Strike Me Down - Mindy Mejia Page 0,94
of the building where we were forced to live. His attention was always fixed on her, his prey.”
He blinked and seemed to come back to himself. He glanced in the mirror and just as quickly away, shaking his head.
“I was intimidated by this space when I began training here. Not the gym. The fight lives in my blood and I’ve always known home there.” A smile crossed his face. “Logan says I was born in a ring.
“But this room …” His gaze raked the granite and tile, momentarily distracted. “All this luxury, a space fit for kings, but not for me, right? You didn’t build this for a poor Somali immigrant.”
Somewhere in the bowels of the building a boiler fired up and heat hummed through the vents.
“I saw you for the first time in here, in that exact spot by the sinks. You were talking to some members, and all I could hear was my mother’s story. You were so charming, so focused on each person you spoke to it seemed you had no peripheral vision. Only the ahead existed for you. Only what came next.
“And I wondered, as I stood in the corner and watched you, what you would be taking from them. I’ve wondered it ever since.”
His finger flicked, unlocking the safety on the gun.
* * *
I didn’t look for the Nassau account immediately when we got home. It wasn’t part of some evil master plot, but then Logan announced Strike Down, dropping the bomb that she was putting a new face on the company, and my inbox literally exploded. The servers crashed. Our website went down. Every manager at headquarters pulled a seventy-hour week trying to sort out the backlash and frenzy. Everyone except Logan. She holed up with her golden boy, the kid who claimed he was entering the tournament along with thousands of other fighters banging on our doors with dollar signs and dreams of glory shining in their eyes. Logan didn’t lift a finger to help any of the other entrants. She refused to do any of the promotional work we’d discussed, instead devoting every free hour to Aaden Warsame.
No, it wasn’t an evil master plot. It was a note scribbled on a cocktail napkin in an Atlanta hotel bar and burned in the fireplace. A plan born from the conviction, long festering, that Logan was not only holding the company back but actively sabotaging what I’d dedicated my life to build. She was right when she made the tournament announcement on the blog; Strike wasn’t her. Not anymore. And not ever again.
Her tablet wasn’t difficult to access. A few nights of guessing passwords, never so many that the computer would lock out, got me to “avocado” rather quickly. It pays to know your wife. From there I found the emails from FirstCaribbean International Bank, logged into the account with the saved passwords on her device, and copied all the information I needed.
I researched the financial side of things on a library computer in the wilds of St. Paul and found the best way, the simplest way, to cut them both out together. An embezzlement. A glaring, obvious one. It couldn’t be too complex, or no one would believe an aging kickboxer and her young, inexperienced lover capable of pulling it off. But Logan signed the Magers Construction contract with me, her initials alongside mine on every page, including the one outlining the unusual deposit requirement for each site. She hadn’t read a single word of that clause or any other, but the paper trail said differently. In court, she would have had full knowledge of the lump sums paid in advance to Magers Construction and just waiting to be reimbursed.
What would you do? If your wife paraded her twenty-four-year-old lover around the company you’d conceived and hustled and saved and spun from every fiber of your being, and then she publicly announced to anyone with half a brain that she was planning to hand it over to him, to him, what would you do? Would you stand quietly in the corner of your own goddamn boardroom and let it happen? Feel your worth in every form drip uselessly from your spinal column? Deflating you. Making you less, and more importantly, making your company less. Would you let her take your vision and give it to some inarticulate child to unravel at his fucking leisure? No. No, you wouldn’t.
I bought a phone, a burner, and set up the online transfer account with Logan’s information.