That part at the end had tumbled Colleen like an avalanche.
And now his hand was wrapped around hers like a steel trap, and the polar bear in Colleen wanted to yank herself the hell out and lumber across the frozen wasteland into the blowing snow and midnight sun.
Panic.
3
Torn
Colleen
The helicopter banked, turning in the California evening above Los Angeles. The sky darkened as the sunset over the sea caught fire outside the helicopter’s window.
Colleen leaned, tugging at her hand a little where Tristan held her fingers.
He didn’t release her. Indeed, Tristan seemed to grip her fingers a little more firmly as he and Micah jabbered on about airports and boarding school friends.
Airports! The helicopter would eventually land at an airport.
Yep. Airport.
Colleen relaxed her hand until it became limp and tried to drag it away from him. Between being drenched and the cold sweat oozing from her palm, her hand probably felt like an eel.
Eels were notoriously hard to catch. Tristan King shouldn’t be able to hold onto her hand that easily. Her fingers should be flopping on her own leg by now.
But still, her hand was bundled up in his.
His fingers flexed and then wove through hers, making a giant, mutant fist.
Between all that stuff that he had said back in the hotel room in Malibu about how he really liked her and now this weird thing of trapping her hand in his, Colleen became a hooked fish on the end of the line, flopping to get away.
She bounced against her harness as she tried to stand and leap. “I’m really nervous about flying, especially in a helicopter, and I need to hold onto my harness.”
Tristan looked concerned and leaned outward. “Is your seatbelt not latched right? I can make sure that buckle is secure.” He reached toward her chest with his claw-like fingers extended like he was going to tear her heart out.
Colleen crossed her arms over her chest like she was in a straitjacket. “I’m fine! My buckle is fine! Jeez, it’s hot in here. When are we landing?”
Tristan withdrew his hand, but he kept it raised by his shoulder and in plain sight. “We should be at LAX within a few minutes. I’ve already had a call from Jian that he’s readying the plane.”
“Well, good! I mean, I suppose that’s safer.”
“Right,” Tristan said, and then he looked down, frowning.
Colleen wove her fingers around her shoulder straps and shivered. “There’s no safe place we can go. You said that they were Russian mafia, and Svetlana said it, too.”
He settled back in his seat, still solemn. “Yes. Yes, I did say that.”
Yes, a private plane. A private plane that she would get on with Tristan, who was also the King of the Killer Whales, TwistyTrader, who was also God-only-knew what else.
She didn’t really know this guy, Twist or Tristan King or whatever he was calling himself today.
She didn’t know anything about him.
All that stuff he’d told her about boarding school might be fake. That Micah Shine guy might be faking it, too. He might be just going along with whatever Twist said. What kind of a name was Micah Shine, anyway? It sounded fake. Shine. Didn’t that mean lying? Shining someone meant that you were conning them, right?
Everything Twist had ever said might be fake. Surely, that baloney he’d rambled on about at the hotel about liking her and all this crap while he’d been holding her hand had to be nothing but a con.
She didn’t even know what he was after anymore.
She didn’t have any money.
He’d already gotten her into bed.
She didn’t own anything of value. Her laptop was a jury-rigged piece of trash that she’d reconfigured to run Linux so it would work.
Whatever Tristan wanted from her must be something else, something valuable that she knew or could do that he was willing to swindle her for.
But what on Earth could a man like Twist want from her? She owned nothing, was nothing, controlled nothing. When she’d met him, she was a nada-nobody working a dead-end job with an unhealthy internet-forum habit. He was a much better coder than she was.
And with that thought, she figured it out.
The Sherwood Forest stock market forums wouldn’t seem important to an outsider because it was supposedly just an entertainment and education bulletin board, but its influence went further than that.
Thousands of small- and medium-size traders blindly followed the advice on the boards.
Journalists were known to haunt the posts, looking for scoops.
They were a mob on the stock market.
That was why she took her moderating job so seriously. Any one of the small traders could be wiped out with a single piece of bad advice. A rumor could start a run on a stock, either buying it at any price or dumping it as fast as they could.
But put together, there were enough traders and lurkers and influencers and market makers and journalists on Sherwood Forest to create more than a ripple in the trading frequency and stock price of even moderately priced stocks.
Between the Killer Whales and the rest of Sherwood Forest’s Merry People, someone with control of a moderator’s account could influence the people who believed everything the forum told them, and they could banhammer anyone who tried to call them out.
And thus, a person with a Sherwood Forest moderator account could control markets, at least for a while.
TwistyTrader didn’t like Colleen for herself.
He wasn’t attracted to her or interested in her.
He was trying to steal her Sherwood Forest moderator credentials.
Yeah, Tristan had known her name and address because she’d had to give the Devilhouse her ID. He’d conned her into meeting him there so he could track her down. And then he’d shaved his beard, changed the way he talked, and worn a long-sleeved shirt in June in Phoenix, Arizona, to cover up the tattoos on his arms and make sure she didn’t recognize him at GameShack.
And he’d worn a suit when they’d been at the airport. Even Anjali had said they must be boiling in those suits in the hot summer morning.
Obviously, Twist had been hiding something. No one in their right mind would wear a long-sleeved shirt or a suit in the desert summer unless they had a good reason.
And then he’d gotten her fired and convinced her to go with him to LA.
Damn, it all fit together, and Colleen was an idiot.
She’d been stupid to think anyone ever would just like her. Even her own family had thrown her the hell out of their lives as soon as they could and sabotaged her on her way out.
Tristan King had wanted something from her.
She rested her forehead against the side window of the helicopter and watched a white bull’s-eye painted on the asphalt slowly come nearer as they landed. A drop of water from her still-soaked hair dripped down the plastic window.
As soon as the helicopter skids touched the tarmac, she was bounding up and away from TwistyTrader and his accomplice. She grabbed the handle of the door and yanked it, sliding the heavy door backward.
Behind her, Tristan called out with that stupid fake British accent, “Colleen? What are you doing?”
She didn’t want to jump the last few feet out of the helicopter. Her stupid, strappy, high-heeled sandals would break her ankle when she tried to land on asphalt. So, she yanked the sodden silk of her skirt away from her legs and held onto the edge of the door as she meticulously climbed out like a sloth trying to swing around a branch.