Chapter 9: The Financial Advisor's Proposition
The neon jellyfish pulsed gently over the zero-gravity pool, their soft blue light washing over the remains of the cookout. Empty bottles, crumpled napkins, the scent of charcoal and sea salt. It was the good kind of wreckage.
From her perch on the porch steps, Mai watched the currents shift. Judy had Casey cornered near the grill, a fresh glass of wine in her hand, her posture telegraphing a business proposition that had nothing to do with finance.
“So,” Judy said, her voice pitched low but carrying on the warm breeze. “Now that the world isn’t ending… you and Mike. Up for a private consultation later? I’ve been stressed. My portfolio is diverse, but my needs have been… narrowly focused.”
Casey chuckled, wiping her hands on a towel stained with BBQ sauce. She glanced over Judy’s shoulder, where Stacy was helping Rick stack the cooler. “You know, Jude, you should meet my friend. The successful businesswoman. Interdimensional empire. She could probably use a sharp financial advisor. Or just… a sharp set of nails down her back.”
Judy’s professionally plucked eyebrow arched. “Is that so?”
Stacy didn’t need to be called. She seemed to feel the shift in attention, setting down a bag of ice with a soft thump. She sauntered over, her movements still carrying that lethal, efficient grace. Her eyes, older and wiser than anyone else’s in the yard, flicked from Judy to Casey and back.
“Heard my name,” Stacy said, a knowing smile playing on her lips. “And I’ve heard all about you, Judy. The hands-on approach to client relations.”
Judy’s composure, usually a suit of armor, showed a crack. Interest, raw and hungry, gleamed through. “Only with select clients. The ones with interesting… assets.”
“I bet.” Stacy took a sip from her beer. “For the record, I used to fuck Mike and Casey for years. Before Rick. It was… stress relief. With benefits.” She said it plainly, no shame, just fact. “Rick takes after his dad. In all the best ways. Ways I’d be happy to demonstrate. Privately.”
The air between the three women thickened, charged with a promise that had nothing to do with the setting sun. Judy’s smile turned from professional to predatory. “My condo has a better sound system. And thicker walls.”
“Sold,” Casey said, grinning.
Near the pool, Mai nudged Felicity with her bare foot. “Told you. Stacy. First to get naked and frolic with someone new. Pay up.”
Felicity, curled against Bruce’s side, flushed but didn’t look away from the tableau. She fished her phone from her pocket and tapped a quick transfer. “You have a creepy talent for this.”
Mandi, sprawled on a lounge chair with her head in Ben’s lap, raised her beer. “Nobody loses a pool like this one. Everybody wins, really.”
The older trio disbanded with subtle, purposeful nods. Judy announced she was heading home to “run some numbers.” Casey stretched, announcing she and Mike were turning in early. Stacy simply caught Rick’s eye, nodded toward the house, and he followed, a silent understanding passing between them.
The yard began to empty. Beth, exhausted but smiling, let Marty lead her back to Shiv’s house, two doors down. Mike and Casey said their goodnights, heading for the guest room with a pair of knowing glances at their daughter. Bruce hauled Felicity up into his arms with a playful growl, carrying her towards the beach for a walk, her delighted shriek fading into the crash of waves.
Soon, it was just Mandy, Ben, and Mai in the glowing backyard.
“Well,” Mai said, standing and stretching, her lithe body silhouetted against the holographic palms. “That’s the grown-ups sorted. Our turn. My bones are still buzzing from yesterday. I need to burn it off.”
Mandy looked up at Ben. “You buzzing?”
He ran a hand through her shaggy brown hair. “I’m always buzzing when you’re around.”
“Good answer.” She sat up, finishing her beer. “Basement. Now. Mai, you bringing the good lube or are we using Ben’s gym bag stash?”
Mai laughed, her English accent crisp in the night air. “Please. I have standards. The good stuff is in my room. I’ll meet you down there. Don’t start without me.”
Mandy led Ben through the sleek, quiet house, down the stairs to her basement domain. It was a blend of magic and tech: server racks hummed alongside softly glowing crystal arrays; schematics were pinned to mystical seal-insulated walls. Her large bed, unmade and piled with blankets, sat in the center under a skylight that showed the star-dusted sky.
The anchor in her mind was silent, just a piece of architecture. Here, in her space, with her people, she felt the last coils of residual tension unwind. It was replaced by a different kind of tension, the pleasant, anticipatory kind.
Ben kissed her, his hands sliding under her t-shirt, calloused palms scraping over her ribs. He was sweet, but he wasn’t gentle, not when she didn’t want him to be. She bit his lower lip, sucking it into her mouth before breaking away.
“Clothes. Off,” she said, pulling her own shirt over her head.
The basement door opened and Mai slipped in, barefoot and wearing only a short silk robe that she let fall open as she descended the last steps. She carried a small black bottle. Her body was a masterpiece of lean muscle and smooth skin, and she displayed it with the unselfconscious ease of someone who lived on camera.
“The cavalry arrives,” Mai announced, placing the bottle on the bedside table. She looked at Ben, already half-hard as he shoved his jeans down. “God, he really is ridiculously equipped, isn’t he? Like a draft horse bred for pleasure.”
Mandy shoved Ben backwards onto the bed. “He’s a good boy. Aren’t you?”
Ben’s face flushed, but his eyes were dark with desire. “Whatever you want.”
“I want you to shut up and lie there.” Mandy climbed over him, her knees straddling his hips. She reached for the bottle, slicking her fingers with the cool, slick liquid. Behind her, Mai shed the robe completely, crawling onto the bed to kneel beside Ben’s head, her small, pert breasts hovering near his face.
“You can look,” Mai told him, running a hand through his short hair. “You can even taste, if you’re good.”
Mandy didn’t waste time. She guided Ben’s thick cock, already fully erect and leaking, to her entrance. She was wet, had been since the yard, the charged atmosphere translating directly into a throbbing need between her legs. She sank down onto him in one slow, deliberate motion, her head falling back as she took every inch.
“Fuck,” Ben gasped, his hands flying to her hips, fingers digging into her flesh.
“Yeah,” Mandy breathed, the stretch a perfect, burning fullness. She began to move, a rolling grind of her hips, setting a slow, deep rhythm. “That’s it. Just a warm-up.”
Mai leaned over, capturing Mandy’s mouth in a searing kiss. Her tongue was sharp and probing. She tasted of lemongrass and sake. One of Mai’s hands cupped Mandy’s breast, pinching a nipple, while the other reached down to where Mandy and Ben were joined, her fingers circling Mandy’s clit with practiced pressure.
The dual sensation was electric. Mandy moaned into Mai’s mouth, her pace quickening. The wet, obscene sound of her taking Ben’s cock filled the room, syncopated with their ragged breathing.
“Want a turn?” Mandy panted, breaking the kiss.
“Obviously.” Mai shifted, moving down the bed. She positioned herself over Ben’s face, lowering her cunt onto his mouth. “Lick. Like you’re trying to solve an engineering problem. Find the source of the wet.”
Ben, dutiful and overwhelmed, obeyed. His tongue lashed against Mai’s folds. She gasped, bracing her hands on the headboard, rocking against his mouth.
Mandy watched, her own movements becoming more frantic. Seeing Mai’s back arch, hearing the sloppy, eager sounds of Ben eating her out, pushed her closer to the edge. She fucked him harder, slamming her hips down, taking him so deep she felt him in her gut.
“You like that?” she grunted, slapping a hand against his muscular thigh. “You like having two filthy cunts using you?”
Ben’s answer was a muffled groan against Mai, his hips bucking upwards, driving his cock even deeper into Mandy.
Mai came first, a sharp, silent cry that tightened her whole body. She ground herself against Ben’s face, shuddering, before collapsing sideways onto the pillows. “Good boy,” she rasped, wiping her chin.
The loss of the visual sent Mandy tumbling over. Her orgasm ripped through her, a convulsive, blinding wave that clenched tight around Ben’s shaft. She rode it out, milking him, until she felt his own control shatter.
“I’m gonna… fuck, Mandy, I’m coming!” he choked out.
“Do it,” she commanded, still moving. “Fill me up. Come on.”
With a strangled shout, he obeyed. She felt the hot, pulsing jets of his release flooding her insides, each spasm triggering another smaller aftershock in her own body. She collapsed forward onto his chest, both of them slick with sweat, sticky with sex.
For a moment, there was only the sound of their breathing.
Mai reached over, trailing a finger through the mess on Mandy’s thigh. She brought it to her mouth, sucking it clean. “Efficient. I approve.”
Mandy laughed, a breathy, satisfied sound. She rolled off Ben, landing between him and Mai. The three of them lay in a tangled, spent heap.
The afterglow was peaceful, but Mandy’s mind, never fully offline, was already cycling back. The anchor.The vendor. The rogue data-stream in the yard she’d noted earlier.
“Jeeves,” she called out, her voice hoarse.
The small floating sphere descended from its charging nook near the ceiling, its mechanical arms retracted. A soft blue light pulsed. “Yes, Miss Mandy?”
“Run a passive scan on all mystical and digital frequencies emanating from the property for the last 48 hours. Isolate any signal that doesn’t match our known devices, Aunt Judy’s portfolio tracker, or Bruce’s wrench. Look for repeats, specifically during the cookout.”
“Processing,” Jeeves said, hovering silently.
Ben propped himself up on an elbow. “Can’t switch off, can you?”
“The guy who sold Howard the gear is still out there,” Mandy said, staring at the skylight. “He was probably watching. Seeing if his product worked. When it didn’t… he might have gotten curious.”
Mai sighed, stretching like a cat. “And here I thought the night was over.”
“Signal identified,” Jeeves announced. A holographic display flickered to life above the bed, showing a complex waveform. “A low-frequency mystical carrier wave, piggybacking on the local municipal Wi-Fi. It initiated a brief, high-bandwidth data upload at 20:47 tonight, during the social gathering. The packet was encrypted with a rotating Sylvan cipher.”
“During the cookout,” Mandy muttered. “He was scoping us out. Getting IDs. Who was here.” She sat up. “Can you trace the destination? Not the IP, the metaphysical destination.”
“Attempting geo-thaumic triangulation,” Jeeves replied. The waveform shifted, mapping onto a glowing, three-dimensional grid of Miami. The signal’s path was a tangled knot, bouncing through blind proxy servers and mystical ley-line convergences. It was a professional obfuscation job.
But at the very end, just before the trail vanished into the digital aether, the path stabilized for a nanosecond. The endpoint wasn’t an address. It was a logo, etched in faint golden light before dissipating.
A stylized, open palm with an eye in the center.
“The Palm & Eye,” Felicity’s voice came from the stairs. She stood there, wrapped in Bruce’s flannel shirt, her hair wind-tousled. Bruce was behind her, filling the doorway. “It’s a… boutique. An antiquities dealer. Very high-end, very discrete. My mom mentions them in a footnote about cursed auction items. They have a showroom in Miami Design District. They’re a front.”
Mandy looked from the fading hologram to her best friend. “A front for what?”
“For procuring rare magical components,” Felicity said, walking down the steps. Bruce followed, his face serious. “Regardless of legality. Or ethics. If Howard bought his salts and lunar silver from anyone in Miami, it was from them.”
Silence settled in the basement, the warmth of sex cooling under a new chill.
Mandy looked at the anchor in her mind’s eye. It was still, but it felt more like a loaded weapon now.
“Okay,” she said, her smirk returning, sharp and without humor. “We know where the vendor lives. Now we need to know what he’s selling next.” She looked at the tangled bodies on her bed, then at Felicity and Bruce. “Tomorrow, we go shopping.”
The anchor in Mandy’s mind remained a silent, coiled spring. Upstairs, in the guest room, the soft murmur of her parents’ voices seeped through the floor.
Mike lay on his back, hands behind his head, staring at the ceiling fan. “They’re plotting down there. I can feel it. The basement has that… energetic hum.”
Casey, nestled against his side, traced idle circles on his chest. “Of course they are. Beth got hit. Mandy got a psychic bomb installed in her head. They’re not just going to bake cookies.” She sounded utterly approving.
“I know,” Mike sighed, the worry lines around his eyes softening. “I know she can handle it. She’s smarter than I ever was. It’s just…” His thought trailed off, unfinished.
Casey changed the subject, her voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. “Remember when Mai was living with us? After Yukio got hurt?”
A slow smile spread on Mike’s face. “How could I forget? That girl had zero concept of bedroom boundaries. Used to just… slip in. Naked as the day she was born. Curl up like a cat.”
“Sometimes she brought Felicity,” Mike added, his hand sliding down to Casey’s hip. “All shy and wide-eyed until she wasn’t. Remember that stormy night? Power went out.”
“The night of the ‘scientific exploration of body heat’,” Casey chuckled, her own hand moving lower. “Flick asked so many questions. You were so patient. A regular professor.”
Their laughter was soft, intimate. Talking through those memories, the shared history of their unconventional home, stoked a familiar heat. Casey’s breath hitched as Mike’s fingers found the waistband of her sleep shorts. Her touch on him grew bolder, feeling him stir and thicken under her palm.
“Think they’re doing the same thing right now?” Mike murmured, rolling to cover her body with his.
“I’d be disappointed if they weren’t,” Casey gasped, arching into him as he peeled the fabric down her legs.
Across town, in the sterile, art-deco luxury of Judy’s condo, the talk was of liquidity and leveraged assets. Judy poured three fingers of expensive scotch, pointing with the glass to a holographic portfolio display. “The interdimensional arbitrage opportunities are staggering, Stacy. But the risk vectors are… nonlinear.”
Rick shifted on the minimalist sofa, trying to look interested. He was a baker. Flour ratios made sense. Temporal stock fluctuations did not.
“The key,” Judy continued, setting her glass down, “is a hands-on assessment of the core assets.” Her eyes, sharp and calculating, left the graphs and landed on Stacy. Then on Rick.
Stacy held that gaze, a slow smile spreading. She stood, and with a deliberate, silent grace, began to unbutton her tailored shirt. Judy mirrored her, fingers working the clasp of her own designer blouse.
Rick’s boredom evaporated, replaced by a sudden, hungry focus.
“Why do you think we came over here, Rick?” Stacy asked, her voice a low purr as her shirt fell open, revealing the sleek lines of her body. She shrugged it off.
Judy’s blouse followed, then her slacks. She stood, unselfconscious and perfect, every inch the wealthy executive. “I’ve seen the original asset in action,” Judy said, stepping out of her pooling trousers. “I need to see the modern iteration. The potential yield.”
Stacy stepped close to Judy, their bodies almost touching. She looked over Judy’s shoulder at Rick, who was now on his feet, his own clothes feeling impossibly tight. “Show her, Rick. Show Aunt Judy what you inherited from your dad.”
Rick nodded, a hungry, wordless sound escaping him as he stripped. Judy and Stacy watched, their hands now exploring each other’s curves—a financial advisor and a CEO conducting due diligence with their fingertips. Judy’s perfectly manicured hand cupped Stacy’s breast, thumb rubbing a nipple. Stacy’s head fell back, a smirk on her lips as her hand slid between Judy’s thighs.
“The principal is impressive,” Judy breathed, her eyes fixed on Rick’s erection. “Let’s assess its performance.”
Back in the basement, the mood had shifted from spent to strategic. The scent of sex still hung in the air, a tang beneath the ozone of tech.
“The Palm & Eye isn’t a store you just walk into,” Felicity said, pulling up data on her tablet. Bruce’s large hands massaged her shoulders. “It’s by appointment only. Heavily warded. Mom said they use perceptual filters—you can’t even notice the door unless you’re keyed in or have a pass.”
Mandy paced, a towel wrapped around her torso. “So we need an invite. Or we need to hack the filter. Jeeves, can you analyze the mystical signature of that packet? Replicate a key?”
“The cipher is organic, Miss Mandy,” Jeeves replied. “It requires a biological signature, likely keyed to specific clients. Replication would require a tissue sample from an authenticated individual.”
Ben pulled on his boxers. “So we need to snag a client. Get a fingerprint or something.”
“Or,” Mai said from the bed, still gloriously naked, “we become clients.” She sat up, her eyes gleaming with entrepreneurial mischief. “I have a show. A popular, occult-adjacent diving show. I need rare, mystical protective charms for deep-sea exploration into… ley line convergence trenches. Budget is no object.”
A slow grin spread across Mandy’s face. “You’d be perfect. Glamorous, known for chasing monsters, flush with cash from sponsors.”
“I am perfect,” Mai agreed. “I’ll book the appointment. You lot will be my technical and security team. Filming equipment, of course.” She winked.
“And once we’re inside?” Bruce asked, his voice a low Scottish rumble.
“We find their client list,” Mandy said. “We find out who else they’ve been selling mind-rape kits to. And we plant a little something in their server. A worm. Let’s see how they like being the ones watched.”
The plan solidified in the charged air. It was bold, brash, and exactly the kind of annoying, targeted thrust the Williamson handbook recommended.
Felicity chewed her lip. “It’s dangerous. If they’re this secure, they’ll have defenses beyond wards. They might scan for malicious intent.”
“Then we don’t have any,” Mandy said, her smirk returning. “We’re just rich, curious kids buying shiny things. The malicious intent comes later. From a distance.” She tapped her temple. “The anchor’s quiet. It’s just me in here. They can scan all they want.”
She looked at her friends, this makeshift crew bound by sex, magic, and loyalty. Ben’s protective stance, Bruce’s steady strength, Felicity’s brilliant anxiety, Mai’s fearless flair.
“Mai, make the call first thing,” Mandy ordered. “Felicity, dig up everything your mom ever wrote or whispered about that place. Bruce, I need you to soup up Jeeves with any stealth-tech your wrench can muster. Ben, you’re with me—we’re prepping the van with every counter-surveillance gadget I’ve built.”
The anchor waited. The vendor, oblivious, was now the target. The game had just flipped.
Outside, the neon jellyfish in the pool pulsed once, like a slow, steady heartbeat, as the house settled into a watchful silence. Tomorrow, they would go shopping.