William Rowan was already far too old to create value in any conventional, measurable sense.
At his age, he no longer ran businesses or sat at the center of daily decisions. What he provided the Rowan family was something far harder to quantify—his presence, his legacy, the weight of his name, the goodwill he still carried among people who mattered, and the stabilizing force he represented inside the family itself.
That kind of value could not be reduced cleanly to a number.
So in the end, Leon set the price for the deal at what could only be called an extraordinary discount.
For one year of William Rowan's lifespan, the Rowans would pay—
one hundred million dollars.
The family had three days to transfer the full amount into the account Leon provided.
Which meant that, as of tonight, Leon's daily income had reached one hundred million dollars.
A number most people would never come close to earning in an entire lifetime.
…
Night had settled fully over the city.
Leon walked beneath canyon walls of glass and steel, through the glowing arteries of Manhattan, until at some point he stopped and looked up.
He looked at the towers.
At the sheets of light burning behind curtain walls and office windows.
For the first time, he thought they were beautiful.
For the first time, he thought they were magnificent.
Before tonight, whenever he looked up at buildings like these—one after another, rising hundreds of feet into the sky, boxing him in on every side—he felt only pressure. The sliver of sky overhead had always looked too small. The towers had felt enormous, cold, untouchable.
And he had felt small.
Smaller than small.
Like an insect crawling at the bottom of a world built for something else.
Leon raised a hand.
He spread his fingers toward the moon hanging over the city, bright and clean above the skyline.
Then he slowly closed his hand.
As if he were gripping the moon itself in his palm.
Something surged inside him.
Hot. Violent. Long overdue.
His mouth split into a grin.
A second later, laughter burst out of him.
Loud. Unrestrained. Wild with release.
He laughed with his head tipped back, laughed without caring who heard, laughed as though he were finally tearing through years of pressure with his bare hands.
Leon had been holding himself down for far too long.
By the time it tapered off, tears had gathered at the corners of his eyes.
Pedestrians moving past on the sidewalk turned to look.
In a city this big, most ordinary people lived carefully. They lowered their voices, shrank their wants, sanded down whatever remained of their sharpness just to survive another month.
So when they saw a man laughing like that under the towers, some smirked at him—
but underneath it was envy.
Others looked on with blank, exhausted faces, and somewhere deep in their eyes, there was something else.
A flicker.
Hope, maybe.
Leon finally straightened, still smiling.
Then he stepped to the curb, flagged down a cab, and climbed in.
As the car pulled away, he made a promise to himself.
He would never go back to living carefully.
Never again to that small, humiliated, cautious version of himself.
If life was going to be lived, then he would live it all the way.
…
The cab moved steadily through the night traffic.
Inside, the middle-aged driver chatted with Leon on and off in the loose, drifting way cab drivers sometimes did with passengers who didn't look like trouble.
At first it was nothing.
Traffic.
Gas.
The weather.
Then, maybe because Leon listened without interrupting, maybe because the city had worn him down too hard for too long, the driver's voice changed.
He exhaled through his nose and gave a tired laugh.
"Sorry. Didn't mean to ramble."
Leon looked at him through the rearview mirror. "Go ahead."
The driver kept his eyes on the road.
"Some nights you just need to hear your own voice, you know?"
He gave the steering wheel a light tap with one hand.
"I've got two kids. My mom's been in and out of treatment this year. Rent keeps going up. Insurance keeps going up. Everything keeps going up except what I actually make."
He forced a smile that didn't hold.
"At home, I don't say much. My wife's already carrying enough. Kids are kids—they shouldn't have to look at their father like he's falling apart."
He swallowed.
"So I drive. And sometimes I talk to strangers, because strangers don't have to do anything with what I say."
Leon said nothing.
The driver continued, quieter now.
"There are days I feel like if I stop moving, even for a little while, everything piles on at once. Bills, family, work, my own head…" He shook it off and gave another humorless laugh. "Sounds pathetic when you say it out loud."
"It doesn't," Leon said.
The driver was silent for a moment.
Then he said, "I'm forty. Feels like I've already burned through two lifetimes."
Leon glanced at the man.
Above his head, the familiar information floated into view.
Name: David Shaw
Age: 40
Remaining Lifespan: 13 years, 58 days, 17 hours, 20 minutes, 08 seconds
Only fifty-three.
Leon looked away.
Then again, given the weight on the man's shoulders, maybe every day he lived was already being paid for with pieces of his life.
The rest of the ride passed in stretches of silence and scattered conversation.
By the time they entered Leon's neighborhood, the driver had mostly regained control of himself.
The cab rolled to a stop outside Leon's apartment building.
The driver glanced at the meter.
"We're here, sir. Total's $68.40."
Leon nodded.
He pulled out his wallet.
There was a thick fold of cash inside—several hundred dollars, loose and uncounted.
He didn't bother separating the bills.
He took the whole stack out and handed it over.
"Keep the rest."
The driver froze. "Sir, this is way too much—"
Leon opened the door, then paused.
"Oh. One more thing."
He took out a pen, wrote down a number on a piece of paper, and handed it through the gap between the seats.
"If you ever get desperate for money, call me."
The driver stared at him.
Leon's voice stayed calm.
"I may be able to help. But remember this—next time, it won't be charity. The price may be higher than you expect."
He didn't wait for a response.
He got out, shut the door, and walked off.
Within moments, his figure had disappeared from the driver's sight.
David Shaw sat there holding the cash, stunned.
His first instinct was to get out and run after him, to return the money.
He actually started to move.
Then he stopped.
His hand tightened around the bills.
A second later, he slapped himself hard across the face, as if to make sure he was awake. Then he turned toward the direction Leon had gone and bowed his head deeply.
After that, he looked down at the phone number.
Carefully—almost reverently—he folded the paper and tucked it into his wallet.
To Leon now, money was beginning to lose all real weight.
It was becoming less like wealth and more like a tool. A token. A placeholder for something far larger.
David started the cab again and pulled away from the curb.
He had not driven far when his phone rang.
He answered it.
Something was said on the other end.
David's face changed instantly.
His foot slammed the brake.
The tires shrieked against the road.
Then, a heartbeat later, he crushed the gas pedal and the cab shot forward into the night.
…
Leon reached the door of the apartment he rented, took out his key, and unlocked it.
The moment he stepped inside, something in him shifted.
The elevated detachment from earlier did not disappear, but it changed. It became quieter, colder, harder to name.
He looked toward the living room.
Chloe had apparently come home exhausted. She was still in her work clothes, asleep on the couch.
Leon stood in the doorway and watched her.
A strange sense of distance rose in him.
Just yesterday, the two of them had still been living on the same plane—worrying about rent, calculating expenses, enduring the same cramped little life.
But tonight, as he looked at her, that no longer felt true.
It was as if she still lived inside a smaller world, one bounded by ordinary worries, ordinary fear, ordinary time.
And he had already stepped outside it.
Leon said nothing.
He simply stood there for a moment, looking at the tired woman on the couch as though an invisible gulf had opened between them overnight.