At what price,love?

Chapter 15

When the train pulled out, Kyoya felt like he'd been gutted. They had counted on him from the start to keep Haruhi with them. And he had, for two years. But now he had failed them all. And he had failed himself most of all.

There had to be a way around it. There had to be some leverage.

~oOo~

Suoh had set up an alert on the OHC Investment account. Deposits and transfers. That morning, ¥2 billion had moved out of the account. A couple hours later ¥935,000 were transferred in. At first he wondered how the kid had managed to lose that much money that fast. But no, the outgoing funds had moved to one of KO's investment accounts. The deposit had been a transfer from the Host Club account. Why bother with that small of an amount? Why not just use it to pay for the girl's share of their upcoming trip?

The girl.

It put her into their investment pool albeit at one seventh of the smallest share. The trip was to London, Paris and San Francisco. The money had been moved into one of the KO's accounts at Morgan Stanley. They had offices in all three of those locations. So did Suoh Financials. What could Stanley offer him that Suoh couldn't?

¥2.2 billion.

£16 million.

€19 million.

$20 million.

Not enough to buy a company, but enough to get the attention of an underwriting syndicate. Stanley must be underwriting an IPO and the reclusive Japanese investor KO had enough pull to get in at the opening price. Suoh pull up a list of upcoming IPOs through Morgan Stanley looking for candidates that fit KO's pattern. The most likely one was a video game company going public later this week. The stock would initially spike and then probably drop which meant that KO would sell within the first two days. Suoh chuckled to himself. Must be frustrating as hell to know you were going to net almost ¥1 billion for your friends within a week but you still couldn't outmaneuver a middle-class housewife from Osaka.

~oOo~

Haruhi's first week in Osaka was... different. She was met at the train station by her aunt who looked as disagreeable and unhappy at her arrival as her friends had at her departure. Her aunt's modest three-bedroom home was larger and nicer than Haruhi's old apartment, but she would have to share a bedroom with her cousin Kimi, who was less than thrilled at losing her privacy. The first thing her cousin said to her when they were alone was "Is it true your dad was a gay transvestite?"

"Bisexual," Haruhi said with a little bit more taunting back than was strictly speaking necessary. "But after mom died he swore he never love another woman, and he never did."

"Did he love men?"

"As a matter of fact yes."

The look on her cousin's face went from disgust to the kind of repulsion usually reserved for contagious plague victims.

Her older cousin the accountant regarded her with a kind of contempt, as if it was her fault that she had lost her parents. Her uncle, she supposed, wasn't too bad. He wasn't delighted at her moving in, but he regarded it as a duty that he - as a respectable family man - would have to take on. Haruhi gathered his coworkers and friends expressed approval for his most correct actions. Still, they weren't really any worse than the snobs at Ouran had been when she first started school there. She could live with them if she had to, and maybe they'd even come around eventually.

The kids at school generally avoided her. Either they didn't know what to say to a girl orphaned and forced to move in with strangers or Kimi had told them about her father and they kind of sneered at her. Haruhi emailed the guys every day so she didn't feel totally alone even though she had to be careful not to say anything that might give them the right idea. The teachers seemed reasonably fair although they really didn't know what to do with the student who showed up with less than two weeks of school left. So far, she'd had a literature essay, a term paper, two quizzes and four problems sets. But compared to what she had to do at Ouran, the material was pretty simple. Class A at Ouran was expected to excel in everything, especially academics. Although cranking out the term paper in three days had been a bit of a challenge. She tried not to feel too vain when she overheard the term paper teacher saying that she had run Haruhi's paper through three different plagiarism software packages and couldn't find the source. The teacher had ultimately had to send the paper back to Ouran where the teachers had confirmed that it was Haruhi's writing style and that the girl was an exceptional student, even by Ouran standards. Mostly Haruhi didn't mind. All the schoolwork kept her busy and away from her new family and out of everybody's hair.