Billionaire Cashback System: I Can't Go Broke!-Chapter 35: City of Dreams

Ryan played six more hands through the rest of the night.

He lost two of them — one to Christian, who’d recovered from the bluff and come back sharper, and one to a man who’d joined the table late and turned out to be considerably better than he looked. The losses were small, controlled, they didn’t change the shape of the evening.

The wins were better.

Not as dramatic as the three kings hand, nothing that stopped the room again, just steady and quiet — Ryan reading the table, reading the people, folding when the math was wrong and staying when it wasn’t. He’d found a rhythm somewhere in the second hour that felt like remembering something he hadn’t known he knew.

When Marvin finally called the game around midnight, Ryan stacked his chips and had them counted.

Ninety-four thousand, two hundred dollars.

A sixty-four thousand dollar profit on a thirty thousand buy-in.

He took the bank transfer with the same expression he’d maintained all evening, thanked the dealer, nodded at the table, and stood up.

Freddie shook his hand first, which Ryan hadn’t expected. "You’re going to be a problem," Freddie said. Not unfriendly — almost admiring.

Christian just looked at him and shook his head slowly with something close to a smile.

Marvin said nothing. He was already on his phone. Ryan got the feeling Marvin processed things privately and on his own timeline, which was fine.

--- 𝘧𝘳𝘦ℯ𝓌𝘦𝒷𝘯𝑜𝑣𝘦𝓁.𝒸𝘰𝓂

The party had thinned significantly. The core event crowd had mostly gone, leaving behind the people who either lived in this world or had nowhere better to be.

The lights in the penthouse had dimmed slightly, the music lower than it had been earlier, the whole atmosphere settling into something more personal than public.

Ryan found the balcony door and stepped through it.

The cold hit him cleanly, a sharp contrast to the warmth inside. The city spread out in every direction below — the grid of it lit up and moving, streams of headlights on the avenues, the dark rectangle of Central Park visible to the north, the clustered glass towers of midtown blazing to the south.

From twenty-something floors up on a clear night it looked less like a city and more alive, something that breathed and moved independently of the people in it.

He stood at the railing and looked at it.

He’d made a promise to himself weeks ago. That promise had still seemed enormous then, too large for the size of what he actually was at the time.

Standing here now with sixty-four thousand dollars that hadn’t existed three hours ago and a Monday meeting with a venture capitalist and a team working toward something big — the promise felt different.

More possible.

The IRS. The unknown text. Whoever was watching whatever they thought they were watching.

He wasn’t going to fold. He’d figure it out the same way he’d figured out the table tonight — read the room, read the people, stay calm, and don’t move until the moment was right.

He heard footsteps behind him. He’d been around Zara enough now that he recognized how she moved — unhurried, no wasted motion.

"You were impressive back there."

He glanced back at her. The night breeze was catching the lighter strands of her hair, moving them across her face. She was still in the dress from earlier, a glass in each hand.

He turned back to the city. "Thanks."

She came to stand beside him at the railing, holding one of the glasses out toward him. He took it. Wine, and he could taste immediately that it was the expensive kind — the sort where the difference from the regular kind was immediately obvious and slightly annoying because it meant all other wine had been quietly lying to him.

They stood there for a moment without talking, looking at the lights below.

"It’s beautiful, isn’t it," Zara said. "This city."

"It is."

She held her glass loosely over the railing. "I stand up here sometimes being one of the very few people for whom it worked out. And I think about how many dreams died down there. In that maze of concrete and glass."

Ryan sipped the wine. "Many. Most, probably."

"Mm." She was quiet for a moment. "I suppose we can’t all have happy endings."

Ryan looked at her. "Is this yours? Being up here, having what you have, where you are in your career — is this your happy ending?"

Zara thought about that. Taking the question seriously instead of deflecting it.

"I used to think it was," she said. "When I was younger I was certain this was exactly it. The destination." She looked down at the city. "But my dad used to say — fulfillment’s a funny thing. Rarely found in the places you go looking for it."

"Your dad sounds like a wise man."

She smiled. Small, private. "He was."

Ryan heard the past tense. Noted it. Let it sit where she’d put it — she’d moved on quickly and he understood why, and this wasn’t the moment to reach for it.

She turned to look at him instead, the subject closed without being closed.

"So," she said. "You told me when we met you had about four hundred dollars to your name."

"Something like that."

"And then you bought me a six thousand dollar coat." She looked at him steadily. "And tonight you put thirty thousand on a poker table to spite a man you’d met forty minutes earlier."

"I didn’t do it just to spite him."

She gave him a look.

"That was one of several reasons," he conceded.

She laughed. "Did you act broke to get close to me? Was that the strategy?"

"I actually was broke," Ryan said. "Genuinely."

"And now you’re doing thirty thousand dollar poker games."

"Yes."

"In two weeks."

"Give or take."

She shook her head slowly. "How does that happen, Ryan."

"I get good interest."

"On what?"

"You wouldn’t believe me if I told you."

She looked at him directly. "Try me."

Ryan glanced back through the glass doors at the thinned party inside, then back at her. He leaned in slightly, close enough to keep it between them.

"Every time I manage to get closer to you," he said quietly, "the universe sees fit to reward me."

He pulled back. Not all the way — not as much distance as there probably should have been given the railing and the night and the wine.

Zara looked at him.

"That is the single most ridiculous line I’ve ever heard in my life," she said.

"Is it working?"

She broke eye contact. Looked at the city for a second, then back at him.

"I think so," she said.

The distance between them had been reducing in increments neither of them had declared. The city hummed below. The breeze moved through again, cooler than before.

"Do you want to kiss me, Ryan?"

He looked at her. "Do you want me to?"

She didn’t answer immediately. Her face changed slightly — the composed version of it she wore everywhere softening into something that didn’t have a name, and a warmth moved up from her neck that she didn’t try to hide.

That was answer enough.

He closed the remaining distance and kissed her.

She kissed him back immediately, one hand finding the lapel of his blazer, the city spread out below them in all its indifferent glittering enormity, thousands of lit windows and a thousand dead dreams and the ones that hadn’t died yet still moving somewhere down there in the dark.

When they separated the night air was very still.

Zara looked at him, her hand still on his lapel.

Neither of them said anything for a moment.

"The coat suits you, by the way," Ryan said.

She looked down. She’d put it on at some point during the evening without mentioning it — the deep burgundy catching the light from inside through the glass doors.

She looked back up at him. "You paid too much for it."

"Seeing you wear it makes it worth every penny."

She held his gaze.

Below them the city kept moving, the way it always did — the way it did for every person standing in a high place making a decision, regardless of whether the decision turned out to be the right one.

Ryan had a meeting with the IRS. An unknown number that knew his name. A Monday meeting that could change everything or prove to be nothing.

Standing at this railing, her hand still on his lapel, the wine in his hand and the city below — none of it felt very heavy.

It felt, for the first time in longer than he could accurately remember, like the beginning of something rather than the continuation of something that was already going wrong.

He looked out at Manhattan.

He was going to take it.

All of it.