Chapter 63
Mark Langford
Mark paced the boardroom. He was alone. The rest of the board members were on the screen, including Ethan Howard.
He still had four people voting with him, but with Ethan’s changed vote, that meant seven in favor of firing him. He was out.
The meeting was convened early Saturday morning.
Ethan sent out an urgent request to redo the vote, saying that new information needed to be shared with the board before the market opened on Monday.
It took all of twenty minutes for everyone to cast their votes.
And the new information? More articles about Mark’s alleged drug use. Nothing actually new.
Mark tried calling Ethan before the meeting, but was ignored. Someone got to him, and it was probably the same person fucking with his head the last few weeks.
He couldn’t sleep or think. Every noise around him felt like people were drilling into his brain. People’s voices pissed him off, regardless of what they were saying. It was overwhelming.
His private doctor accused him of taking drugs, and it didn’t help that he refused to take a drug test. Something was wrong with him, and if the doctor couldn’t find an illness to explain it, it had to be drugs.
He couldn’t risk a drug test leaking to the media.
Now, though, he didn’t care. Not after that vote. Because they got to Ethan.
Mark’s mind was a mess. He stormed out of the meeting room and took a cab home. His phone exploded with notifications about Condukt. Already, someone was leaking information about the vote, along with more videos of him acting crazy.
He wondered who was going to replace him, but the thought was quickly pushed down by the image of Natalia smiling at him, and then Natalia bleeding in some godforsaken shithole she should have never been in.
An alert and headline nearly made him vomit in the car.
VALE ANNOUNCES NEW PARTNERSHIP WITH MAJOR AUTOMOTIVE OEM
Goosebumps spread over his arms and back. His body was on edge. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he thought he was running out of time. He needed to act now.
Daniel Mason was going to find out what it was like to lose someone he loved.