“So you’re okay? She’s not going to send anyone after you or your friends? Um, Micah, and—”
“And Blaze and Logan. She’ll consider the matter closed, and we’ll all be okay.”
“Then what’s wrong?” she asked him.
“There are contingencies,” Tristan told her, his face shadowed from the harbor lights behind him in the night. “And they need to be finished within four hours. The first thing is that more than fifty percent of the voting rights of the investors’ total stock needs to be signed over to a designated negotiator by proxy waivers, and it can’t be me. If it were me, the lack of propriety would attract the attention of the Federal Trade Commission. We’ve flouted the law and skirted what they actually allow this whole time, and that would be too much.” He sighed. “And if I go to prison, this will all fall apart.”
“So, should we find a lawyer to be the designated negotiator? Or maybe a hedge fund?” she asked him.
He said, “Colleen, it has to be you.”
“Me? Nah. I wouldn’t know how to do it.”
“You have a basic knowledge of business and finance. That half of a finance degree of yours is going to come in handy. More importantly, the minnows and sea bass trust you. They’re going to need to trust the person who’s holding their right to vote on what happens to GameShack.”
She gestured back to where Anjali was sitting. “I don’t know how to do whatever it is, Tristan. If anything, Anjali is a forum moderator, too, and she has three more semesters of finance than I do.”
Anjali shook her head. “They trust you more than anyone else. This whole plan only worked because you were heading it. If any one of the rest of us had tried to convince the minnows to put their life savings into a trash penny stock, the result would have been uproar and resounding laughter. We would not have gotten ten percent of the response you did. People called your absence ‘an extinction level event’ for the forum when you were missing for a few days. You have to do it.”
The responsibility deluged her.
Tristan told her, “Anjali can advise you, and I’ll tell you exactly what to do.”
“But, what’s the deal?” Colleen asked. “Are the minnow-level investors going to get shafted?”
Tristan shook his head. “They’ll end up with their stock shares and the CurieCoins, but there’s going to be a reorganization. There are several things we have to do.”
“Then we got everything we wanted,” Colleen said, a thrill running through her. “What did Mary Varvara Bell ask for in return?”
Tristan shrugged. “Nothing important.”
56
Proxy Waivers
Colleen
Anjali prepared the proxy waivers, inserting the correct name and information for the GameShack Corporation, as well as Colleen’s name and info as the designated negotiator, into the appropriate slots on the form that she’d downloaded from her advanced business class.
Colleen spent her time drafting posts for the boards, explaining that there had been a change in plans, but that if everything went right, the small fish were going to get a lot more money than previously thought. No matter what, the deals would be over with by the end of the night.
And if everything else fell through or if they didn’t like the outcome, TwistyTrader would make good on his offer of thirty-six cents per share. They had nothing to lose by waiting a few hours.
The Killer Whales scoffed at her, gloating to the small fish that they’d been had. What suckers, they said. There’s one born every minute. They’d gotten out of their positions when their losses were small because that’s what savvy investors do, not suckers like them.
Then Colleen explained a proxy waiver, meaning that the minnows would sign over the voting rights associated with their stock shares for a limited amount of time, but they still owned the stock. The stock would stay in their trading accounts and would not move. It had to do with assigning just the voting rights.
When she was done explaining and the minnows had finished electronically signing the proxy waivers, Colleen held the voting rights to sixty-seven percent of GameShack’s stock.
“Okay, it’s done,” she said to Tristan. “I can’t believe they trusted me with this.”
He reached out and held her hand. The warmth of his hand comforted her. “Remember all those ideas that you had for the GameShack stores when we were sitting at that Starbucks back in Phoenix when we first met? I used those ideas to make the deal. It’s time to do some of them.”
Horror slammed her. She’d made a mistake. “Wait, I told you to sell all the real estate. Are we going to fire all the GameShack employees? We can’t just burn down the company. Remember? Sixty thousand people—”
“Of course not,” Tristan said. “That would be unethical, and I wouldn’t expect you to do it. When I was sitting in my computer room talking to Mary Varvara Bell, trying to figure out what I could offer her, your ethics guided me.” He dropped her hand and stroked her cheek. “It’s one of the reasons why I love you, because I know I can trust you. You won’t betray people. You can’t. When I said I was the spotlight, I was wrong. That’s you. You’re my guiding light.”
Colleen stuttered to a stop. “I—Tristan, I should have said it before. I—”
“Don’t,” he said. “Don’t say anything. When this is over, and it should be over soon, we’ll talk. I wanted you to know, but I don’t want you to say anything you’ll regret, or that I’ll regret. Just let me get through these next few hours, okay?”
“Okay.” Her skin flushed, anxiety emerging as heat.
He drew her into his arms, wrapping her in warmth against the night that chilled her skin.
“Next,” Tristan said, “we take a sledgehammer to GameShack.”
57
Casimir van Amsberg
Tristan
They needed a lawyer.
It was after midnight in Monaco, but that meant it was just after six o’clock in New York and three o’clock in California.
Colleen said, “I don’t know any lawyers.”
Tristan said he knew a lawyer out there he could call. “He’s a friend of Maxence’s.”
“You mean your buddy Max, the royal-dude Prince of Monaco who owns the air we’re breathing?” she asked.
“The very one. Casimir is a good guy. While this isn’t exactly his specialty, he is a contract and intellectual property lawyer.”
Tristan made the videocall and set his phone on speaker so Colleen could hear.
When Casimir answered the videocall, Tristan became uncomfortably aware that he was once again introducing Colleen to a guy who was better-looking than he was, at least in his estimation. Casimir’s hair was dark with streaks of auburn that caught the sun's fire shining over the ocean behind him. He seemed to be standing on a deck overlooking the sea, and he had the most brilliant green eyes Tristan had ever seen on a human being.