Certainly, even having her in the second bedroom in the penthouse and then Jian off in another part of the hotel somewhere might invite accusations of impropriety.
Dammit.
Tristan spun and landed on the bed because standing upright seemed like an unnecessary hassle. His feet were hanging off the end, so he kicked his shoes off and then sat up to strip off his socks and rub the sand grains off his feet.
Colleen was probably being ushered to her room on the other floor of the hotel. He hadn’t asked Jian for the room number precisely to forestall what was going through his mind just then, which was traipsing through the hotel and knocking on her door, standing with his arm braced on the frame, and waiting to be invited in.
Nope. Couldn’t. That was why he hadn’t asked.
Instead of stalking Jian and demanding to know her room number, rather than haunting the floors until he heard the bell of her laugh through a thin hotel wall, he should do his damn work.
The meeting scheduled for the next morning was with his long-term money managers, and that appointment was much more important than today’s meeting with Toledano. Twenty times as much of his money was parked with them, and they had banking connections and thus could access vast amounts he could borrow.
His notes needed to be in order if he was going to convince them to lend him enough money to be able to parlay it into the sums he needed to pay off Mary Varvara Bell.
And thus, Tristan slid his computer out of the overpriced courier bag Jian had purchased for him and flipped open a slew of spreadsheets, entering numbers from accounts and then sorting and analyzing them in a dozen different ways.
Over hours, the numbers blurred in front of his eyes and made no sense. If GameShack’s main source of income was their live streaming services, as he’d been assured it was, then why were those numbers so damn dismal?
Their obscure cryptocurrancy, CurieCoin, must be dragging down operations. Insisting on being paid in such an unlikely crypto, and only that crypto, seemed suspicious.
But their balance sheets they submitted to the Federal Trade Commission appeared to show they were profitable.
Yet, they couldn’t be unless their modest userbase were addicts who shoveled CurieCoin at their streamers by the virtual wheelbarrowload.
To command that kind of a rabid fanbase, they must be showing niche porn, except that Tristan had popped over to their streams and found only first-person shooter games and occasional Minecraft feeds.
It didn’t add up.
And yet two sources had assured him that the streaming side of GameShack was wildly profitable.
He needed another finance major like himself to bounce ideas off of until he understand what the numbers meant.
Another finance major like Colleen.
Tristan rose from his desk chair, fully intending to ask Jian to produce her even though it was ten o’clock at night, before he stopped himself.
Because it was inappropriate.
Dammit.
Instead, he slapped his computer shut and fell upon his bed more in frustration than despair, but damn.
Yeah, he couldn’t pine away for Colleen. The damn numbers needed to get done.
So, he sat up.
His phone in his pants pocket poked him in the hip as he rose, so he tugged it out of his pants and flung it on the bed beside him.
The screen lit.
A notification scrolled onto the home screen that he had a social media direct message waiting for him.
Whilst there were potentially hundreds of people it might be from, he hoped the message was from QueenMod.
As always, because he was a coder at heart and thus slightly paranoid about the upcoming emergence of strong AI in the Singularity that would forever change history and mankind’s place in the cosmos, resulting in either Utopia or Terminators, he went back to his computer on the desk and ran his login through a VPN back on his yacht in Monaco.
Thus, the security software he’d written and uploaded onto that computer in Monaco would filter any malware he encountered and encrypt anything he sent, as well as disguise his location so anyone would believe that he was still in Monaco.
