Chapter Three: The Price of Attention

Kron never came upstairs. He left a card with no phone number. A gold crown was pressed into black paper; on the back, one sentence read: DO NOT EDIT A FUTURE YOU CANNOT AFFORD. Xu Zhixia sealed it in a transparent evidence sleeve. Within half an hour, the gold and the words vanished, leaving plain black stock. “Call the police?” Chen asked. “And report a man for giving you a card with bad ink?” She opened Starbridge's ownership records. Its largest institutional shareholder, at 19.8 percent, was Crown Capital. The same fund sat behind Obsidian, Aurora, and the network broadcasting the Super Bowl. “Kron. Crown,” she said. “He wasn't warning you. He was confirming who opened the door.”