He hadn’t told Blaze what he was being forced to do, and he hadn’t told Micah. If Logan called, Tristan wouldn’t tell him either.
But Colleen—
Because she had been with Tristan in LA and was still with him, she was in harm’s way. She deserved to know.
Not good enough.He could make sure she was out of danger within hours. He could just dump money on her and tell her to get lost, though Micah had a point about them being safer together.
So if they were together, if she might be able to help Tristan with what he had to do, then he needed to tell her.
But he didn’t want to involve her in it.
Because it was immoral. And depending on how he did it, it toed the line of being illegal.
Because the best ways to do it wereentirelyillegal.
And afterward, when he transferred the stock to the Malefactor’s estate at an artificially depressed price, that wasdefinitelygoing to be illegal.
But he didn’t have to involve Colleen in that. Indeed, that was a few keystrokes on a computer. Tristan, alone, would do it.
But she was knowledgeable about both computer programming and the financial markets. She could help him.
Rationales for not telling Colleen flashed in his head, each one more desperate than the last.
She would worry.
She would judge.
She would throw him out of her apartment and lock the door, as she should.
And she should have all the information about him so she could make that choice for herself.
“Just to be clear,” Tristan said, “I never wanted to get you involved in this. If your manager hadn’t mistreated you so badly, and if I hadn’t provoked him to fire you, I wouldn’t have involved you at all. Well, maybe,” he mused. “I probably still would’ve asked you to go to coffee with me, and in all honesty, maybe I would’ve offered you a job to fly around the world with me and talk coding because I liked you from the first minute I saw you. So that would’ve ended up with the same result. But I wish I hadn’t done it. I wish I hadn’t gotten you involved with me and my problem. So I’m sorry.”
Tristan reached for his rum-colored briefcase, which he’d stowed under her computer desk when they’d arrived the night before. He lifted the soft leather flap over the top and rummaged around inside until he found the thick cream stationery emblazoned withMary Varvara Bell.
As he handed it to her, relief spread through his entire frame, all six feet four of it, nudging out the trepidation about Colleen’s reaction. Tristan had to spill his heart to someone, and Colleen was the only person he felt safe enough with to spill it to.
Her eyebrows pinched toward the top of her nose as she read the letter.
Tristan waited, resolved to endure forever if he needed to. Waiting was better than the very real possibility that she might throw it back in his face and tell him to get the hell out.
She glanced at him over the top of the page a few times, but she read the entire thing before she asked any questions.
Finally, she flipped the final page over, glared at its blank reverse side, and frowned. “That’s all they said?”
“Yes.”
“They didn’t say what the stock was for or explain why they want it?”
“That’s all I got. That’s all I know.”
She dropped the letter onto the computer desk and stabbed it with her finger, her fingernail painted and manicured the previous afternoon before everything went to hell. “And if youdon’tdo this, if you don’t follow their directions to the letter, they will take everything you own and ruin you.”
“According to the promissory note I signed when I was twenty-two years old, they can take absolutely everything I own away from me. That includes not only the Anonymity computer program that the Butorins kidnapped us to steal, but also another algorithm that I set loose just a few months ago that essentially churns money for anyone who owns it. Just like Sergey was so impressed with his offer of clean and laundered money, all of that money becomes legitimate. A crime syndicate would love it. They’d even be able to run their black-market money through it and clean it.”
Colleen hadn’t looked up at him yet. “And all you have to do in order to keep your money and your yacht and your nifty computer programs that run around the internet to vacuum up money and erase you, is to acquire millions and millions of dollars’ worth of GameShack stock, burn down the company until that stock is essentially worthless, and give the worthless stock to this estate or hedge fund or whatever it is that’s run by this woman, Mary Varvara Bell.”
“They said the stock would be transferred to them, and I think they have some sort of portal or way to receive it that is set up for that. But yes, that’s what I took away from the letter, too.”
