"No, Amelia."
She blinked. "No?"
"I don’t want repayment. Not for the treatment. Not for anything."
Amelia stared at him.
The refusal had been delivered cleanly and without hesitation, with the same calm certainty he used for every statement he made. It was not a negotiating position. It was a finished answer.
For a moment she didn’t know what to say.
She had, on some level, been half-expecting this. The way he had handled everything from the moment she had woken up suggested it. He had not left his name. He had not left contact information. He had specifically, she had learned from the hospital’s compliance officer, instructed the facility to never release his account details to any patient or representative. Every signal he had transmitted since the rescue had been the signal of a man who did not want repayment.
Which meant her instinct had been correct. Which meant the speech she had prepared, in some part of her mind, had always been a speech she would have to deliver against an opponent who had already declined to participate in the exchange.
She set her coffee down.
"I was half-expecting that, honestly." Her voice carried a small, quiet acknowledgment. "Especially after I learned what you’d done with the hospital. Most people who help anonymously don’t go to the trouble of staying anonymous afterward. You did. That told me a lot."
She drew a slow breath.
"If you weren’t who you are, if you weren’t a public figure right now, with your face on every TikTuk feed and your name on every viral clip, finding you would have been almost impossible. I want you to know I would have tried anyway. I would have spent however long it took. But the fact that you’re already this visible is the only reason I didn’t have to spend the next two years looking."
She took the smallest sip of her coffee.
"So tell me." Her eyes lifted to his again, steady and serious. "You really don’t want any repayment? You don’t need my help with anything? Nothing I have, money, influence, connections, anything, is something you want from me?"
Stan watched her.
He had been about to give her the same straight no he gave to most of these questions. The system penalty made the refusal automatic, if she returned the thirty million, the hundred-times multiplier would shred him for three billion dollars he did not currently have available in liquid form.
But the second half of her question landed differently than the first.
’You don’t need my help with anything?’
The answer to that was, suddenly, not no.
Amelia Don was a Warner Bros. shareholder with significant international reach. Amelia Don had a personal security detail from Vanguard, the same firm Stan had been considering hiring less than an hour ago. Amelia Don had connections he didn’t have, in industries he wasn’t yet established in, with access points he couldn’t directly buy.
And Amelia Don was, by her own urgent insistence, looking for a way to repay him that wasn’t money.
He set his coffee down.
"Since you’re so determined to find a way," he said quietly, "there is something."
Amelia’s eyes lit up. The change was instant and unmistakable, the visible relief of a woman who had spent two days carrying a debt she couldn’t put down and had just been given permission to start carrying it differently.
"Anything," she said. "Name it."
"I’ve been dealing with a problem for the past several weeks." He kept his voice level. "A number of people have been impersonating me. Not casually, systematically. Some of them on platforms, posing as me online. Some of them in person, presenting themselves to wealthy targets as me and running long cons. One of them recently scammed the heir of the Reeves family, a young man named Von Reeves, out of a substantial portion of his inheritance. The scammer used my online alias to do it. Specifically, he used my identity as Sir Streak."
Amelia’s brow tightened. She was listening with the focused, calculating attention of a woman whose business instincts had just kicked in.
"I’ve been thinking about the right way to handle it," Stan continued. "It’s not a problem I can solve through public confrontation, exposing one impersonator publicly just teaches the rest to be more careful. What I need is a coordinated tracking operation. Someone who can identify the scammers operating under my identity across multiple platforms and multiple geographies, and then make them pay in a way that sends a clear, lasting message to everyone else considering it."
He held her eye.
"You have Vanguard on retainer. Vanguard has a serious intelligence and tracking division, I’ve been told as much, by people whose judgment I trust. You also have the broader Warner Bros. network and your own connections beyond it. Between Vanguard and your own resources, you have the ability to find these people and dismantle their operations in a way I can’t easily do on my own."
He let the proposition settle.
"Track them. Identify the active impersonators. Get the man who scammed Von Reeves first, that one is personal to me, and I want him made into a public example. And after that, the rest. Systematically. Quietly. Until the world understands that pretending to be Sir Streak is not something that goes unanswered."
He sat back slightly.
"That’s what I want. If you genuinely want to repay me, that’s the help I’ll take."
Amelia did not respond immediately.
She held the cup in her hands and looked at him across the table with the careful, measured stillness of a woman processing an offer she had not been expecting. The fruit plate arrived. The waiter set it down between them without comment and left.
Neither of them touched it.
Amelia exhaled slowly.
"You’re asking me," she said, "to use Vanguard and my Warner Bros. influence to run a coordinated international tracking operation against organized identity fraud."
"Yes."
"Targeting scammers operating across multiple platforms in multiple jurisdictions."
"Yes."
"With the explicit goal of making at least one of them a public example severe enough to deter the rest."
"Yes."
A small, slow smile began to form at the corner of her mouth.
It was not a polite smile. It was not the careful, neutral smile she had used in the parking lot earlier. It was something sharper and more focused, the expression of a woman who had spent her adult life building and using her influence in opposition to predators, who had a long, well-established personal hatred of men who took from those weaker than them, and who had just been handed a project that aligned, almost perfectly, with the most satisfying impulses she carried.
"Stan." Her voice was quieter now, but it had gained a new edge. "Do you understand what you’re asking?"
"I think I do."
"You’re asking me to do the one type of work I genuinely enjoy. The one type. Tracking down men who exploit other people’s trust and dismantling them. Publicly."
"I had a feeling you might be the right person for it."
She held his eye for a long moment.
Then she set her cup down with deliberate care.
"Consider it done."