The Cryptocurrency King

FULL RENT, CASH

"Full rent. Cash. Count it twice if you want."

Wes set the envelope on Sal Renner's kitchen table hard enough to make the man flinch. Two thousand three hundred dollars, every bill of the back debt plus this month's, counted out in twenties the night before with hands that had finally stopped shaking.

Sal stared at it, then at Wes, then back at the envelope like it might be a trick.

"Where'd this come from."

"Does it matter?"

"It matters to me whether I'm about to get a call from a cop about a kid who robbed a gas station."

"I picked up extra shifts," Wes said, and the lie came out so smooth it scared him a little. "Overtime at the garage. Double shifts at the bakery on weekends. It adds up faster than you'd think."

Sal counted the money slowly, licking his thumb between bills like he thought Wes might have short-changed him out of spite. When he finished, he looked almost disappointed there was nothing left to threaten.

"Huh," he said. "Guess the deadbeat found some hustle after all."

Wes didn't answer. He didn't need to. He walked out of 4C with his shoulders back for the first time in months, and if some small ugly part of him wanted to watch Sal's face crumple with the envelope in his hands one more time before the door shut, he let himself have that. Just once. Just this once.

Out in the hallway, Mrs. Alvarez's door cracked open again, the way it always did whenever anything worth watching happened on the fourth floor. She caught Wes's eye and gave him the smallest nod, the kind that didn't need words attached to it, and Wes felt something loosen in his chest that had been wound tight since the day his father died.

"Bout time somebody stood up to that man," she said, quiet, before easing her door shut again.

It didn't fix everything. It fixed one thing, cleanly, completely, and that was more than he'd managed in a year.

That night he transferred enough to clear the pharmacy balance too, careful, small amounts, spread across two weeks so nothing about the pattern looked unusual to a bank algorithm scanning for exactly that kind of behavior. He was learning fast. Break the money into pieces small enough that no single piece looked like anything.

He still hadn't answered the message.

It sat in his inbox for four days, unread status stripped away the moment he'd opened it and never dared to reply, sitting there like a held breath. I did. Two words. A stranger, somewhere, who'd watched him find the same crack in the world that Wes had found, and who knew exactly what Wes had done with it.

He told himself it was probably nothing. A bot. An automated abuse-detection script phrased like a person to scare small-time skimmers into stopping. That was a real thing security teams did. He'd read about it during his library research, honeypot warnings dressed up in casual language specifically to spook amateurs off before real investigators got involved.

He almost believed it.

He spent those four days moving carefully, splitting withdrawals, spacing out logins, doing everything the research he'd crammed at the library told him would keep a pattern from looking like a pattern. He told himself he was being paranoid. He told himself that twice a day, usually right before catching himself checking the apartment window for cars that weren't there.

Then, on the fifth night, his laptop chimed again while he sat at the kitchen table doing his mother's medication schedule by hand because the app kept crashing on Sawyer's old tablet.

UNKNOWN: You paid off a landlord in Little Havana on Tuesday. Cash. Two thousand three hundred dollars, give or take. Careless. Cash withdrawals over two grand get flagged even when the deposit itself doesn't.

Wes's stomach dropped through the floor.

UNKNOWN: I'm not the one you should be worried flagged it.

Across the table, Sawyer looked up from his pens, some instinct in him catching the change in Wes's face the way he always did, faster than anyone gave him credit for.

"What," Sawyer said. Not a question. A demand.

"Nothing," Wes said, closing the laptop too fast, too obviously. "Homework thing."

"You don't have homework. You dropped out."

"Sawyer."

"You've been weird for three weeks. Weird happy, then weird scared, sometimes both on the same day. I've been keeping track." Sawyer pulled a small notepad from his pocket, one Wes had never seen before, and flipped it open to a page covered in tiny, careful handwriting. "March fourteenth, you smiled at nothing. March twenty-second, you didn't sleep. Yesterday you paid Sal in cash and today you're scared of your own computer."

Wes stared at the notepad, at weeks of his own behavior catalogued in his brother's neat block print, and didn't know whether to laugh or be terrified.

"You're keeping a log on me."

"Somebody has to. You don't tell me anything real anymore, so I have to figure it out from the outside, like a science experiment." Sawyer closed the notepad. "I don't know what you're doing. But I know it's big, and I know it scares you, and I know you think not telling me protects me. It doesn't. It just means I have less information to work with."

His brother studied him for a long moment, the way he studied everything, cataloguing it, filing it away for later even when he pretended not to notice. Then he went back to his pens without another word, which was somehow worse than if he'd pushed.

Wes sat there with the laptop shut under his palm, the cursor of that unanswered message still burning behind his eyes.

I'm not the one you should worry flagged it.

If that was true, someone else already had.