Chapter 2

The morning breeze was crisp, but to my skin, it felt like luxury. I stood on the pavement outside the two-story suburban house, taking deep, greedy breaths of warm, unpoisoned air. In ninety days, this very street would be buried under three feet of razor-sharp black ice. The trees lining the driveway would snap like dead twigs under the sub-zero pressure.

My phone vibrated violently in my hand, shattering the quiet.

I looked down at the screen. Julian.

I let it ring until it cut off, only for a text to immediately pop up: [Julian]: You have one hour to come back, apologize to my mother, and transfer that money. If you don't, I'm changing the locks and putting all your shit on the curb. Don't test me, Clara.

A dry, bitter laugh escaped my throat. Changing the locks on a house registered under my name, bought with my dead parents' life insurance policy? He truly believed that three years of psychological conditioning had made me his permanent, spineless pushover.

[Clara]: Keep my stuff on the curb. It’ll save me the trouble of packing when my lawyer serves you.

I blocked his number without waiting for a reply, then blocked Brenda’s and his younger sister’s accounts for good measure. The silence that followed was intoxicating.

I walked two blocks down to a small, quiet coffee shop, ordered a large iced caramel macchiato, and sat in a corner booth near the back. I needed a clear head and a bulletproof strategy.

First, I closed my eyes and focused on the strange sensation hovering behind my navel.

With a simple thought, my consciousness dipped into the void. The boundless, pitch-black space was still there, completely silent and undisturbed. Suspended in the absolute center was Julian’s two-thousand-dollar luxury watch.

I focused on the macchiato sitting on the wooden table in front of me. I lightly tapped the plastic cup with my index finger and willed it to move.

Swish.

The cup vanished instantly. In my mind’s eye, the iced macchiato was now floating right next to the watch. I held my breath, waiting for a second, then willed the coffee back out.

It reappeared on the table with a soft clack, not a single drop spilled, the ice cubes still clinking against the sides, untouched by melting.

Time stasis, I realized, my heart pounding against my ribs with suppressed thrill. Anything I put in there remains in the exact physical state it was in when it entered. No decay, no temperature loss, no spoilage.

This wasn't just a convenience—it was the ultimate survival cheat. In the apocalypse, when the global power grid died and fresh food became more valuable than gold, I could store thousands of tons of piping-hot meals, fresh produce, and liquid fuel without ever worrying about refrigeration or degradation.

Now, I needed capital. Real, massive, unstoppable capital.

In my previous life, I worked twelve-hour nurse shifts at the local community hospital. I remembered the exact date—March 1st—because it was the day a massive local news broadcast broke story after story about an unclaimed lottery jackpot. A single ticket purchased at a modest gas station on the edge of the industrial district had matched all six numbers for a fifty-million-dollar tax-free pot. Because the winner hadn't come forward for weeks, the local news had run the winning sequence on the screen every single hour for three days straight.

Those numbers were burned into my memory: 07 - 14 - 21 - 33 - 42 - 09.

I drained my macchiato in one long gulp, stood up, and called a rideshare to the exact convenience store on 4th Avenue.

Ten minutes later, I stood before the greasy glass counter of the gas station. The sleepy clerk barely looked up from his phone as I grabbed a slip and filled out ten identical plays using those exact six numbers.

"Ten tickets on one combination?" the clerk asked, his voice dripping with boredom as he scanned the paper. "That's twenty bucks, lady."

"Keep the change," I said, handing him a fifty-dollar bill.

He handed me the long strip of thermal paper tickets. I held them tightly in my hand, slid them into my leather wallet, and walked back out into the sun. The draw was set for eight o'clock tonight. By tomorrow morning, fifty million dollars would belong entirely to me.

My phone chimed with an incoming call from an unknown number. I answered, putting it on speaker as I walked down the sidewalk.

"Clara? You crazy, ungrateful bitch!" Brenda’s voice screeched through the speaker so loudly that a pedestrian walking past me turned to stare. She was using a burner or a neighbor's phone. "Do you think blocking our numbers makes you safe?! Julian is at the bank right now trying to access the joint savings, but the teller says the account is frozen! What did you do?!"

I paused under the shade of an oak tree, my voice smooth and ice-cold. "I called the bank at six-fifteen AM and reported fraudulent activity. Since I'm the primary account holder and the sole depositor for the last twenty-four months, they froze all outgoing transfers pending an audit."

"You... you can't do that!" Brenda gasped, her voice trembling with a mixture of rage and genuine panic. "How are we supposed to pay for the groceries?! How is Chloe supposed to pay her rent this afternoon?!"

Chloe.

Hearing that name sent a dark, thrilling surge through my veins. Chloe was Julian’s "cousin" who had moved into our spare room six months ago under the pretense of being a broke college student needing a temporary place to stay. In reality, she was his mistress—a fact I didn't discover until my dying breath in that garage, when she was wearing my fur coat and drinking my wine.

"Chloe can sell the designer handbags Julian bought her using my credit card," I said plainly.

"Listen to me, you little orphan!" Brenda hissed, dropping all pretense of maternal care. "If you don't unfreeze that account right now and bring fifty thousand dollars home, I will tell everyone at your hospital what kind of abusive, heartless monster you are! I'll ruin your reputation! I'll make sure you get fired!"

I smiled, my fingers tightening around my phone.

"Go ahead, Brenda," I whispered. "Tell the whole world. Tell them that a middle-aged parasite and her deadbeat son are starving because their cash cow finally slaughtered the farm. I’m coming by the house at noon to collect my grandmother's chest. If any of you are still in my hallway when I arrive, I won't just keep the bank account frozen—I'll file a police report for the eight thousand dollars Julian embezzled from my personal account last month."

"You wouldn't dare—"

I hung up, blocked the new number, and took a deep breath.

The immediate thrill of putting them in their place was satisfying, but it was only the appetizer. Merely leaving them poor wasn't enough. In my past life, they didn't just take my money—they took my dignity, my warmth, and my life. They had laughed as my breath turned to frost inside my chest.

I pulled up a map of the city on my phone and zoomed in on a location three hours north: the granite ridges of Blackwood Mountain.

Deep within those hills lay a decommissioned, subterranean Cold War military communications bunker—a three-story underground concrete fortress built directly into the bedrock, currently owned by a private real estate liquidation firm.

In my past life, a group of wealthy elites had survived the entire three months of the ice storm inside that exact structure, completely unaffected by the sub-zero hell above ground.

My eyes hardened as I stared at the satellite imagery of the mountain.

"Julian wants my house," I murmured, staring at my reflection in a shop window. "I'll let him have it. I'll let him and his whole toxic family huddle inside those paper-thin drywall walls when the temperature drops to minus fifty."

I flagged down a taxi, sat in the back seat, and gave the driver the address to a high-end corporate law firm downtown.

The game was just beginning, and for the first time in my life, I held all the cards.