She settled down beside them on a deck chair and started locking comments and pushing back on the bad advice the Killer Whales were doling out to the smaller investors. They didn’t delete the comments because that might have tipped the Killer Whales off that the moderators were watching too closely.
Anjali, as PikachuMod, typed in the secret moderators’ group chat, The Killer Whales are hunting today. We need to push back and keep them from eating all the minnows and sea bass, or at least their money.
Colleen typed back as QueenMod, Those jerks. They’re liquidating their positions and telling the small fish to buy to prop up the price.
Anjali looked at Colleen over the top of her phone. “That was what I said.”
“And you were right.”
Anjali scoffed.
In the group chat, several moderators were incensed that the Killer Whales were once again chewing up the minnows, but ScholarMod asked, @QueenMod, don’t you work at GameShack?
She wrote back, I got fired last week, but I can absolutely tell you that there is no way that GameShack is divesting itself of its streaming service or filing for bankruptcy. They have oodles of liquid cash and real estate as collateral for any loan.
Those weren’t the only assets over at GameShack, of course. That massive stash of their cryptocurrency CurieCoins, which were stored in the virtual vault that Tristan and Colleen had discovered, far exceeded the value of their streaming service and real estate.
Colleen still thought it was weird that GameShack was hoarding CurieCoins.
Anyway, she and Anjali kept the little fishies calm in the main chat rooms and told them to wait and see.
Wait.
Because the minnows should hold onto their money.
They shouldn’t buy the dip yet.
They worked through the day, Tristan trading in his bat cave of computer monitors, and Anjali and Colleen on laptops and phones lying on the deck of the yacht. Colleen was soaking up the sun while Anjali lay right beside her under the shade of an awning, and they waved to the rich people strolling along the pier to their yachts.
Anjali asked her, “Do you think Tristan can get us into the yacht club over there? They have a pool.”
From their vantage on the top deck three stories above the waterline, they could see over the lower yachts to the building on the shore. Members wearing white slacks or skirts with blue blazers despite the July warmth strolled into the building, while servants in black suits did their bidding. People wearing swimsuits hung over the wall around the roof on one level, laughing and drinking fruity-looking drinks.
Colleen told her, “I’ll see what I can do.” She hesitated, but she asked, “Are you and Jian still engaged?”
Anjali threw her a friendly scowl like Colleen must have lost her mind. “Of course.”
“Oh. Okay. Cool.”
The New York Stock Exchange closed at four o’clock Eastern Time, which was ten o’clock at night in Monaco. Anjali and Colleen had moved into Tristan’s computer cave because the heat was getting stronger.
Colleen set her laptop aside from where she was sitting at the end of Tristan’s magnificent computer desk, the screens blasting blue light down on them. Three of the graphs scrolling over the screens froze as New York and Chicago ceased stock trading for the day.
Tristan stretched his heavily muscled arms overhead and folded them behind his neck, bowing farther backward in his computer chair. “Done. Nothing more to do for a few hours. Supper?”
Supper at his favorite restaurant and a peek into his life here in Monaco, where he called home? “Yes, please.”
Anjali and Jian had their own plans to stay on the boat that night. Colleen refrained from teasing her friend about them making the beast with two backs.
Jian was still recovering from broken ribs and having been beaten up just two days before, and he mentioned something about needing to tell the story to the other staff on the yacht.
Colleen managed to find a sundress among the few clothes she had left, and Tristan emerged from his closet wearing a midnight blue three-piece suit tailored close to his athletic body that caught the blue in his eyes and made them all the more startling.
Hot damn.
Colleen and Tristan walked along the quay in the warm summer night, a raised sidewalk built on landfill running around the harbor. The streets around the port were even named with the word quay instead of street or avenue: Quai Albert 1er, Quai l’Hirondelle, and Quai Rainier 1er.
Monegasques and tourists crowded the sidewalks as tightly as the New York sidewalks that Colleen had seen on television, while supercars screamed by on the narrow, winding street just inches away. The occasional déclassé Maserati zoomed past, but it was at the back of the bunch.
Despite how built-up Monaco was, once one turned off the main streets, backstreet restaurants and shops occupied the ground floors of shorter buildings just a few stories high, while people lived in apartments on the upper floors.
Tristan’s favorite restaurant was at one of these cozy, non-touristy cafés. Tristan showed Colleen inside, shook the maître d’s hand, and was shown to a table.
The menu was all in French, and it didn’t have prices.
Colleen felt very much like a desert-dwelling hick. She laid the menu on her plate that was flanked with too much silverware. “I’ll have whatever you’re having.”
Tristan glanced at her over his menu, his intense blue eyes curving at the corners as he smiled. “We’ll go over the menu together. I want you to enjoy tonight and thoroughly experience it, princess.”
Colleen ended up getting a creamy dish that she couldn’t pronounce and didn’t know what was in it, but it was absolutely delicious.
Afterward, she pointed to her scraped-clean plate. “You can see I hated it.”
Tristan smiled. “Let’s take a walk. I want to show you Monaco.”
The Monte Carlo casino was built like a palace, an exquisite showcase of wealth and beauty, and nothing like the tacky flashbulb-covered casinos that Colleen had seen, again, in movies and on TV because she’d never actually been there.
She’d never actually been anywhere.
When she got back to Phoenix, whenever that was going to be, she needed to see more of the United States, too. She needed to see the real things, not just generic stock footage on TV.
Colleen had lived in Arizona her whole life, and she’d never seen the Grand Canyon, or Meteor Crater, or the Petrified Forest, or the sky islands of southern Arizona. She’d only seen pictures when her friends had gone there. That, she needed to rectify.
In a gilded blue-and-white room of the Monte Carlo casino, Tristan laid a few chips on red at a roulette table, and Colleen snuggled up against his side like a Bond girl. Slot machines rang in other rooms while the gamblers laughed and chattered over the roulette wheels and poker tables.
Over at one of the doors leading in, the crowd bubbled like they were fermenting, and the tenor of their voices rose with excitement.
Tristan glanced over the heads of the crowd in the direction of the fracas, smiled and waved, and then went back to watching the roulette wheel.
Colleen elbowed him. “What’s the commotion?”
Tristan smiled down at her. “A friend of mine from high school just arrived. He’s coming this way, so take a deep breath and prepare yourself. No matter what happens, he’s a nice guy, and his wife is a feisty little sweetheart. As a matter of fact, I helped him rescue her from kidnappers just a few months ago. It doesn’t look like she’s with him, though.”