Her Corporate Takedown: Entangled with a Billionaire

*CHAPTER 93: RENEGADES*

It seemed that our renegade picked up a weird hobby from all the money that had gone to his head.

And evidently, so did Daniel.

My feet instinctively started to move towards him, but I did not forget who I was at that moment. I was still very much aware of the mission I had to carry out as Melissa. I just thought that perhaps I could expedite things if I took advantage of the relationship between Daniel and Melissa, since they weren't total strangers. Thankfully, Daniel didn't seem to mind, since he looked in my direction as soon as my red hair caught his eye.

"Fancy seeing you here," Daniel said, stopping me in my tracks.

I pretended to not have seen him initially and made it seem as though I was going to walk past him. The fact that he stopped me was reassuring that he didn't have something to hide, but that was until he remembered who I really worked for.

"It's nice to see you outside of the office, Daniel," I replied with a subtle smile. He initially looked at me pleasingly, but then his face turned pale and worried, as if he suddenly had an epiphany.

"You too, Melissa. What brings you to a place like this?"

Why did he suddenly look so worried?

"Nothing major. Just a job." So, I decided to indulge his fears. Something was clearly going on with him that he refused to tell Leiya and I couldn't get any details about his problems out of him at the football game. Maybe Melissa could get some answers instead.

"A job?" he replied, almost choking on his drink. "Is it a job for Andrei?"

"That's right." He was clearly very wary of who I worked for, the private investigator who was very good at his job. Was his problem so bad that he stooped low enough to get involved with shady underground people? Then, was he aware of the deal Michelle made with Paladin? Is she here too?

"I'm sure it doesn't involve you, but you seem like a regular here, so perhaps you could help us find someone," Kiran said so decisively that it seemed like a command rather than a request.

"I don't think anything you'd be investigating would concern me, so I'd be glad to help if I can."

Daniel was cleverly fishing for answers just as we were, while being cautious. I told him the name of the person we were looking for and his eyes widened as I said his name. I hoped he was surprised by the coincidence that he knew the person, rather than the thought that we were meddling in his affairs.

"Why are you looking for him?" His question inclined towards my latter suspicions.

"He has something for us," Kiran replied, further showing his expertise at handling these situations while my mind was still going around in circles.

"I see. Follow me, then."

We followed Daniel through the crowd of boxing enthusiasts up to the upper levels until we came face to face with the renegade.

"Did your client ask you to bid on one of his designs?"

"That's right," Kiran ad libbed on the spot.

"Must be your first time participating since you've never seen him before."

"Our client wanted someone who could actually get the job done," I pitched in my piece of the conversation.

"They sure did," Daniel replied. "Then, why don't we see who can win the most bids between the two of us?"

"You're also participating?" I asked, looking surprised.

"Yes, I am also representing a client. What would you like if you won our little competition?"

I almost replied impulsively, just thinking about my own wishes, when there could be something more valuable to gain that would help us with the mission. While I pretended to think about the answer, I waited to see if Andrei or Kiran would say something in response, but none of them said anything. Andrei was also unusually quiet ever since we made contact with Daniel. I was sure he was listening. Since neither of them had anything to say, I went ahead with my own reply.

"I want you to answer one question without lying or beating around the bush."

"Oh, that's it. Fine by me. If I win, I want you to go out with me."

Aren't you getting married soon?

I didn't have time to take another breath before he came up to me and whispered in my ear, "I need you to forget that I was ever involved in this."

I couldn't believe my eyes as I watched his aura transform into a dark aura rather unlike Andrei's. It felt more sinister, and in a completely more repulsive way than even Michelle's. He definitely had something to hide. I just hoped that it had nothing to do with our mission, otherwise talking to him would end up being the biggest mistake I made tonight.

He chose the worst ear to whisper his threats as Andrei must have felt like he was talking to him. If he was already afraid of Andrei and still decided to threaten me, then his situation must be so dire that he was willing to go against Andrei, knowing what he was capable of.

As we next learnt from Daniel, our renegade had been selling the designs at these boxing matches to the highest bidder. First, you bet on the boxing matches and if you win, then you get the right to bid on one design per match. It seemed like a twisted way to sell some designs but I didn't come here to judge.

Daniel introduced us to the renegade and told him we were one of today's participants.

"Which company are you representing?" asked the renegade. "I need to verify that each participant is with a valid company."

I froze for a second, thinking that our cover was blown, then I shouted the next word I heard in my ear, "Imron."

I held my breath for the next minute or so while his men attempted to verify our obviously fake company.

"Okay, you're good. Looking forward to doing business with you." He extended his arm and I returned a firm handshake while hiding my puzzled emotions with a calm mask and an assertive gaze.

"How did that check out?" I whispered to Kiran while we went to our private room.

"Just leave those details to Andrei. He's probably got hundreds of fake companies lined up."

I set up my small notebook computer in a private room while Kiran checked the room to see if it was bugged or wired. We were given VPN access to the betting site to place our bets for tonight.

"Isn't this just a guessing game? We don't know any of these contestants, so that makes it harder to place winning bets."

"Normal spies would have taken one day to observe all of the contestants before participating in the betting game. But did you forget that we are not normal spies? We have the benefit of making retrospective bets."

"Do you guys use hacking to solve all your problems?"

"If necessary, yes," he replied while laughing. "And from what Andrei is telling me, Daniel is also good at programming. Not to mention, if he's here, we can infer he's also a good hacker, so you should be careful."

"Me? I'm doing this?"

"Yea, give the first round a try and make some bitter memories."

Already doomed to fail, I see. Since I'm just placing a bet, I'll just do that and see how it goes. I placed an initial bet to get our name on the board, but by opening the betting website using one of our special software, I was able to hide what our bet was from the other players.

Near the end of the first boxing match, it was clear who would win the match. It only took one round to showcase my horrendous gambling skills. Since my initial bet was wrong, I had a couple of minutes to change my final bet so that we could be eligible to bid for the design.

I jumped back into the software to change my bets. However, as I was typing, I kept getting an error message saying that I couldn't change my bets. What was going on?

"It's not working. I can't change the bets on the website."

"Oh dear, it looks like Daniel blocked you. Your ex-fiancé sure left a nasty present for you."

"Doesn't that mean we lost this round?"

"Yep. Seems like he's being pretty aggressive against us, understandably. I'll take over since you'll never beat him with your current typing speed."

Kiran took out his personal computer and logged into the website as our company's representative after I logged off. I knew that Andrei could win against Daniel, but I wasn't certain if Kiran could also win. Since there were only five designs up for grabs, we barely had any wiggle room left. We had to win the next three bets at least.

Kiran got comfortable while Daniel made his bid for the first design. Daniel was indeed wary of us. He didn't seem to care if other people made successful bets, only that we didn't. Was it because he suspected that we weren't actually here representing a company? Was he more involved in this than he led us to believe?

The second round was about to start and Kiran had not only the betting website open, but half a dozen other complicated windows were also open. There was something exhilarating about watching a pro hacker at work and I still felt the same way even though I was used to watching Andrei and Ari week after week.

Kiran sat up in his chair and his fingers twitched in anticipation of the announcement to place all bets. Then, it immediately came. I couldn't follow his fingers, which flew over the keyboard as prompt after prompt emerged, then disappeared from the screen. I would have loved to follow what he was doing, but my eyes couldn't keep up.

He kept up the typing right throughout the boxing match as a few alerts kept popping up. In stuttered breaths, Kiran explained that Daniel was trying to shut us out from the system during the match so that we couldn't change our bets at the end of the round. Then, it was no wonder I got that error message at the end of the first round.

This time, it seemed like Kiran was doing a great job of shutting him down and we were successful with our bet in the second round and won the right to bid for the second design.

Little did we know, the round was not over. Even after we won the right to bid on the designs, Daniel still came after our bid, and tried to force our numbers to be lower than his. Sadly, Kiran got a late start in the hacking to protect our bid and remained one step behind Daniel. Thus, we also lost the second round.

But the glorious news did not end there. Andrei finally came live again in our earpieces as he relayed the most recent updates from his background checks.

"It looks like Daniel is the one working with the renegade to steal the new designs from Melberlin's lead designer."