Page 92 of Tangled

That was how she felt him sigh.

It was a deep sigh, not a littleAh,likeIsn’t that nice,but a deep, soul-level,“Oh.”

“Everything okay?” she asked from where she was crushed against his side.

“Yeah,” he said. “Aftercare is important. Aftercare is just—really important.”

“I’m okay. That was great.”

He didn’t let go. “No, stay.Aftercare is important.”

50

Tuesday

Tristan

After lunch, Tristan showed Anjali and Colleen his office with a computer rig that took up half the room, and they went to work.

At the opening of the stock exchange and thus trading in New York, which was two-thirty in the afternoon in Monaco, GameShack’s stock price was already sharply lower, well less than half of its closing price the day before, and drifting downward.

The internet was screaming with rumors of GameShack’s imminent demise.

Which GameShack denied.

Vehemently.

They blamed hackers for infiltrating and crashing their system, calling it “a cybersecurity incident.”

And the message boards bellowed, “Well, of course, they’d say that if they were going bankrupt.”

GameShack’s users wanted to know whether their identity and credit card information had been compromised and was for sale on the dark web.

And when GameShack said they’d “look into it” and wouldn’t be releasing any more information, that all communication would go through their lawyers, the real outrage started.

Which was Tristan’s cue.

Tristan began buying small lots of the stock at this lower price, the lowest price it had been in years, just enough to prop it up for a bit and establish that he certainly hadn’t known what was going to happen to the stock price in case he needed that as a defense in court later.

Yeah, their plan was far beyond insider trading, all the way to market manipulation.

Logan’s grandfather, the Malefactor, had taught Tristan everything he knew about business, and the Malefactor wouldn’t have let little niceties like FTC regulations or international law stand in his way.

For behind every great fortune lies a great crime.

Plus, if they did it right, the little investors at the Sherwood Forest forum would come out as winners.

What else could be expected from a forum called Sherwood Forest?

After half an hour of plucking small lots of GameShack stock as the price fell, Tristan opened the floodgates and poured money into the stock market, scooping up all the GameShack stock he could find.

Predictably, because Tristan was creating greater demand, the stock’s price stabilized and began to rise.

Colleen strolled over to where he sat in the control room on his yacht, flipping his eyes around the bank of monitors that formed a semicircular wall on the desk. She set another cup of coffee beside him, espresso and cream, just how he liked it. “How’s it going?”

“We’re almost there. The price is rising to where I want it, so I’m just about to turn it off.”

Colleen wrapped her arms around his neck and pressed her soft cheek against his. His growing beard held their skin apart, and he wasn’t sure he liked that.