*Who's My Eternal*
New York, 7:43 AM.
The phone slipped from Kael Draven's hand and hit the marble floor with a crack.
"Mr. Draven? Mr. Draven, are you still there?" The bank manager's voice sounded far away. "The accounts are frozen. The estate goes into foreclosure next week. I'm sorry—"
Gone. Every cent. The company, the penthouse overlooking Central Park, the cars, the name he'd spent twenty years building. All of it, vanished overnight.
Kael didn't answer. He couldn't. He collapsed back into his office chair, breath shallow, eyes fixed on the framed photo across the room. His late wife, smiling, holding Noa as a baby and Cindy still in her belly. She'd made him promise to protect them.
"Dad?"
Noa stood in the doorway, 9 years old, school tie crooked. Cindy, 6, hid behind his leg, clutching a stuffed rabbit. They'd heard the phone hit the floor.
Kael forced himself to look at them. Where would they go? What would he tell them? New York would eat them alive now — creditors, lawyers, news crews. The Draven name was about to mean nothing.
His gaze drifted back to his wife's photo. Philippines. He hadn't been home in twenty years. He'd left to become someone. Now he had nothing left but that.
Decision made.
He stood, knees shaking, and walked to the safe behind the painting. There was still one thing left: his old passport, and three emergency plane tickets he'd bought when his wife was sick. Just in case.
"Pack one bag each," he told Noa and Cindy, voice hoarse. "We're going home."
Two days later, Ninoy Aquino International Airport, Manila.
The heat hit them first. Thick, humid, nothing like New York's dry cold. Noa dragged his single duffel bag, eyes wide at the jeepneys and the noise. Cindy clung to Kael's sleeve, her stuffed rabbit already wilting in the 32°C sun.
Kael hadn't been back in twenty years, but the smell was the same — gasoline, grilled meat from the street vendors, rain on concrete. Home.
A rusted driver met them with a cardboard sign: _DRAVEN_. No press. No lawyers. Just an old man who used to work for Kael's father. "Welcome back, Sir Kael," he said, taking their bags without a question.
The car wound through Manila's crowded streets, past skyscrapers and slums stacked side by side, until they reached Quezon City. The gates were still there. Rusted, vines crawling up the stone, but still standing.
*The Draven Ancestral Mansion.*
Kael stepped out and stared. The place he grew up. Two stories, capiz windows, paint peeling, narra wood floors he used to race across as a boy. It wasn't Central Park. It was smaller, older, quieter. But it was theirs. Paid for, untouched, because his father had refused to sell it before he died.
Noa dropped his bag in the foyer, dust puffing up. "Is this ours?"
Kael put a hand on his son's shoulder and nodded. "This is where the Dravens started. And this is where we start again."
Cindy wandered to the wall where old photos still hung — Kael as a kid, his parents, his late wife visiting once when she was pregnant with Noa. She touched the glass.
That night, no penthouse, no staff, no millions. Just the three of them, eating instant noodles on the floor because the power kept flickering. Kael looked at his kids in the candlelight and made a second promise.