"I am Marcus Hale, son of Richard Hale! Save me and I will make you rich!"
Laughter broke over him before the promise finished.
"Still thinks money fixes everything," someone said.
"Isn't he the billionaire heir?"
"Yeah… the one who ruined that poor scholarship kid."
Phones glowed in a ring around him. No hands reached out. Rain slid down Marcus's face, mixing with blood as the Bentley groaned against the canal barrier and fuel burned his lungs. For the first time in twenty-three years, his name meant nothing.
Marcus Hale had always lived by that name. Doors opened before he touched them. People obeyed before he spoke. He had grown up rich, powerful, untouchable — and he treated poor people like they were beneath him.
Kai Dunmore had been one of them.
The quiet scholarship student with cheap shoes and worn clothes. Marcus mocked him openly — calling him "charity," laughing at his poverty, making sure teachers and sponsors saw him as inferior.
He still remembered parent day.
Kai's mother had come in faded clothes, hands rough from labour, eyes proud as she stood beside her son. Marcus had looked at them and laughed to his friends.
"Generations of poverty," he'd said. "Some families never improve."
Kai had heard. His mother had too.
She only lowered her eyes.
Later, when Kai earned an internship on merit, Marcus erased it with a single call and a smile.
"People from your background should know your place."
Kai never fought back. He only looked at Marcus with calm, steady eyes.
That same boy was kneeling beside him now in the rain.
Kai Dunmore.
Past and present crashed together in Marcus's mind — the insults, the humiliation, the stolen future, the shame he'd forced on Kai's mother — and the impossible truth that the only person helping him was the one he had hurt most.
"Fuel line's gone," Kai said, dragging him up. "Move or we both die."
"Why…?" The word came out weak.
"Move!"
They stumbled across wet asphalt.
One step.
Two.
Three.
The Bentley exploded behind them, a brutal wave that hurled them forward. Marcus hit the ground hard, breath gone, vision tearing apart. Through the fading haze he saw Kai still reaching back for him, still pulling him farther away.
The poor boy he had destroyed — and the son of the woman he had shamed — was the only one who came to save him.
Then everything ended.
Not darkness. Not silence. Not even emptiness, because emptiness has dimensions and this had none.
Only the memories remained. They came all at once, without mercy, without sequence: every face he had dismissed, every person he had used and discarded, every moment he had looked at suffering and calculated its inconvenience to himself. Kai running toward him through rain. Kai Dunmore's face over four years — open at first, then careful, then closed, each stage of that closing a trophy he'd never acknowledged collecting.
He died.
Kai died too.
Something vast spoke into the nothing.
Life terminated.
Wealth irrelevant.
Power revoked.
Moral balance: catastrophic deficit.
Reassignment authorized.
Cold returned. Hunger returned. Weight returned.
Reincarnation in….
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