Strike Me Down - Mindy Mejia Page 0,88

who mean the most to you. You can see them, hovering around you, everything bright and good. Everything you would fight for. Maybe you feel yourself drawn more strongly toward one of them. A grandson. A lover you met in an airport, perhaps. Maybe even a company you dreamed and hustled to life. It’s okay. You don’t have to explain yourself to me. There’s no logic to what we love, to the things that pull at our deepest core. You would die for all of these things, of course, but say you were standing in a flour mill and there was an explosion, an instant rending of death from life. Your fast muscle twitch would take over and throw your incinerating body over that one person, that dearest, most precious thing. It’s worth a hundred of you, and the thought finds you in the shadows of every day, both sustaining and destroying you. And it will all be worth it, every sacrifice, every piece of you scorched away, as long as you can see them succeed. You will give everything, and you’ll do it with the fire of that explosion in your gut, telling you that you’re running out of time, that your chances to feed this great and beautiful thing are numbered, and you don’t know how many moments are left for it to be yours.

Strike was that thing for me. My true love. My only child. Two minutes ago I didn’t know how many moments I had left with Strike. But now, without even realizing it, Nora had helped me save the one thing that mattered most.

I’d known Nora Trier was special without understanding exactly why. I’d been drawn to her again and again, fumbling with my adolescent gestures, my idiotic advances, but now I saw the truth and it was so much more than I could have hoped for or imagined. She hadn’t found the money; she’d found the match to light Logan Russo on fire.

C.J.’s announcement stopped the crowd in midchant.

“Logan is missing.”

I passed the concessions, where everyone had fallen silent and vendors froze midtransaction with credit cards dangling forgotten in the air. C.J. outlined the situation quickly, with absolute gravity and poise, and then posted Nora’s picture on every TV and jumbotron in the arena, setting the entire stadium into unrest. Logan. Missing. Person of interest. Everyone on the concourse began coming back to life, but with purpose now. They started to talk and text, heads craning in every direction.

The rumble grew louder, the kindling catching fire, carrying heat past my body and far into the night. Minneapolis would feel it. The country would feel it. If Logan was dead, Strike would burn in the hearts of the world forever.

When the second-floor exit came into view, I saw a familiar form moving past the security guards. Jesus, she’d gotten through. Was I the only person on the planet who could see this woman? By the time I reached the exit she was halfway down the skyway, rushing toward downtown, and when she saw me behind her, she broke into a sprint.

But she couldn’t outrun the explosion.

NORA

SHE FLEW through the skyway, throwing her entire body against closed doors and sprinting through open ones fast enough to feel wind against her face. She passed a skeletal looking janitor and two beggars, neither of them Rose, her homeless romantic who’d cackled when she walked through these bridges with Gregg Abbott a week ago. Rose had wanted Nora to take her heart out of her briefcase. If only the older woman could see her now. She lost a shoe at one point and kicked the other one away as she raced over the top of 2nd Avenue, leaving them strewn like breadcrumbs.

It wasn’t how she’d planned to conduct the interview, but she didn’t have time to deal with the police and an entire city of rabid fans. She needed him alone. She needed him to think he’d won.

Stopping to get her breath at one point, in the middle of a bridge, Nora pressed a hand to her chest and squeezed the Strike badge against her racing heart. She looked through the windows, over the dark street, and saw—in the skyway one block down—Gregg Abbott staring back across the night. He smiled, and she felt something crawl inside her. She started running again and he moved in the same direction. Come and get me.

Passing the turn to the Parrish offices, the route she and Corbett had walked a thousand times,