Three days passed.
The real estate agent was nothing if not efficient. He showed up at Ethan's door with a finalized contract, a pen, and the carefully neutral expression of a man who'd already calculated his commission.
One signature. That's all it would take. One signature, and 1.7 million marks would land in Ethan's account. Combined with his parents' savings, that brought his total to just over two million.
Ethan stood in the living room and let himself look — really look — at the place one last ti.
The faded wallpaper his mother had picked out when he was three. The scratch on the baseboard from the tricycle he'd crashed into it at full speed. The kitchen doorfra where three pencil lines marked his height at three, four, and five years old — the last one drawn just weeks before the accident.
Thirteen years of mories, packed into nine hundred square feet.
His throat tightened. He pushed it down.
"Don't change anything," he told the agent. "Not a single piece of furniture. Not the wallpaper. Nothing."
The agent looked at him with sothing that might have been sympathy. "The buyer's financing will take a while to process. They won't be moving in imdiately. I can keep an eye on the place for you — three months."
"Three months is all I need."
"After that, it's their property. I won't be able to stop them."
Ethan nodded. "I'll have it back before then."
He signed.
Everything Ethan owned fit in a single suitcase.
He'd always been frugal — a side effect of growing up with nothing — but seeing his entire life reduced to one battered piece of luggage still stung. Clothes. A few textbooks. The cracked phone. A photograph of his parents he'd taken off the wall and tucked between two shirts.
With no house left to his na, the only option was the Holloway residence.
When he arrived and knocked, it wasn't Frank or Linda who opened the door. It was Natalie.
Natalie Holloway was about his age — sixteen, maybe seventeen — and she had the kind of face that would've stopped traffic in a few years when she grew into it. Right now, in oversized sunglasses and a school hoodie, she mostly looked annoyed.
The annoyance deepened considerably when she saw who was on her doorstep.
"Oh. It's you." Her tone could have flash-frozen a swimming pool. "I finally get a day off, and you show up. Co back another ti."
She moved to close the door.
Ethan, who'd survived two years of Ashford Prep's finest sociopaths, was not about to be defeated by a teenage girl with a grudge. He jamd his foot in the doorfra before it could shut.
"What are you doing—"
"Natalie, if I can't get into this house, I'm sleeping on the street tonight. I literally do not have money for a hotel."
"That sounds like a you problem—"
"You two are going to rip that door off its hinges."
Linda Holloway appeared behind her daughter, grocery bags in each hand, the weary expression of a woman who'd been managing this particular conflict for years.
Her eyes flickered to Ethan's suitcase. She didn't look surprised — more like a woman confirming what she'd already guessed.
She didn't comnt on it.
"Co in," she said, stepping past Natalie. "There's a room at the end of the hall. Clean it yourself. Nobody's going to wait on you."
A current of warmth spread through Ethan's chest. He'd been rehearsing how to ask — what words to use, how to fra it so it didn't sound pathetic. And Linda had just handed him a room without a single question.
Sharp tongue. Soft heart. Exactly as advertised.
Behind him, Natalie reacted like a cat whose tail had been stepped on.
"What? Mom, he's living with us now?"
"Natalie." Linda's voice went flat and cold. "That is your cousin. Watch your mouth."
Sothing in Linda's tone — the maternal equivalent of a loaded weapon — made Natalie swallow her next words. She retreated to her room with red-rimd eyes, but not before shooting Ethan a look of pure, undiluted resentnt.
Great, Ethan thought. This is going to be fun.
"Aunt Linda, I'm fine. She's not—"
"Shut up." Linda set the groceries on the counter without looking at him. "I'm going to ask you one ti: is what you're doing worth it?"
She was looking at the suitcase. At the sum total of a seventeen-year-old's life, cramd into a box with wheels.
"It's worth it." He t her eyes. "Everything I've lost — I'm going to get it all back. With my own hands."
Linda studied him for a long mont. Then she nodded once.
"I don't trust you," she said. "But I trust my husband. If Frank decided to help you, he has his reasons. Now go clean your room. Dinner's in an hour."
She turned and disappeared into the kitchen.
Ethan hauled his suitcase down the hall, feeling lighter than he had in days.
Dinner was a battlefield.
Linda had cooked enough food for a small army — her default response to family stress — and the table was packed with dishes by the ti Frank walked through the front door.
He spotted Ethan imdiately. His eyes went to the suitcase visible through the hallway door, and his face darkened.
"Get up. We're going to find that agent right now. How dare he—"
"Frank." Linda's voice. Calm. Final. "Ethan will be eighteen after the New Year. He made his own decision. Are you going to hold his hand for the rest of his life?"
Frank's jaw worked. He looked at Ethan.
Ethan looked back. "Uncle Frank, you know what I'm building. When it works, I'll buy the house back exactly as it was. Every piece of furniture. Every wall."
"And if it doesn't work?"
Ethan dropped the casual act. t his uncle's eyes with sothing steady and absolute.
"It will."
For a mont — just a flicker — Frank saw soone else standing there. Not the scrawny teenager with the cracked phone and the suitcase. Soone older. Steadier. A man with broad shoulders and a calm voice who'd once thrown himself in front of shrapnel without a second thought.
David.
Like father, like son. After all these years of raising the kid, he'd ended up exactly like his old man. That sa quiet stubbornness. That sa refusal to bend.
Frank's grip on Ethan's arm loosened.
"You little brat." His voice was rough. "If you don't buy that house back, I'll skin you alive."
They sat down to eat.
Natalie was already at the table, radiating hostility like a space heater radiates warmth — except the opposite. She kept her eyes on her plate and didn't acknowledge Ethan's existence.
The al proceeded in tense silence until Frank set down his chopsticks and placed a bank card on the table in front of Ethan.
"Three million marks. With what you have, it should be enough."
Linda, who'd known about it since the phone call, said nothing. She'd made her peace.
Natalie had not.
She stared at the card. Then at her father. Then at Ethan. And the resentnt she'd been swallowing for years — every sacrifice her parents had made for this boy who wasn't even their son — finally clawed its way out.
"Three million?" Her voice ca out high and sharp. "Are you serious right now?"
"Natalie—" Frank began.
"No! No! Mom, Dad — do you hear yourselves? Three million marks for him?"
She was on her feet now, chair scraping back against the floor. Her eyes were bright and wet and furious.
"It was fine when you were feeding him and clothing him. Fine. I dealt with it. But this? He gets kicked out of school and your response is to hand him our entire savings?"
"Do you know what people at school say about him? Go ask anyone — every high school in the city knows he got thrown out of Ashford Prep!"
"And he's dragging your reputation down with him! The great Frank Holloway, principal of—"
"That's enough, Natalie." Frank's voice dropped low.
But she was past the point of caution. Past the point of caring about consequences. The words ca pouring out like water through a broken dam:
"Why should I shut up? Soone has to say it! He sells his parents' house, moves into ours, and now he's taking three million marks that should be our family's money?"
She pointed at Ethan. Her hand was shaking.
"It serves you right that you don't have parents. Soone like you doesn't deserve—"
CRACK.
The sound of the slap was louder than anything that had been said.
Natalie's head snapped to the side. She stood there, frozen, one hand rising slowly to her cheek. Frank's palm was still in the air — trembling, not from restraint but from the fury it had taken to move that fast.
The kitchen was silent.
Frank Holloway had never hit his daughter. Not once in sixteen years.
Until now.
His voice, when it ca, was barely above a whisper — which sohow made it more terrifying than any shout.
"If I ever hear you say anything like that again, Natalie, I will—"
He stopped. Closed his eyes. Breathed.
The sentence didn't need to be finished.
Natalie stared at her father with an expression Ethan couldn't read — shock, betrayal, heartbreak, all of it tangled together — and then she turned and ran to her room. The door slamd hard enough to shake the walls.
Silence settled over the dinner table like snow.
Linda hadn't moved. Her face was unreadable, but her hands were gripping the edge of the table hard enough to turn her knuckles white.
Ethan sat very still.
He hadn't asked for this. Hadn't wanted it. The three million marks on the table felt heavier than anything he'd ever held — because it wasn't just money. It was a family fracture, laid bare under kitchen lights, with the taste of dinner going cold on everyone's plates.
He picked up the card and put it in his pocket.
Then he looked at the hallway where Natalie had disappeared, and at Frank, who was staring at his own hand like he'd never seen it before, and at Linda, whose silence said more than any words could.
Five million marks. One shot. No room for failure.
The stakes had just gotten higher than nuclear physics.
PLZ Throw Powerstones.
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