Hate Me Closer

Chapter 4: Playing With Fire

Chapter 4: Playing With Fire

The doctored expense report took her four hours.

Aria sat cross-legged on her living room floor at midnight, laptop glowing, a glass of wine going warm beside her. The real foundation expense reports — she'd photographed them during her first week, "for budget reference" — were open on one side of the screen. On the other, her forgery.

It was good work. A few shifted numbers, a vendor invoice re-routed, and suddenly it looked like Halston Foundation funds had paid for a very private renovation of Dorian Vale's penthouse. Nothing provable. Everything suggestive. Exactly the kind of smoke a gossip columnist could turn into fire.

Her finger hovered over the send button.

This was phase two. The first real move. Not a skirmish — a wound.

She thought of her father in the marble lobby, his hand shaking in hers. She thought of seven years of silence.

She pressed send.

The email went to Simone Park at the Halston Ledger — a columnist who'd built her career on exactly this kind of story — from an anonymous account, routed through two relays. Untraceable. Nadia had set it up months ago.

Her phone buzzed a minute later. The number was still saved as Unknown. Paranoia, Nadia had said, was just professionalism with better instincts.

Unknown: "Done?"

Aria: "Done. Phase two begins."

Unknown: "Proud of you. He'll never see it coming."

Aria set the phone down and stared at the ceiling. She should have felt triumph. Instead she felt like she'd just lit a match in a room full of gasoline — and she was standing inside the room.

---

By nine the next morning, the match had found the gasoline.

"Have you seen this?" Jess, the foundation's twenty-three-year-old events coordinator, stood in Aria's alcove holding her phone like it might explode. Her eyes were red. "It's everywhere. They're saying we — that the foundation —"

Aria took the phone. The Ledger's headline screamed: "VALE FOUNDATION FUNDS UNDER QUESTION — Documents Suggest Misuse." Simone Park had done her work well. Suggestive, damning, just short of libelous.

Around them, the thirty-eighth floor hummed with panic. Phones ringing. Margot moving through it all like a general, voice crisp, face unreadable. Through his glass wall, Aria could see Dorian on the phone — probably with the auditors, probably with the board — one hand in his hair, the posture of a man holding up a ceiling.

"They're saying I misfiled the reports," Jess whispered. "That it's my fault. Oh God, Aria, if I made a mistake—"

"You didn't make a mistake." Aria gripped the girl's shoulder, and the lie of omission burned her tongue. "Listen to me. You didn't do anything wrong."

But Jess was crying quietly now, and across the floor a board member was shouting into his phone, and Aria felt something cold and sick curl in her stomach.

This was the plan. Collateral damage was part of war.

So why did she want to confess to a crying twenty-three-year-old?

Then Dorian's office door opened, and the floor went quiet.

He walked out calm — too calm — and stood in the center of the chaos like the eye of a storm. "Listen up," he said, and his voice carried without effort. "There's a story in the Ledger this morning questioning our finances. Here's what happens next. We commission an independent audit, today. We publish every number. And nobody —" his gaze swept the room, landing briefly, deliberately, on Jess — "nobody on this team takes the blame for something they didn't do. Whoever planted this wanted us scared and divided. We're neither. Back to work."

The room exhaled. People moved. Jess wiped her eyes and mouthed thank you at no one in particular.

Aria watched Dorian retreat to his office, shoulders straight, and felt the sick feeling spread. He'd protected his people without hesitation. No scapegoat. No panic. Just integrity, deployed like armor.

It would have been easier if he'd been the monster she needed him to be.

---

She stayed late again. Everyone else fled at seven, wrung out. At nine, Dorian emerged from his office and stopped at her desk.

"You held the team together today," he said. "Jess told Margot what you said to her."

"It was nothing."

"It wasn't nothing." He sat on the edge of her desk — too close, like last night, like always now. "Most people in this business would've let a junior take the fall. You didn't."

Her throat tightened. If he knew. If he knew the leak had come from her laptop, her hands, her four hours of careful forgery —

He covered her hand with his. Warm. Steady. "Thank you."

She stared at their hands. His thumb rested against her knuckles, and she remembered the handshake in his office — deliberate, lingering. Nothing about this man was accidental.

"Get some rest, Aria," he said quietly, and stood. "Tomorrow we fight back."

She nodded, not trusting her voice. He walked away, and she sat motionless until his office door closed.

Then she pulled her hand back and looked at it — the hand that had typed the lie, pressed send, lit the match.

At home, she poured the wine and didn't drink it. She lay on the couch and stared at the ceiling and asked the dark a question she didn't want answered:

This is what winning feels like?

The dark said nothing. But her phone buzzed — Unknown: "Ledger story is trending. Beautiful work."

Aria turned the phone face-down and closed her eyes.

Beautiful. Sure. That was the word.

---

End of Chapter 4