His Only Obsession

Raven: The photograph is creased from being folded and unfolded too many times. My father smiles at the camera, his arm around my fourteen-year-old shoulders. We're both squinting in the summer sun, both happy. I was so clueless then. I pin it to the center of my corkboard, right next to the other evidence I've spent eight years collecting. Bank statements showing transfers my father never made. A forensic accounting report I paid three thousand dollars for that highlights the digital fingerprints, transactions routed through an IP address registered to Harrington Industries. Security logs from my father's office showing someone accessed his computer after hours. Repeatedly. And then there's the suicide note. I pull it out, still in its evidence bag. The police returned it after closing the case, because why would they keep investigating a suicide everyone agreed was a suicide? Except my father didn't write it. I spent two years tracking down a forensic document examiner willing to work for someone with more determination than money. Her report sits in a folder labeled "Personal." Twelve pages of analysis confirming what I knew the moment I found him. The handwriting is similar but not identical. The pressure points are wrong. The letter formations are off. Someone traced my father's writing, probably from old birthday cards or shopping lists. They traced it well enough to fool cops who didn't care. Not well enough to fool an expert. I took the report to three different lawyers. They all said the same thing: without additional evidence linking the forgery to a specific person, without witnesses, without the statute of limitations on my side, one document analysis wasn't enough. Too circumstantial. Too much reasonable doubt. The system that failed my father the first time wasn't going to save him the second time either. So I'm going to destroy them myself. My phone buzzes. A text from Jordan, my only friend who knows what I'm really doing. You start tomorrow. Are you ready? I look at my wall. At the evidence I've compiled and the plan I've spent years perfecting. I'm ready. Another text comes through immediately. Remember, you're not the angry teenager anymore. You're Raven Stone, the competent assistant. Don't f**k it up by letting them see you're angry. I smile at that, because Jordan knows me too well. I'm not angry anymore. I'm patient. I pour myself whiskey, the cheap kind, because even after years of saving, even after working three jobs to pay for forensic reports and fake credentials, I'm still careful with money. Still living like the daughter of a disgraced man, because that's what I am. Until tomorrow. Tomorrow I become someone else entirely. I down the whiskey in one burning swallow and let myself remember the last time I saw my father alive. He was quiet at breakfast. We were eating cereal because the bank had frozen his accounts, and cereal was what we could afford. I was sixteen and stupid, asking him if he'd talked to a lawyer yet. "It'll be fine, sweetheart," he said. He smiled, but it didn't reach his eyes. "These things take time." "But you didn't do it." I was so sure then. So convinced that truth mattered. "I know." He squeezed my hand. "I know I didn't." That was the last conversation we had. I came home from my after-school shift at the coffee shop and found him in the bathroom. Hanging from the shower rod. The note on the counter next to Mom's wedding ring, the one he still wore even though she'd left us years before. She'd remarried and moved to California, changed her number, wanted nothing to do with the "scandal" of his charges. She didn't even come back for the funeral. I'm sorry for what I've done. I can't live with the shame. Please forgive me. I knew immediately. My father didn't write like that. Didn't talk like that. And he sure as hell wouldn't have apologized for something he didn't do. I told the police. Showed them birthday cards, shopping lists, anything with his real handwriting. They looked at me with pity. "Sometimes people write differently when they're upset, sweetheart." That detective, Benny. I'll never forget his name. He actually patted my shoulder like I was a child having a tantrum instead of a daughter watching her father be erased. "Grief makes people irrational," he said. I wasn't irrational. I was right. And I was alone. I set the glass down and pull out the folder I've memorized but still review every night. Raven Stone's credentials. Bachelor's in Business Administration from a respectable university. Two years as an executive assistant at a mid-sized firm. References that I carefully cultivated—half real, half enhanced with help from Jordan's less-than-legal skill set. A LinkedIn profile that's polished and forgettable. Adrian Lockwood won't see me coming. The job posting for his executive secretary appeared six weeks ago. I'd been monitoring Lockwood Enterprises for two years, waiting for an opening, and when this one appeared, I knew it was my chance. I made sure I was perfect. Three interviews. Skills tests. A background check that I spent thousands of dollars ensuring would come back clean. And then, three days ago: "Welcome to Lockwood Enterprises." I printed the email and pinned it to my board, right next to my father's photograph. I'm so close now. Adrian Lockwood and Anastasia Harrington destroyed my father to merge their empires. In three months, after my father's convenient death, Harrington Industries and Lockwood Enterprises announced a partnership that made both families obscenely wealthy. I have the timeline documented. The merger talks that started a week after the embezzlement charges. The stock transfers that happened the day after my father's funeral. The funeral the Harringtons didn't attend because they were too busy negotiating contracts. I just need proof of who actually stole the money. And I need to make sure everyone knows exactly what they did. My father's urn sits on the bookshelf. Brushed aluminum, no inscription. They wanted five hundred dollars for the "dignity package" when I was sixteen with eighty-three dollars to my name. I pick it up. It's cold, impersonal. "I'm close, Dad," I whisper. "I start working for Adrian Lockwood tomorrow. I'm going to find out exactly what he and the Harringtons did to you. And then I'm going to make sure the whole world knows." The plan is simple in theory, complicated in execution. Get hired. Gain access to Adrian's files. Find evidence of the real embezzlement, the one that was pinned on my father. Expose both families publicly, completely, in a way they can't bury with money or lawyers. And if I can destroy Adrian's engagement to Anastasia in the process? Even better. I've seen the photos of them together. The golden couple. Tech billionaire and hotel heiress. They've been engaged since childhood, some archaic arrangement between families. She looks at him like he's a possession. He looks at her like she's a stranger. There's something there. Something wrong between them that I don't understand yet. But I will. I wasn't always this focused . In high school, before everything fell apart, I was ordinary. I was the girl who ate lunch in the library and kept her head down. Anastasia Harrington noticed me exactly once. She was a year older, impossibly beautiful, and cruel in the way only teenage girls with unlimited money can be. I was in her orbit at school events—our fathers knew each other professionally, though we existed in completely different social universes. After the embezzlement charges hit, after my father's name was plastered across the news, she made sure I understood exactly where I stood. "I heard about your dad," she said one day, cornering me by my locker while her friends watched. "My father says he always knew your dad was trash. Guess it runs in the family." I transferred schools two weeks later. Finished my senior year at a public school across town where no one knew me, where I could be invisible. By the time I walked across that stage to get my diploma, my father was dead and Anastasia Harrington had moved on to Yale, probably never thinking about me again. Good. She won't recognize me now. I've made sure of that. The mousy brown hair is now black. I've lost the teenage awkwardness, the uncertainty in my posture. I carry myself differently. Speak differently. I spent two years working with a voice coach to smooth out my accent, to sound expensive and educated. I'm not the scared girl she terrorized. I'm someone new and dangerous. I pull out the folder one more time, studying my fake credentials, my carefully constructed history. Raven Stone exists on paper, in databases, in professional networks. She has a credit score, a work history, references who will vouch for her competence. She's perfect. And tomorrow, she walks into Adrian Lockwood's office and begins tearing his world apart. I look at my father's photograph one last time. "I promise," I whisper. "I'm going to make this right."