Strike Me Down - Mindy Mejia Page 0,85
hadn’t been to him. The guard pulled them apart and dragged her into the elevator.
“Stay with Henry. I’ll explain later.”
The door closed as Mike shifted from foot to foot, mouth gaping, and before she knew it, the guard was depositing her at the curb. “I hope you got what you came for.”
“And then some.”
Ignoring the texts now flooding in from both Mike and Katie, Nora looked up the name of the bank where Corbett had confessed to hiding the money and dialed the number.
“Hi, this is Logan Russo.” A man walking into the hospital did a double take, and Nora winked at him. “I’d like to check my balance.”
She rattled off the information requested. Account number and personal data, not even blinking at how readily she had the details at hand. Of course she knew Logan’s birthdate, her address, the last four digits of her social. It took less than a minute. Sixty seconds to confirm nineteen million dollars were safe in Nevis. The last dot on the map, the end of the chase, but it wasn’t over yet.
Nora turned to the stadium rising above the cityscape, where the tournament lights flashed against the transparent ceiling. The championships were almost done, but there was still time for one last interview.
By the time she flashed her temporary Strike badge to the security guards posted at the gates, the fights seemed to be over, except no one was leaving. It only took a few inquiries to learn Merritt Osborne had been injured in the final match. Dead, one vendor said. No, just knocked out, corrected another. The champions milled around the rings, surrounded by cameras and coaches, waiting for the big announcement Logan wouldn’t be making.
She found Merritt on a stretcher in the locker room, being prepped for removal to an ambulance. Tears leaked down the corners of her eyes into the brace holding her neck and head in alignment, while her entourage hovered uselessly nearby.
“I’m so sorry,” she kept repeating. “I let you down. I’m so sorry.”
Gregg, standing just outside the ring of EMTs, mumbled a reply and lifted a hand, where it hovered stiffly in the air before dropping back to his side. He didn’t seem to know what to do. Nora spotted the Marketing Director at the fringes of the group, fixated on her phone, and moved over to her.
“Is it serious?”
C.J. shrugged, not looking up as she continued to type. “Concussion. Maybe some internal bleeding.”
“That’s too bad. Gregg wanted her, didn’t he?”
“He thought Merritt would represent empowerment and energy, the next phase of Strike.” C.J. retracted the phone and frowned at the stretcher being wheeled out to the ambulance.
Nora shook her head. “Why did he think Logan would have picked her?”
“You want to know the secret?” C.J. glanced over. “It never mattered who she picked. White, black, trans female, cis male. She gave so much prestige to this brand we could turn a pebble into a star. Aaden would have been fine—a great immigrant story—we just would’ve had to shift away from our female-centric message. Broaden the base. Gregg never liked him, but between you and me it’s too bad he’s not in the running.”
“Too bad he’s dead, you mean.”
She made a noise of agreement, her attention pulled back to the magnet of the phone. “Now Merritt’s out, Logan is missing, there’s no money, and who the fuck knows what’s going to happen next. I should’ve started working on my résumé as soon as he turned down the vStrike offer.”
“Excuse me?”
“You could’ve found five billion in those virtual-reality simulators. Everyone was pushing Gregg to go commercial and enter the gaming market. Twenty million would have been a joke. But he refused. He was obsessed with finishing all the new clubs. Then it was all about filling the seats, practically giving them away just so we could say we’d sold out. And now look where we are.”
“Five billion?”
“That was the initial offer from the gaming company. We could’ve negotiated up. Way up. But Gregg said the timing wasn’t right. He wanted to debut vStrike at the tournament first.”
“Why?”
C.J. shrugged.
Gregg had turned down a multibillion-dollar sale? They’d already sunk all the research and development costs for vStrike. That five billion would have been pure profit. What was he playing at?
With Merritt, her entourage, and the medics gone, Gregg stood alone in the middle of the room. She took a step forward, intent on getting him alone, but C.J. cut in front of her—“nope, save it”—and pulled Gregg back to the