Chapter 9: The Midnight Crash
It started precisely at 11:45 PM. Ethan and Chloe were no longer in the lobby; they had retreated to the exclusive penthouse suite of the St. Regis, celebrating their supposed total victory with a bottle of vintage Dom Pérignon and caviar. Ethan was lounging on a velvet sofa, scrolling through his corporate portfolio on his tablet, laughing as he watched his stock options climb another two percent. Suddenly, the screen of his tablet flickered violently. A red warning banner flashed across the display: AUTHENTICATION FAILED: ASSET FREEZE INITIATED BY FEDERAL RESERVE CLEARING HOUSE. Ethan frowned, tapping the screen impatiently. "Must be a glitch in the server," he muttered, opening his banking app to check his personal liquid accounts. But as he logged in, his face drained of all color. The screen displayed a stark, horrifying balance: $0.00. Before he could even draw a breath to process the number, his phone began to ring incessantly. It was his chief financial officer, calling in a state of shrieking panic. "Ethan! Are you seeing this?! Every single corporate account has been locked! The SEC has frozen our trading desks! Institutional investors are pulling out en masse—some unseen entity is dumping our entire stock float on the open market at a thirty percent loss!" Ethan dropped his phone, his hands trembling violently as he stared blankly at the wall. "That's impossible," he whispered, his voice cracking with rising hysteria. "We have fifty million in reserves! We have prime real estate! Who could possibly—?" Before he could finish his sentence, a heavy pounding echoed against the penthouse door. The digital storm engineered by Arthur Sterling had broken through the dam, and the floodwaters were washing away Ethan’s entire empire in real-time.
