The bar emptied out slowly.
The bartender worked a wet rag across the counter in long, monotonous strokes.
Leon didn’t move.
He was turning a question over in his head.
Was he screwing Shawn and Lori over?
No.
He leaned back in his chair and answered himself without hesitation.
This wasn’t a con.
This was saving them.
And saving himself.
Money?
In a few months, every bill in circulation would be nothing but paper printed with a dead president’s face.
Not even worth burning.
A house?
A car?
Stocks?
When the streets are full of things that eat people alive, all that stuff buys you is a slightly more dignified death than the guy who had nothing.
He was Leon Chen.
A transmigrator with empty pockets.
His only asset was what he knew.
Spoilers for a future nobody else could see.
Shawn and Lori had something different.
They had real assets, the kind that still held value on the eve of total collapse.
The kind you could still convert into food, weapons, and gear before the world stopped pretending to function.
He had the information.
They had the capital.
This wasn’t fraud.
It was the last rational asset restructuring before the end of everything.
A partnership where everyone won.
He’d provide the investment advice.
They’d provide the seed money.
And when the apocalypse hit, they’d all collect on what they’d built.
Fair.
Clean.
Simple.
There was one more thing Leon figured he owed them, though.
A bonus.
Call it after-sales service.
Shawn’s feelings for Lori were a time bomb with a long fuse.
In the original timeline, that bomb went off and destroyed everything between the two men who’d been brothers since childhood.
He had a chance to cut the wire before it got there.
Kill that tragedy while it was still just a seed.
Leon stood, turned, and walked out of the bar.
The night air was cool against his face.
He needed sleep.
And then he had a second shareholder to meet.
BANG.
BANG.
BANG.
The knocking was hard and urgent.
Lori jolted awake on the sofa.
She checked the clock on the wall.
Almost midnight.
Since Rick’s accident, her days had collapsed into a single blurred routine: haunt the empty house, run out of strength, fall asleep wherever she landed.
Repeat.
“It’s me!
Lori!
It’s Shawn!”
She exhaled and crossed the room to open the door.
The smell of alcohol rolled over her the moment the door swung open.
Shawn’s eyes were bloodshot, his hair wild.
Every part of him was vibrating at some frequency just past normal.
“Shawn?
You’ve been drinking?
What happened?”
“I’m not drunk, Lori.”
He grabbed her by the shoulders.
His grip was hard enough to hurt.
“Listen to me.
I found something.
I found a way out.”
“What are you talking about?”
She tried to pull free.
He held on.
“A way to wake Rick up.”
The words hit her like a crack of thunder.
She stared at him.
Her mind went completely blank for a second.
“You…
what did you just say?”
“I said I can save Rick.”
His voice was raw with it.
“I met someone.
Someone who has a method the hospitals don’t.
He can actually fix him, Lori.
Not like those sons of bitches in the ward who just shake their heads and tell you they did everything they could.”
Lori’s lips started to tremble.
She looked at him, this half-mad man in her doorway, and what climbed up from the bottom of her chest wasn’t hope.
It was a cold, quiet grief.
He’d finally broken.
“Shawn.” She took him gently by the arm and tried to steer him toward the sofa.
“You’ve had too much.
You need to sleep.”
“I’m not fucking drunk.” He yanked his arm away.
“I know how this sounds.
I know.
But Lori, what else do we have?”
He pointed at the wall.
There was a photo of Rick in his uniform.
Taken back when everything was ordinary.
He was smiling like a man who had no idea what was coming.
“Are you really going to just sit here and watch him turn into a breathing corpse?
Wait for the day you sign the form and they pull the plug?” Shawn’s voice cracked.
“I can’t do that.
I won’t.”
“He’s a con man, Shawn!” The sob tore out of her before she could stop it.
“There are no miracles.
Rick is—”
She couldn’t finish.
“There might be.”
The look in Shawn’s eyes had gone somewhere past desperate.
Past rational.
“Even if he’s running a scam, I have to find out.
What if this is real?”
He searched her face.
“Lori.
This is the last shot we’ve got.
I’m begging you.
Just trust me this once.”
He was looking at her the way he always looked at her when he thought she wasn’t watching.
This woman he’d loved in secret for years.
His best friend’s wife.
Lori looked back at him.
Then at the photo.
What was the worst that could happen?
She was already in hell.
Any light, no matter how faint, no matter how far away, was enough to make her walk into the fire.
“This person,” she said quietly.
“Who is he?”
The next day.
An abandoned gas station on the edge of town, convenience store windows dark and empty.
Leon sat in a folding chair with an unlit cigarette between his lips.
Shawn and Lori stood across from him.
Lori’s face was pale.
Her eyes were swollen from crying.
She studied the young Asian man in front of her with the careful, measuring look of someone trying to find a crack in something.
This was the miracle-maker Shawn had been talking about?
“Mr.
Chen.”
She spoke first.
“Shawn’s told me everything.
I need a guarantee.”
“I can’t give you a guarantee, Mrs.
Grimes.” Leon said it the way you’d state a weather forecast.
No apology in it.
“Call me Leon.”
“I’m not a doctor.
I’m not God.
I’m a middleman.”
He stood and walked closer to her.
“You have two options.
You can walk out of here, go back to the hospital, and stare at a vitals monitor every day.
Hope for something with worse odds than the lottery.
Or you can take a bet.”
His eyes didn’t move from hers.
“A con man doesn’t talk to you the way I just did.
A con man buries you in promises.
He paints you a picture so bright you can’t look away.”
“I’m not doing that.”
“I’m telling you the truth.
This is a high-risk gamble.
The stakes are your husband’s life and everything you have left.”
Lori held his gaze as long as she could.
Then she took a half-step back, her shoulder finding Shawn’s arm without thinking.
“What do we need to do?” Shawn asked for her.
“Money.” Leon said it like a period at the end of a sentence.
“How much?”
“I don’t know yet.”
➤ Next: Eliminating Hidden Dangers