Hate me harder

Digging

Mara had been staring at the same name for twenty minutes.

Tobias Kane. Former financial journalist. Three years of sharp, well-sourced reporting — the kind that left corporate reputations in pieces — and then eight months ago, nothing. His Black Enterprises profile had simply stopped. No published piece, no follow-up, no explanation. Just silence, and a LinkedIn update that said he now worked communications at a small accounting firm across town.

People didn't walk away from the biggest story of their career for nothing.

She wrote his name in her notebook — physical, nothing digital that could be remotely accessed — and circled it twice. She wasn't ready to contact him yet. Approaching a source empty-handed never worked. She needed enough to show him she was serious first. Enough to make talking worth the risk. Whatever had made Tobias Kane trade journalism for accounting spreadsheets was still sitting on top of him. She could feel it in the abruptness of it, the cleanness of the disappearance. That wasn't a man who'd lost interest. That was a man who'd been given a reason to stop.

She moved on.

The regulatory filings she'd flagged were next. Two amendments from the same quarter, both tied to a subsidiary called Vantara Holdings buried three layers beneath Black Enterprises in the corporate structure. On the surface they were minor — adjusted projections, a reclassified asset. The kind of paperwork that passed through large corporations without anyone blinking. Finance teams amended filings all the time. It meant nothing on its own.

Except Vantara Holdings had been dissolved four months later.

Companies didn't get quietly dissolved right after adjusting their projections unless someone needed them gone before the questions started. You didn't build a subsidiary, run it through two financial quarters, amend its numbers, and then erase it — not unless those numbers had become a liability.

She underlined it twice and kept going.

By the time she'd worked through lunch she had four threads. Tobias Kane. Vantara Holdings. The three former Black Enterprises employees who'd left under unexplained circumstances. And a small detail she'd almost missed — a board member named Gerald Fitch who had resigned from Black Enterprises two years ago and had given no interviews since, despite previously being the kind of man who gave a lot of interviews. His social media had gone quiet around the same time. His name had essentially vanished from any conversation connected to Black Enterprises, as though someone had gone through the record and carefully removed it.

She added Gerald Fitch to her notebook and circled his name too.

She was still staring at it when Priya knocked.

"Three o'clock with Mr. Black," Priya said from the doorway, wearing her delivering-bad-news face. "Clara just sent it. It wasn't on your morning calendar."

Mara checked the time. Two forty-seven. "Fine."

She closed her notebook, slid it into her bag, and rolled her shoulders once before standing.

Ethan's office was on the eighteenth floor — quieter up there, darker toned, the kind of space that communicated serious money without making any effort to impress. The furniture was minimal, everything chosen with the kind of precision that looked effortless and wasn't. Clara nodded her through the double doors without a word.

He was standing at the window when she walked in. Corner office, two full walls of glass, the city stretched out below like he'd personally arranged it. He turned when he heard the door and looked at her the same way he always did — like he'd already accounted for her before she arrived.

"Sit down," he said.

"I'm fine standing."

He let it go. "Your workspace proposal. I need it now."

She stared at him. "You gave me until Friday."

"I moved the deadline. Board presentation Friday afternoon, floor plan needs to be confirmed before then." He sat down and pulled a document toward him. "So."

The audacity of him was genuinely something. She pulled out her phone, opened her notes, and walked him through the proposal in under a minute — her team keeping their current space, the operations team relocated to the east wing, a shared resource room established on the east side as a compromise. She'd thought it through carefully the night before, anticipating every objection, and she laid it out cleanly with no filler.

He listened without interrupting.

"Done," he said when she finished.

"Just like that?"

"It's a reasonable proposal." He looked back at his document. "Was there something else?"

She wasn't leaving without pushing at least one more thing. "The discontinued product lines. I want the full strategic review documentation — every metric, every data point they used to flag them. My contract guarantees sign-off and I can't exercise it without the original data they based the decision on."

He looked up. Held her gaze for a beat longer than necessary. "I'll have it sent by end of day."

She nodded and turned to leave.

"Ms. Voss."

She stopped.

"Vantara Holdings," he said quietly. "It's a dead end. Standard portfolio restructure. There's nothing there."

The room felt very still suddenly. She turned back around slowly, keeping her expression completely neutral, giving him nothing.

He knew. He'd known she was digging and he'd sat through this entire meeting saying nothing, watching her the way he always watched her — like he was reading something she hadn't said out loud — and now he was telling her directly. No accusation. No anger. Just that calm, closed-door finality of his, like he was doing her a favour by pointing her away from a locked room.

Which meant he'd been watching her. Closely. And had been from the start.

"I appreciate the transparency," she said, her voice perfectly even.

Something shifted at the corner of his mouth. Not quite a smile. Almost something worse — like he found her genuinely interesting and hadn't decided yet what to do about it. "I doubt that," he said.

She left without another word.

Back at her desk she drew a firm line through Vantara Holdings in her notebook. Then she wrote underneath it in clean, deliberate letters:

He's watching. Be smarter.

She looked at it for a moment.

Then she turned the page, wrote Gerald Fitch at the top, and started a fresh list.

She was just getting started.