Chapter 149: Access denied

Ivy

"Which brings us to the fourth quarter allocation." I clicked to the next slide without looking at it, because I knew it by heart.

"The East District acquisition comes in at eight point four. Our legal team and marketing team are padded. If we shift the media budget from the third party agency to in house, we can save another six percent without touching headcount. The numbers are in the files before you on page twelve. Questions?"

Three hands shot up. A woman near the back asked about the tax exposure on the East District, which was a good question and one I had anticipated.

A man on the left asked about the timeline, which was a bad question, because had he been asleep when I went through the timeline? I spent ten minutes explaining it anyway. I had to answer with patience.

I couldn’t lose both ways, could I? Since my father had already named me heiress, I might as well make the company mine and make sure he would never have the chance to toy with me again. And to do that, the board had to be convinced by July that I was the only possible person to run this company.

No one else.

I wasn’t making much headway with therapy, though it had only been two weeks and I should give it more time.

May was approaching very soon, and maybe it was because I had been a spy since the beginning of the year, but it felt like there was an invisible deadline I was running to beat, and time was moving way faster.

Last month the board had looked at me like I was a substitute teacher, but I could see some of them already looking at me with respect.

Go, Harper, go.

Once the meeting was over, they filed out of the room while Jenny gathered the documents we had shared. I let myself have ten seconds of the good feeling before I had to go report to my father, who had not attended the meeting.

Father’s office was hotter than a greenhouse. Another woman had stumbled out of his office, struggling to adjust her clothes just before I reached the door.

Was it just me, or was my father not even bothering to hide that he was sleeping with his employees anymore? Or was it a new habit he had just developed? I shoved down the questions and walked in to submit the report of the meeting to him.

"Good," he murmured, not looking up from the document ten minutes later. "Close the door and sit, Harper."

I closed the door and sat down opposite him. He kept reading for another minute while I waited. He turned a page with a flick of his thumb and set the document down, and I knew the good feeling was about to be over.

"Change the numbers."

"Which numbers?"

"The budget. All of it. You are presenting to the investors on Thursday, right? So what you present should be at least thirty percent higher than this."

It took everything in me to stop my jaw from hitting the ground. "Thirty percent more? Father, the budget is already two times over what the project actually needs. There’s already excess..."

"And what happens when it’s not enough? Will you fund the project by yourself? Just do what I ask you to do!"

I swallowed, my fingers rubbing against each other nervously. Lying about a budget to investors was basically fraud.

"An extra thirty percent on a project that’s already double funded is going to raise questions. The investors will ask why," I tried reasoning with him.

"The answer will have to be something, and right now there isn’t anything."

"There will be." He picked up his pen and turned it over in his fingers. "Have you forgotten that I lost a fortune in the last two months? The FBI are sniffing around me like dogs with their noses in my books. Every quarter from now on, everything we touch has to make more money, because I have to make up the difference somewhere and it is not going to come out of my pocket."

"So we make the investors bear it?"

"Why not?" Father shrugged, his eyes gleaming. "The investors have money to burn. This is the game, Harper. Money makes money. You cannot build a company like mine on a small number. You present a small number, and those investors will think small of you. You present a large number and deliver it, and they think you’re a magician. Do you understand?"

I understood the logic, but it was wrong however I nodded bleakly. "Yes, Father."

"Good." He was already picking his tablet back up. "Wear something grey for the conference on Thursday. You may go."

He had never once told me what to wear before a press conference. So why had he started now? I walked out of his office and took the elevator down two floors to my office on the eighteenth, sagging only when I was seated behind my desk.

Just how many projects in the past had my father padded? I turned on my computer, logged into the company’s database and started digging through the files.

In two hours I found about four discrepancies. There was a vendor that existed on paper but not in real life, and a consulting retainer paid quarterly to a company with the same registered address as three other companies.

There was a transfer in February two years ago with no vendor attached to it at all, just an account number and a slush fund with contributions from six different divisions over eighteen months, all going to the same payee.

Anthony Braddock.

I sat back in my chair, frowning at the screen. What was Angel’s father doing with all that money?

There was no way he moved 250 million without my father noticing. Was Dad in on it? The report said the project had crashed because it hadn’t done well despite the marketing, but could it be that my father and Anthony had skimmed off most of the money and lied to investors?

There was a file with my mother’s name. I clicked on it, and the moment I did, a red caution sign flashed across my screen, and all the files I had seen were wiped away, rapidly showing the same notification.

Access denied. Access denied. Access denied.

Shit. Dad must have locked me out. He had been watching. He was always watching. Frustration came up hot and fast in my chest, and I had to stand up and walk to the window and press my forehead against the cold glass to breathe.

What was he hiding?!

It was four in the afternoon. I should probably tell Jenny to get ready to close for the day. My intercom buzzed on the desk, and I strolled forward to receive it.

"Miss Kingsley? Someone is asking to see you."

"Who is it?"

"I don’t know, they won’t give me a name... wait, hey, wait! You can’t just go in there..."

Wait... no, it couldn’t be. The doors to my office burst open.