Something more than his heart and soul because she already had those.
Something that only he could give her.
He’d have to think about it.
Tristan had never found where his parents and his siblings had moved to after he’d returned to Iowa and discovered their family farm had been deserted, so he couldn’t send them anything.
Maybe he should’ve tried harder.
Maybe they didn’t want him to find them.
He’d talked to his friends—especially Micah, Logan, and Blaze—a lot over the years about that day, about walking into the decrepit farmhouse and finding nothing but dust and mice, and even the neighbors hadn’t known where his parents, brothers, and sisters had gone.
He’d talked to them about how sliced-off he’d felt.
His friends were all estranged from their families, too, and they’d agreed that they were a flock of black sheep, a tribe of scapegoats, but they were all outcaststogether.
And that was why he’d been able to call the Scholarship Mafia guys when he’d needed rescuing from real mafia kidnappers or Cannes con artists, and why they’d called Tristan when they’d needed a couple hundred thousand dollars’ worth of a particular cryptocurrency with no questions asked, or when they’d found themselves hiding under the bed of a corrupt politician’s young wife and needed a distraction so they could jump out the window.
Good times.
Tristan should delete his few social media and messaging accounts or transition them to memorial sites on Wednesday, so hackers couldn’t phish his friends if they hadn’t heard about what was going to happen to him.
Organizing the end of his life soothed him, turning it into an intellectual exercise instead of a looming gray void that he would enter on Wednesday night or Thursday at the latest.
He sipped the scotch, a mellow burn and smoke on his tongue and throat, and deleted everything off his phone’s calendar from Friday onward.
“What’cha doing?” Colleen asked as she leaned on the other side of the table from him.
Tristan slapped his laptop closed and tucked his phone in his pocket. “Just getting ready to set out the charcuterie trays for a snack, and then we might want to turn out the lights for a few hours to rest before we get to France in the morning.”
Anjali and Jian wandered toward the front of the plane, both looking fresher for the rest and food over the last few hours, though Jian still moved gingerly from his broken and bound ribs.
As the two of them encroached on the table where he’d been sitting and Colleen was already standing across from him, an itch started on the back of Tristen’s neck, the tingle of prey when it is cornered. “What’s going on?”
Colleen spun the chair and sat down directly across from him. Anjali took the chair beside her whilst Jian eased into the seat beside Tristan.
He looked at the three of them arrayed around him and lifted his highball glass of scotch. “This is literally my first one. I don’t need an intervention.”
Colleen leaned on her elbows and clasped her hands on the table. “Tristan, we need to talk.”
“No, we don’t.” Stupid instinctive response.
She said, “We need to talk about how we’re going to get the GameShack stock before the New York Stock Exchange closes on Wednesday night.”
“Can’t be done,” Tristan said, completely dismissing the nonsense. “I’ve done the math. The numbers don’t add up. There is no way to procure such an enormous amount of stock in that short of a timeand alsocrash the price. Buying that much stock will move the priceupwhen people see there’s a big purchase order that’s buying. A long squeeze can take weeks to set up, not to mention that it’s illegal to do it on purpose.”
Anjali and Colleen nodded because they were very knowledgeable about finance and knew a whole heck of a lot about the kinds of market manipulation that were not allowed on the Sherwood Forest forum. As moderators, they’d seen and squashed long squeezes, short squeezes, and trade rigging on the boards.
Most of those illegal plans had been hatched in the Killer Whale sub-forum, The Pequod, a private room that the admins moderated but most of the small fish didn’t know about.
Tristan continued, “I don’t have the money to buy three times as much stock as I need and then sell most of it in order to crash the price. That’s pretty much the only way to do what Mary Varvara Bell wants. And with the amount of stock she specified, I couldn’t do that. They want too big of a percentage of the total shares. There’s no way for me to do it.No onecan do it. There’s no way out for me.”
Colleen was shaking her head at him. “You have friends who can help you. Going it alone is just always a bad idea. You have your school buddies, and you have online friends that you’ve made over the years, and you haveus.We’re sittingright here,Tristan, asking how we can help you.”
Tristan set his jaw because there was no way,absolutely no way,he was going to endanger Colleen, Jian, or Anjali again. “Look, this is all me, okay? This is just something I have to do.”
“No, it’s not,” she argued.
