"Gentlemen, now that we have an agreement, I'll take my leave."
Leon smiled faintly as he looked at the four men now holding the Rowan family together.
He didn't wait for a response.
A prompt surfaced in his mind.
Please select the acceleration multiplier.
One hundred times.
Leon lifted one foot and stepped toward the bedroom door.
The instant his foot came down, the world split.
A hundredfold acceleration sealed him off from the outside flow of time.
He seemed to be walking through the same room, the same air, the same light—yet somehow not inside the same moment at all. It was as if he had slipped half a step out of reality and was taking a casual stroll through a parallel slice of time.
The contradiction of it, the dislocation, was enough to make anyone watching feel their scalp tighten.
In Edward Rowan, Victor Rowan, Charles Rowan, and Richard Rowan's eyes, Leon had only just moved.
His foot had not even fully landed.
And then he was gone.
No blur. No transition. No readable movement.
One moment he stood before them. The next, he had already reappeared more than a dozen yards away.
Then he passed through the bedroom door and disappeared from sight.
The four men stared at the empty doorway.
No one spoke.
It was a long while before they looked at one another.
Victor Rowan—the family's public-facing figure in the business world—shivered hard enough to feel it in his shoulders. He rubbed absently at his forearm beneath his sleeve and realized his skin had broken out in goosebumps without him noticing.
His brothers were no better.
"I never imagined," Edward Rowan said at last, exhaling slowly, "that something like this could exist in the real world."
Charles Rowan, who had spent decades at the top of old money circles and had seen his share of dangerous men, kept his eyes fixed on the doorway.
"This is different," he said quietly. "We've all met elite fighters. Men trained to kill. Specialists with physical control that borders on the absurd. But this…"
He trailed off.
Those people, no matter how lethal, were still flesh and blood. Put a bullet in them and they went down like anyone else.
What Leon had just shown them was something else entirely.
The gap was too wide.
Not the distance between one man and another.
The distance between what should be possible and what had just happened in front of them.
Richard Rowan spoke in a low voice.
"We can befriend him. We cannot afford to make him an enemy."
Edward said nothing for a few seconds.
Then he nodded.
"His existence may be the best thing that's ever happened to this family."
History had always been simple in one regard. Whether they held power over nations or fortunes beyond measure, men at the top all wanted the same thing in the end.
More time.
And Leon Li had just opened a door none of them had ever dared believe was real.
…
Just as the four of them were about to say more, a hoarse voice came from the bed behind them.
"Victor…"
A pause.
"Victor…"
Then again, a little clearer.
"Victor."
The four men jolted at once.
Any further thought vanished.
They turned sharply, faces lighting with undisguised relief, and looked toward the old man on the bed.
A moment ago, he had been hanging by his last breath.
Now color was slowly returning to his face.
His eyes had opened.
He looked at the four men gathered around him.
"Uncle."
"Uncle, how do you feel?"
"Dad!"
"Uncle!"
Their breathing turned ragged. The words came one after another.
Victor Rowan flushed red with shock and excitement. For a man nearing seventy, he moved with astonishing speed. He spun and rushed out into the hallway.
"Doctor!"
"Doctor!"
"Doctor!"
Members of the Rowan family, the medical team, and security had been waiting at the staircase the whole time.
The second Victor's voice tore through the corridor, every heart there tightened.
They exchanged glances.
The same thought hit almost all of them.
The old man's gone.
Several doctors in white coats rushed up the stairs toward the bedroom.
The rest of the family followed close behind, grief already rising on their faces.
Security tensed instantly and locked the corridor down.
Then everyone poured into the room—
and froze.
The old man was sitting up against the headboard.
The doctors were stunned for a beat. Their first instinct was that this had to be a final rally before death. They moved quickly to the monitors and medical equipment still tracking his condition.
Fresh data began to populate across the screens.
Dr. Alan Brooks, senior physician overseeing the case, stared at the updated readings for William Rowan.
His eyes widened.
His mouth fell open.
"That's not possible."
For a second, he felt as though he were dreaming.
His mind threw up one impossible phrase after another.
A body pulling back from collapse.
Vitality returning where there should have been none.
A dying system reigniting.
Only moments ago, he had been certain William Rowan was at the absolute end. The body had been shutting down. There had been no room left for optimism, no room left for interpretation.
And yet now—
there was life in him again.
Real life.
Not illusion. Not a monitor glitch. Not a dying reflex.
His body had somehow produced fresh vitality from the edge of total exhaustion.
"Well?"
Edward Rowan and the others looked at him.
Dr. Brooks forced himself to breathe. Then he chose every word with care.
"It's possible some of the earlier readings were compromised," he said. "Based on the current data, Mr. Rowan's overall condition appears to have recovered to roughly where it was about a year ago."
He did not question what had happened.
He did not say what he really thought.
He knew perfectly well this was not a machine error.
But that was what he had to say.
That was not medicine.
That was survival.
"Good," Edward said.
He nodded, satisfied, then stepped forward and patted Dr. Brooks once on the shoulder.
"Thank you."
Then he turned and walked back to the bed.
Dr. Brooks watched his back, lips parting slightly as if to ask something.
In the end, he said nothing.
He understood exactly what kind of family the Rowans were.
Families like this had their own gravity. Their own rules. Their own boundaries.
A man survived around them by knowing which questions belonged in his head and nowhere else.
That young man…
Dr. Brooks thought back to the mysterious figure he had seen that night.
The truth was, he wasn't the only one.
No one in that room said Leon's name out loud.
But every single person there had carved the image of that young man deep into memory.
…
Outside the Rowan estate, traffic still streamed along Riverside Drive.
Leon had already released the acceleration field.
His hands rested in his coat pockets as he walked into the night wind. The front of his overcoat snapped softly in the gusts. He adjusted his glasses with one hand and let the smallest trace of a smile touch his face.