Scandal In A Ten Million Dollars Suite

She applied in four lines. My name. Mara Hale. Archival experience and available immediately. She didn't want to make it look tedious, she didn't care whether they impressed anyone. Aiden read it twice. Sat back, read it a third time and still couldn't tell who she was from it. There were fourteen applications. He sat at his desk with his jacket off and went through every one. The first applicant opened with three sentences about their love of history. He turned the page. The second had listed every qualification they held, longest first, in case he missed the point. He turned the page. The third addressed him by his first name. He closed that one without finishing it. Four more came and went. Solid credentials, clean language, nothing obviously wrong with any of them. He read each one to the end and put them down and felt nothing and moved to the next. A person who needed the job badly enough always showed it somewhere then he turned the page. In twenty years that had never happened. He put the page down and picked up his phone. "Elias. Applicant for the archive position. Mara Hale. Everything you can find about her I need it by morning." He went to bed and didn't sleep. That morning the report hit the boardroom table and Henderson jumped. "Eleven years." Aiden picked the papers back up and threw them. They scattered across the table, knocked over a coffee cup. Nobody moved to clean it up. "Eleven years and you bring me this?" Henderson grabbed at the pages. His hands were shaking. "Mr. Kross, I can explain" "Don't." Aiden pointed at the door. "All of you. Out. New numbers by six or don't come back. I don't care which." Chairs scraped. Someone knocked over a second glass and left it. Within sixty seconds the room was empty except for Elias, who was still by the window finishing his coffee like none of it had happened. "Henderson has three kids," Elias said. "Then he should do better work." "You threw papers at him." "He wasted forty minutes of my morning. If he fixes the numbers by six we'll pretend it never happened. If he doesn't, that's his decision." Elias set his cup down. "Delroy called. He wants you at two." Delroy was already opening the file when Aiden sat down. No handshake, no small talk. That was why Aiden had kept him for twenty years. He slid a document across the desk and Aiden picked it up and read it. Then read it again. "This is a joke," Aiden said. "It's legally binding." "He was losing his mind." "He was assessed twice in the last year. Both times, completely sound." Aiden put the paper down. You must marry a woman who has never lied to you. "Then he did this on purpose." "Without question." "The timeline." "Your thirty-fourth birthday. Eleven months from today." Delroy folded his hands on the desk. "If the condition isn't met the estate transfers to government heritage classification. The house, the land, the holdings, the archive. All of it." Aiden went to the window. The Kross estate was somewhere past the city noise, past the traffic and the glass buildings. His grandfather built that house. His father grew up in it. Edmund lived in it alone for thirty years and now Edmund was gone and had taken a match to the whole thing on his way out. "He left a note," Delroy said. "With the will." "Read it." "You've spent your whole life reading everyone around you and trusting none of them. Find one person you can't see through. That's the only one worth keeping." The clock on Delroy's wall ticked. "Is there a loophole," Aiden said. "I've looked. Your uncle was thorough." Delroy paused. "There is one thing. An archival position at the estate. Edmund's personal records need cataloguing before the legal assessment is complete. Whoever fills the role works inside the house. Daily. The kind of person who applies for something like that isn't usually someone who knows who you are or what you're worth." "You want me to use a job listing." "I want you to find a solution. That's one." Aiden grabbed his jacket. "Send me the applications tonight." There were fourteen. He went through every one. Twelve he dismissed in under a minute. He could see exactly who they were from the way they wrote. Everyone performing, everyone selling, everyone constructing the version of themselves they thought he wanted to find. He turned the page. My name. Mara Hale. Archival experience. Available immediately. He called Elias. "The Hale application. What did you find." "Her father worked for your uncle eleven years. Edmund froze him out in 1998. No payout. Daniel spent six years fighting it in court, lost every case, died broke in 2019." Elias paused. "She applied four days after Edmund's obituary ran." "She's not here for the job," Aiden said. "No. You want me to pull it?" "Call her," Aiden said. "Tell her she starts Thursday." Silence on the line. Then: "You just found out she has a reason to burn this family down." "I know." Aiden looked at the page. "Call her." He hung up. Three hundred miles away Mara Hale looked at the number on her phone screen, let it ring twice, and picked up. "Ms. Hale. You've been selected for the archival position and you start Thursday." She wrote down the address., said thank you and then hung up. Then she opened the drawer under her desk and took out the photograph she had been carrying for four years. Her father outside the Kross estate in 1991 where he was smiling before all of it. She put it in her bag. I won't say anything else till on thursday and she left the building.