Chapter 3 : No Room for Error

When Raven stepped out into her new office space the next morning, the sun was barely peeking over the horizon, lighting up the grid work of city streets outside. This office was a different world than the drab bullpen of the day before. Instead of a maze of uniform desks with flat fluorescent lighting, there was an entire office, just for herself, with a window overlooking the skyline.

Her name was already on the nameplate on the door. Still, it all didn’t feel real.

She was dressed to match the change in circumstances. No more sensible blank-slate first-day outfit. She’d put time into her hair this morning, scheduled a manicure after work yesterday, and ensured she appeared composed and pristine. No one would doubt that she belonged here by looking at her. And she would make sure they knew that she did when they saw her work.

Raven wasn’t cocky, but she was certainly confident. If you put an earnings sheet in front of her, she could decode it to dig out the company's narrative within minutes. Data to her was like water to a swimmer: she dove in and didn’t slow down.

Early as it was, she was the first one in the office. She ran through the programs on her computer to kill time, checking out the kind of software the upstairs analysts got access to. The answer was—apparently—the good stuff. This kind of program cost an amount of money that was prohibitive to everybody but the big players.

After an hour, around 7:30, there was the elevator ding, and a man and a woman stepped out, coffees in hand. He was a suave, delicately featured man with a swoop of blond hair, and she was a petite brunette with eyeliner so precise it could draw blood. She wore a pantsuit that was a crisp, fiery red and strode in like a wildfire.

Raven stood to greet them, holding out her hand.

“Good morning,” she smiled. “I’m Raven Cannon.”

They didn’t seem at all surprised to see her there, just like she wasn’t surprised when they introduced themselves as Andre and Sharon. She’d peeked at their nameplates on the office doors adjacent to hers, the only other offices in this suite.

The fact that they knew her name and that the position was filled also meant that they must’ve been on top of their emails after hours, getting caught up. These were Raven’s kind of people: those who knew where they were going and kept their eyes open for every little detail. She felt right at home immediately.

“You’ve got a full caseload of reports for your first day,” said Sharon, getting right down to business. “We don’t start slow here.”

“I’d hoped not,” Raven laughed with genuine excitement. “What are the priorities?”

“Your first priority is making sure all your VPNs are running before you touch any actual data on your computer,” replied Andre seriously. “That’s not a mistake you’ll get to make twice. Security here leaves no wiggle room.”

“Is that what happened to the guy who just got fired?”

She hoped it wasn’t insensitive to ask. Sharon and Andre looked at each other meaningfully.

“There were… other… security concerns involved there,” said Sharon at last. “We don’t have the full picture. But enough scare tactics. Let’s get you set up and running.”

Not only were there three separate VPNs that routed internet traffic randomly, making every second spent online untraceable, but the financial data itself was behind some serious firewalls.

By the time Raven was looking at numbers, she had a fresh understanding of how tight digital security would be here. This was the kind of energy and urgency she’d expected on her first day of work, the kind of momentum that demanded everything she had.

Sharon then gave her the rundown. “Just look for irregularities. Anything at all. Any notable data patterns. This is closer to forensic accounting in the first stages, to get a real, complete look at what’s happening in the companies Sinclair owns.”

Raven was only a little surprised when the first task on her docket was delving deeper into the same subsidiary she was investigating the day before, but this time, with a wealth of proprietary records she was lacking yesterday.

Kade Sinclair himself could have been the only one who’d chosen this for her to work on. She felt a small rush of excitement and appreciation that he’d actually remembered.

***

The day passed at what felt like light-speed, and the discoveries kept piling up too. Raven’s head was spinning, but she didn’t let her focus slip. The numbers told the whole story, clear as day. If this information ever leaked…

The subsidiary company was shuffling new investment funds into its accounts in a long-running scheme to mask outgoing transactions, exactly as she’d suspected. There were only a few reasons a company would be doing something that shady for that long and with this level of regularity.

The first was that the subsidiary was a sort of pyramid Ponzi scheme, where money flowed to the top of the food chain and vanished to be secretly replaced by incoming funds, giving the impression of a healthy business. If the influx of funds ever dried up, the company would go under, and the whole thing would come to light.

The second possibility was, if possible, even worse.

Money was going in and out in a long-running system that, to all appearances, had to do with the company’s operations. But Raven could see clearly that these large transactions didn’t actually fit with any reasonable activity. Which meant where the money came from and where it was going were being disguised. In short: this was money laundering.

Unfortunately, Raven had a gut instinct that the second explanation was the most likely one.

Heart beating hard, she knocked on Sharon’s door as five o’clock drew near.

“Hey, Raven. Come on in.”

Grateful, Raven shuffled in quickly. “Do I report findings to you and Andre? Or do we have a separate supervisor to receive reports?”

Sharon looked bemused for a second and then cleared her throat. “You’re to deliver all notable findings to Mr. Sinclair.”

She couldn’t have heard that right. “What, to Kade Sinclair? I’m supposed to just… walk into his office with the folder?”

“I recommend knocking first,” smiled Sharon. “But yes, essentially.” She must’ve been able to read the look on Raven’s face. “Okay, I don’t think you’re fully grasping the position we’re in, the job we’re doing. We are Mr. Sinclair’s eyes and ears. We don’t report to the board; that’s just the title. We report to him.”

A CEO with such tight control of company data… it wasn’t unheard of, but Raven had a strong sense that this was more than the run-of-the-mill practice of privileged information.

“I hear you,” she said carefully. “I understand.”

“Good,” Sharon replied. “Head on up when you’re ready. And take my advice: keep the data presentation as short and clear as possible. Use names and numbers—don’t generalize or summarize. Just report and give possible conclusions, then let him parse.”

The message was clear: Kade Sinclair was a man who you had to tread carefully around.

Raven stepped out of the elevator and into the pristine, modernistic C-suite. It would be a lie to say she wasn’t nervous. But it wasn’t just the thought of reporting directly to the CEO… it was the idea of reporting directly to this CEO. The memory of his dark eyes in the warm gloom of the elevator yesterday…

She recognized Kade’s assistant, Megan, who sat at the gleaming reception desk in front of the CEO’s office. No other members of the C-suite were in; she’d heard the common rumors that they did more golfing than investing. But not the CEO.

“Go on in.” Megan’s smile was pure professionalism. “He’s expecting you.”

Raven nodded. “Thank you.”

Raven was determined to retain her composure, and she focused on keeping her face stoic as she opened the door and stepped inside.

Kade’s office was lined with ceiling-high windows and arranged in glassy, geometric monotones. It was futuristic and classic at once. But the man at the asymmetric white desk at its center was the real focal point. His dark eyes rose to look at her.

Kade Sinclair was just as attractive as she remembered. And just as disarming.

She held her ground, standing up straight. She knew her face gave nothing away; she was good at this.

“Well?” he said, without preamble.

She did exactly as Sharon had instructed: numbers, facts, dates, and her own conclusion, all delivered in under five minutes.

“Let me see,” said Kade, holding out his hand for the folder.

Raven approached the desk—it felt like a very long walk with those eyes on her—and gave them to him. He paged through the printouts silently, running his finger along the columns and pausing on Raven’s notations.

His face remained unchanged as he regarded her again, but she thought she could see the thoughts chasing each other behind his eyes.

“Thank you, Miss Cannon. Well done. I agree with your assessment.”

She gulped. This was new territory: they didn’t teach you this part in digital information classes.

“What are our next steps?” she asked. She didn’t want to say fraud, money laundering, or lawsuit out loud, not in this hallowed office where every word was measured.

“That is none of your concern. I will handle it. But be assured it will have my personal attention.”

That was it: that was all she was getting. That was very clear. His cool gaze was as good as any dismissal. Her impression of him didn’t change an inch: he was cool, practical, almost mechanical—but she’d eat her notebook if he wasn’t one of the most handsome men she’d ever seen.

“Goodnight, Miss Cannon,” said Kade Sinclair crisply. “I will see you in the morning.”

“Goodnight,” she echoed back, nodding in farewell, and left the office without looking behind her. But she could feel the weight of that dark gaze as she walked out the door.

She decided to walk instead of taking the subway: it was a lovely summer evening, and she felt like she needed to thaw from the aggressive AC in the office. But it was as if Kade Sinclair’s gaze followed her along the hot sidewalks too, block after block. He had that kind of presence, an insistent authority she had to will herself to feel equal to.

But she wasn’t equal to it: that was the fact of the matter. She was an underling, a fresh hire with everything to prove, whereas he was at the head of one of the largest and wealthiest holding companies on the globe.

All her life, she was used to the feeling that nothing she did was ever good enough. Her father had walked away from her family, and even as a small child, it was hard not to feel as if Raven wasn’t somehow at fault for it.

Then there was her stepfather: a stern, militaristic man who held the whole household in an iron grip. Every mistake was treated as if it were going to be the end of the world; every small slip was a failure worthy of punishment. It was an old story and one she didn’t revisit too often. She’d worked so hard to get away from those feelings of inadequacy.

Kade’s dark eyes, his gaze that evaluated and devoured instantly, brought all those feelings back. The feeling that first drove her to this level of drive and ambition. The drive to not disappoint. To always be better than just “good enough.”

She was given this opportunity—this gift—through pure luck. It shouldn’t have happened that way—she should have found her way to this position deliberately, willfully. But now that she was here, there was no room for error.

No cracks. No faults.

She wouldn’t disappoint Kade Sinclair. She couldn’t.