“Oh, don’t you worry about that, Tristan. You have enough to think about, what with you and Colleen Frost being so involved in this little conundrum. You keep an eye on your problems, and I’ll handle the rest. I’ll expect the GameShack stock price to be less than one US dollar one week from Friday, and I’ll contact you with a link for you to transfer the agreed-upon amount of stock to White Holdings, Inc. Goodbye, Tristan.”
Tristan tapped his phone to end the call. He missed the red dot, so he fumbled and had to press it again to hang up.White Holdings, Inc.?
When he turned in the chair, Colleen stood almost directly in front of him, her hands braced on her hips. “That sounded bad.”
Tristan nodded. “Yeah, it was bad.”
And he needed to figure out how bad it was before he told Colleen anything about it.
“Um, we have to pull it together for a few minutes because Anjali is almost here with my computer monitor. She called me while she was already driving over.”
Knocking rattled the door, and a woman’s voice called out,“Yoo-hoo!”
“And there she is.” Colleen walked toward the door.
Tristan rubbed his face, composing himself.Seriously, dammit.
Mary Varvara Bell’s threats rang in Tristan’s head aboutthings getting dangerous for him and his informant,whom she’d confirmed that she knew was Colleen Frost.
His whole body vibrated with paranoid rage, from his scalp to his jaw grinding his teeth together and the cords of his neck to the muscles in his feet. Everything tensed because heneededto leap up to protect Colleen. Even his tongue was rigid and shoved against the roof of his mouth.
When Colleen opened the door, the woman who’d dropped her off at the airport stood in the doorway. The breeze picked up her long, flowing hair that fell to her waist or farther. She wore a short, sequined skirt and a tank top, which seemed a little overdressed for a Wednesday morning.
However, Jian had assured Tristan on many occasions that Tristan had no sense of fashion or decorum, so maybe he was reading too much into it.
Anjali glanced at Tristan and didn’t seem surprised to see him, and then she told Colleen, “It’s down in my car. Help me carry that monstrosity? And thank you very much for lending me the monstrosity. It came in very handy for debugging code for class and moderating Sherwood Forest forums. With you busy, it’s been hard to keep tabs on all the Killer Whales, and that suspicious character TwistyTrader hasn’t poked his head up at all since last weekend. I checked his logs. He has not been silent this long since he joined the boards two years ago. I think he is sulking about you putting him on moderation.”
“Oh, yeah, well, he’s probably just busy,” Colleen said. “Or people need social media breaks sometimes. That’s probably what happened to him.”
Wait,so Colleen’s buddy Anjali was a moderator at the infamous stock market forum, too?
And he noted, she didn’t like TwistyTrader.
Tristan said, “Colleen talked me into joining that forum a few days ago. I’m what you call a minnow, I guess.”
Anjali raised one groomed eyebrow at him. “If you just joined, you’re a sea slug, a bottom-dweller, for the first month and ten posts.”
Oops.He’d forgotten about the newbie level. “Oh, yeah. That’s right.Sea slug.Who are you there?”
Colleen laughed at him. “Tristan, this is PikachuMod.”
“No kidding!” Tristan said, laughing.“You’rePikachuMod. Jeez, the Killer Whale guys areterrifiedof you. Everyone says the Pikachu has huge teeth, meaning that you bite. You’refeared.”
Anjali’s skepticism turned into a tight smile. “As it should be.” She turned back to Colleen. “People are still asking about you. I’ve assured them that you’re fine, but there’s a conspiracy theory going around that you were kidnapped and trafficked.”
“Well, tell them I haven’t been kidnapped. Do they need proof of life?” Colleen held up her phone.
“No pictures right now,” Tristan said. A decent coder could strip information from image files, and any picture of Colleen could give away their location right then and for the rest of her life.
Damn, that was so vulnerable.
Colleen eyed him but then turned back to Anjali. “Yeah, I have a lethal case of bedhead right now. No filter in the world can help me that much.”
“They would say it was Photoshopped anyway. They are definitely all wound up in their crazy theories. But you should make an appearance. There’s a whole thread dedicated to ‘Where in the World is QueenMod Moderator?’ Aliens have been mentioned.”
Colleen told her, “Okay. I’ll get on. We’ve just been tied up.” She snorted and glanced at Tristan, and he forced a smile onto his face in return. “But, we don’t really need the monitor. I don’t know how long we’re even going to be in town, and you said you were using it.”
But they needed the monitor.
