Tristan laughed. “Max liked you. He’s kind of reserved with people because he is who he is, especially after his older brother died and he accidentally got the throne shoved at him, but inviting you to meet his wife was huge. He’s overprotective as hell of Dree. He hovers around her like a psychotic daddy eagle. You did great.”
She didn’t believe him at all.“Right.”
The unreality of it assailed her.
Two weeks before, Colleen had been a college-dropout clerk working in a struggling computer-gaming chain store, and now she was hanging out on yachts and at the Monte Carlo casino in Monaco and chatting up royalty.
She slipped her fingers into Tristan’s hand. “I’m having a great time.”
He hugged her against his side and pressed his lips against her temple. “That’s all I want.”
The dealer announced,“Rouge!Red wins.”
Tristan collected his money and whispered into her hair, “Let’s get out of here.”
In bed that night, when Colleen was sated and sore and Tristan was wrapped around her, he murmured, “Whatever happens, tonight was the best night of my life. If it all had to happen to lead up to this day with you, it was worth it to me.”
Colleen clung to him more tightly. “Me, too.” She thought about it. “Except Jian and Anjali getting kidnapped. To hell with the Butorins.”
He chuckled. “Yeah, to hell with them. I want you to have something, just in case.”
That seemed morbid. “No, you don’t have to do that.”
“Yeah, I do. I haven’t had a spare minute to dodge out and buy you something because I didn’t want to spend those minutes away from you.”
“Dude, you gave me a bank account full of money. I checked it. That was a lot more than we agreed on. Like, ten times more. Did you make a typo? I was going to bring it up.”
“Don’t bring it up, and it wasn’t a typo. No matter what happens, I want you to be taken care of, at least enough to get through school.”
“That’s tuition, books, and dorm for me andtwentyof my most intimate friends.”
He nodded. “Good. Start a business when you get out. Or take a trip around the world. I just hope I’m there to see you do it.”
The weight of it became too much, and she hung her head. “Don’t talk like that. I want to see things with you. I want you to tell me what’s on the menu and what I should eat. I want to go to casinos and other things with you. Speaking of going places, there’s that yacht club at the end of the pier—”
Tristan clasped her chin and lifted her face, and then he slid his warm palm over her cheek. “I want to. I’ll try. But I want you to have something. It’s the most valuable thing I own that Mary Varvara Bell won’t get, or at least, she can’t take it away from you.”
“You’re giving me youryacht?”
“Nope.Better.”Tristan opened the nightstand drawer and pulled out a small, portable hard drive, which he placed in her palms. “Here. In a year or two, you can buy your own yacht.”
“What’s this? Your vacation pictures with other women so I won’t mourn you?”
“It’s my Superman program, the one that arbitrages stock market futures and squeezes pennies out of every stock market in the world. Just in case I survive, and just in case we go our separate ways at some point, I tweaked the code to keep our two serpents from fighting each other. That’s if I make it out of this. If I don’t, then you’ll have the only copy. If something happens to me and I don’t log into my beast for two weeks, the kill switch will activate, and it will wither and die. I didn’t want it running up the score if there’s no one to take the money. Oh, and I called yoursSupergirl.”
“Pleasedon’t talk like that,” she said, and her chest felt funny. Bad-funny, not good-funny.
“This one, though, I’ve already hand-coded your bank accounts into it. All you have to do is plug that USB into a computer and upload it into any website to set it free. I was going to do that for you, but it seemed like something we should do together or that you should do when you want to. It also has a kill switch and a rudimentary dashboard for the login, but I didn’t write it for casuals. If you want to change your bank accounts, you’ll have to go into the code.”
The shiny black box, the size of a pack of cigarettes, seemed to weigh like lead in her hands. “Is this illegal?”
“No. It’s completely legal, though a little devious. If anything, syncing the prices at the markets is a social good, and they’re essentially paying you to do it. It’s notillegallike what we’re doing with GameShack is.”
“Oh, yeah. I know. But you don’t have to give me this. This is, like, money for the rest of my life without working.”
“Exactly.”
“It seems excessive.”
