
CHAPTER 140
He moved the light slowly across the floor. Drag marks. Long, smeared streaks in the frost leading from the empty spaces toward the stairwell of Building 4. Someone had come down here, grabbed the corpses by the ankles, and hauled them upstairs like bags of groceries.Tank whined softly and pressed his body against Marco's leg."Yeah." Marco stared at the drag marks for a long time, his face completely still. "I see it, boy."The cold prevented decomposition. There were no animals down here large enough to drag a full grown man up a flight of stairs. Which meant the starving residents of Building 4 had finally crossed the last line that separated desperate humans from something else entirely.Marco thought about his previous life. About the way Valentina's family had killed him. About the things that happened afterward that he had never fully understood until this exact moment, standing in a frozen garage with an empty space where a dead man used to be."Let's go home, Tank." His voic
CHAPTER 139
Sarah stood in the entry corridor with her hands clasped together and her eyes fixed on the floor, looking like a dog that had been caught stealing food off the table and was now trying to decide whether to run or roll over."I need to tell you something." Her voice came out small and thin. "About why I'm really here."Marco leaned against the wall and watched her with the patient, slightly bored expression of a man who already knew what was coming but wanted to hear her say it anyway."My husband sent me." Sarah's shoulders curled inward. "He joined Valentina's alliance yesterday, but he doesn't actually believe it's going to work. He's watched three groups try to break in here and every single one of them ended up as frozen decoration in your garage. He figured if Valentina wins, he's on her side. If you win, I warned you first. Either way, we eat.""So your husband is playing both sides of the fence like a stray dog that begs at two different back doors because he's too lazy to hun
CHAPTER 138
"Don't bother." Valentina set the knife down on the counter and wiped her hands on her jeans with the calm, mechanical motions of a woman who had just finished a household chore. "That gash is going to bleed out before she makes it down two flights of stairs. And even if it doesn't, where's she going to go? Every person in this building has been eating corpses for three days. A bleeding old woman running through the hallway is just fast food with legs."Kevin stared at her with a mixture of awe and absolute terror. Valentina caught his expression and something cold and calculating flickered behind her eyes.She looked at Kevin properly for the first time. Thin arms. Narrow shoulders. Hands that trembled even when he was not afraid.He had freed her, yes. He had swung the ashtray, yes. But in a real fight against a real threat, Kevin was about as useful as a paper umbrella in a hurricane."Kevin." She walked toward him and placed both hands on his chest, looking up into his face with a
CHAPTER 137
Valentina did not hesitate. Not for a breath. Not for a heartbeat. Not for the fraction of a second it would have taken a normal person to reconsider what they were about to do.She drove the sharp heel down into Brando's temple with the full weight of her body behind it.Her brother convulsed beneath her, his legs kicking against the carpet, his fingers clawing at the floor in wild, mindless spasms.His mouth opened but nothing came out except a thin, wet gurgling sound that lasted three seconds before it stopped entirely.His body went limp. His hands uncurled. His eyes stayed open, staring at the ceiling with the blank, frozen confusion of a man who had died still waiting for his mother to save him.Rosa screamed from the doorway, a sound so raw and broken it barely sounded human."MY BABY! VALENTINA, WHAT DID YOU DO TO MY BABY!"Valentina stood up from her brother's body, turned toward her unconscious father on the kitchen floor, and struck Sergio twice across the skull with the s
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