The Cryptocurrency King

THE FOUR-THIRTY-ONE

He made it home in eleven minutes flat, lungs burning, legs shaking, and found the apartment exactly as it should have been. Diane asleep in the bedroom, oxygen machine ticking its steady rhythm. Kitchen table empty, pens lined up in a neat row exactly the way Sawyer always left them before heading out.

Except the clock on the microwave read 4:31 p.m.

Sixteen minutes past when Sawyer was always, always home.

Wes's blood went to ice.

He checked the bathroom. Empty. He checked the fire escape, the hallway, knocked on Mrs. Alvarez's door hard enough to rattle the frame, and got nothing but a confused shake of her head when he asked if she'd seen his brother come in.

He ran back down to the street, scanning both directions, half expecting to see his brother's familiar careful walk rounding the corner right on schedule with some perfectly reasonable explanation for the delay. Sawyer stopped to read a sign. Sawyer's shoe came untied and he had to redo it exactly right. Sawyer counted cracks in the sidewalk sometimes when the numbers in his head got loud.

The street stayed empty.

"Sawyer doesn't miss his time," Wes said, mostly to himself, pacing a groove into the hallway carpet. "He's never once missed his time. Not once. Not in three years."

He called the therapy program. The receptionist confirmed Sawyer had left at 4:02 p.m. exactly, right on schedule, walking his usual route alone the way he always did, because independence was part of the program and Sawyer had earned every bit of it through months of practice.

Four blocks. Thirteen minutes on a normal day. Twenty-nine minutes had passed since then.

Wes's phone buzzed. Not a text from Sawyer. A message from the same untraceable channel that had been finding him for weeks now, the Watcher, the one voice that had somehow always known things before Wes did.

WATCHER: I told you to keep him close. I need you to stay very calm and read the next part carefully.

Wes's hands shook so badly he nearly dropped the phone.

WATCHER: A car matching a description used by Marea Holdings associates was seen on the route your brother walks, four minutes after he would have passed through that block. I don't have visual confirmation of what happened. I have a partial license plate and a very bad feeling, and neither of those things is something I can hand you fast enough to matter right now.

WES: Where is he.

WATCHER: I don't know yet. But I know Rourke gave you forty-eight hours to call a number on a white card, and I know your brother just went missing three hours into that window, which means somebody decided the clock didn't need to run its full course.

Wes stood frozen in the hallway of a building that had never once, in three years, felt unsafe, staring at a message that had just turned the ground beneath him into something that could open up and swallow everything he had left.

From the bedroom, Diane's weak voice called out, sensing something wrong the way she always could. "Wes? Where's your brother?"

He didn't have an answer that wouldn't break her, so he didn't give her one yet. He stepped into the hallway, out of earshot, hands shaking so badly he had to brace them against the wall.

Think, he told himself. Sawyer needed patterns, not panic. If he was scared right now, wherever he was, the only thing that would help him was someone thinking clearly on the other end of whatever was happening.

He tried the Watcher's channel first, fingers flying across the keyboard, three messages in a row, each one more desperate than the last. No response came back. Not even the typing indicator that usually appeared within seconds. For the first time since this had all started, the one voice that had always seemed to know more than Wes did had gone completely, absolutely silent, exactly when he needed it most.

That silence told him something Rourke's threat hadn't managed to. Whatever protection he'd been leaning on without fully realizing it, it had limits, and he had just found the edge of them.

His phone buzzed again. A new number this time. Unknown. No name, no contact saved, nothing but ten digits and a single word typed beneath them that made the whole apartment building tilt sideways around him.

Call it.

Wes looked at the white card still crumpled in his other fist, the same ten digits printed clean across the front, and understood with a clarity that felt almost peaceful, almost cold, exactly what kind of person he was about to become in the next sixty seconds.

He wasn't a ghost anymore. Ghosts didn't fight back.

He dialed the number.

It rang once.

"Took you long enough," Rourke said.