Raven Chapter 18 Stolen Shirts and Shipping Manifests 216 #5
“Exactly. We need to step up your training. Silas is giving Emerson a crash course in runes and magic as, for some reason, none of us are comfortable with you two being alone.” He shakes his head in bafflement, but I’m positively giddy at this admission.
“You’ll have a training session in the morning with all of us, lessons with Emerson mid-day, then another training session at night. ”
I try my best not to groan at the idea of that kind of rigorous schedule, but fail miserably and end up sounding like a dying whale. Ro-ro isn’t impressed, and he sends me a very judgy look. I sigh, knowing he’s right and I need to do it.
Ugh, if this is what it takes to get that man to look at me like something other than a problem he's still trying to solve before setting aside, then lead me to the pain palace.
“Fine, but I’m complaining the entire time,” I tell him, then groan because I definitely meant to keep that inside my head.
He just gives me a little disapproving look before a little buzz sounds, and he presses another button to unlock his door. It opens to admit a man in a fancy suit, followed by a younger, weasel-faced man clutching a tablet.
The suited man gives Forrest a respectful nod. “Mr. Hatcher.”
“Forrest,” the weasel-faced man—Davison, according to his tag—chimes in with a familiarity that makes Forrest's eye twitch almost imperceptibly. His gaze immediately slides past Forrest and lands on me, lingering a second too long.
Some sort of budget meeting begins, and I make myself look like I’m doing my job. Am I just drawing stick figures jumping to their death off a steep cliff? Yes, but there’s also a pretty realistic drawing of a penis. No idea who’s, but it’s there.
At this point, I’m trying to do anything to ignore the feel of Davison's eyes on me. Every time there's a lull, he finds a way to bring me into the conversation. It’s infuriating. I’d much rather be watching animals die in gruesome ways while sipping tea and eating chocolate, but no.
Instead, I’m sitting here getting creeped on.
It’s comforting, in a way, that the gods are still the same old assholes they’ve always been.
"Of course, we'd need to ensure our new... consultant…” I feel his eyes rake up and down my body, “understands the fiscal constraints," he says, smiling at me. It doesn't reach his eyes.
The suited guy, Sterling, lets out a sigh. "Davison. Focus. She’s here to adjust workplace flow, not audit."
But Davison doesn't focus. His eyes are constantly straying from the tablet and onto me. Later, when discussing departmental allocations, he turns to me directly. "A fresh perspective is so valuable. What are your initial impressions of our operational flow, Miss...?"
I freeze, my pen stilling. Shit. What's my cover name? He never gave me a cover name .
Forrest doesn't even look up from his papers. "Her assessment will be included in my report. She is here to observe, not to be observed. Now, stop wasting my time and continue with the Quarter 3 projections."
His tone is absolute. A verbal smack-down. Davison's smile tightens, but he finally looks away.
The rest of the meeting passes with him shooting me sidelong glances—like a predator about to pounce. Not in a sexy way. If this look came from Anik, I'd be planning my escape route toward the nearest horizontal surface.
From this guy? I'm planning my escape route toward the nearest shower. Does Forrest have one tucked away somewhere? If so, I'm about to find out.
When they finally leave, Davison is the last out, his gaze sweeping over me one final, hungry time.
The door clicks shut. The silence is thick. Forrest slowly lifts his head, his eyes like chips of granite. He doesn't look at me. He looks at the door Davison just exited through.
"Anik," he says into his phone, which he seems to have pulled out of thin air. "Run a full background and financial deep-dive on an employee named Davison. He's compromised. Assign someone to tail him. Ensure they know the consequences will be severe if they lose him."
Then, he finally turns that formidable gaze on me. "It seems your presence has already proven useful. Uncomfortable, but useful."
“Glad my discomfort is useful to you, Ro-ro,” I mutter before flinging my head back so it lands with a satisfying thunk on the back of the chair.
“If we’re going to keep just hanging out like this, I’m going to need you to let me do something.
I have about ten more minutes of this in me before I'm going to start chewing on the drywall.
Give me a job. A real one. I can feel my shiny new neurons atrophying. "
He looks up from his monitor, his gaze assessing. He takes in my hand tapping the pencil, my bouncing knee, and the fact I’m chewing on my lip. I think he can sense the fact that this is building up to some seriously chaotic, boredom-driven, bad decisions. He is obviously spot-on.
I’m about five minutes from hijacking a phone and calling Kieran to come rescue me. Or ordering spray paint online to liven up the space. I’ve never spray painted anything in my life, but it seems fun and really, how hard could it be?
As if he’s read my thoughts, he pulls a tablet out of one of his desk drawers and pulls something up.
“Very well,” he says, walking over to me. He places the tablet in my hands. The cool, smooth surface is a stark contrast to the frantic energy buzzing under my skin. “These are the last month’s shipping manifests for all magical components entering the city through our monitored ports.”
I can feel my soul attempting to leave my body. “Spreadsheets. This is not work, Ro-ro. I’m pretty sure it is actually classified as cruel and unusual punishment.”
“I’m not torturing you. I’m employing you. Cross-reference the declared items with their declared weight, volume, and tariff value. Look for discrepancies.”
It takes everything inside of me not to slump forward and slam my forehead into the coffee table. Unconsciousness would definitely get me out of this.
Why did I ask for this again?
Oh yeah, boredom. And the desperate need to prove I'm not useless and a drain on resources. Unconsciousness is looking better and better.
“This sounds like it’s going to involve math,” I groan, the words tasting as appealing as the concept of a pureed food diet.
“I want you to find the lies.” His tone is utterly serious, a low vibration that stills my bouncing knee for a fraction of a second.
“Smugglers are often arrogant. They get sloppy with the paperwork. A crate of ‘common river stones’ that weighs two tons. A shipment of potted plants, valued at a price that wouldn’t cover the soil they’re planted in.
Find where the data doesn’t make sense.” He meets my eyes, and I sense the faintest hint of a challenge. “Can you do that?”
I straighten up. You’ve successfully solved the mystery of corporeality, I tell myself. This spreadsheet couldn’t possibly be harder than that.
When he nods, I realize, once again, the words have escaped the confines of my skull. No matter, the sentiment remains.
Time to woman up.
I, in fact, do not woman up . The columns and rows mutate from simple data into a seething, numerical mob, all of it screaming at me threateningly, demanding attention.
It’s a sensory crime scene, a blizzard of fancy words and numbers where the only victim is my sanity.
The sheer volume of what they monitor is staggering.
Does he usually go through this himself?
How is he able to do this on top of everything else I’ve been seeing him do today?
“How do you even find a starting point in all of this?” I ask him after looking at the spreadsheet, like it might bite me for however long I’ve been held hostage by it.
“You’ve been at it for twenty minutes, and you haven’t even started?” He sighs before standing and making his way over to sit in the chair across from me. “If you’re struggling that much, just say something.”
I eye him. “Because you set such a great example of that for the rest of us?”
“Who says I need help?” He asks, truly baffled.
I run all the things I’ve seen him do today alone through my head, then add in the other stuff he has going on in the background on top of family stuff. There’s no way he’s not drowning, at least a little.
He and Dre are both similar like that. Both of them act like asking for help is like asking for a venereal disease.
“I do.” I shrug. “Everyone needs help sometimes.”
He doesn’t answer, simply reaches across to spin the tablet on the table so we can both see it. He scans it for less than a minute before pointing to a single, seemingly innocuous line item—a shipping manifest for "ceramic garden gnomes."
“There. The declared value is thirty percent below the typical market rate for the weight and volume. It’s a common shell for moving illicit magical components. Follow the money, and you’ll find the lie. Everything else is just noise.”
I just blink at him, stunned. “What do you even do with this information?”
"I make note of it, and we find a way to do something good with it."
“And by good you mean…?”
“Some of it might go to Silas to help us do our jobs, some of it we sell to Rhys and put the money into one of our foundations or another we trust. The university here is also always looking for rare and illicit substances to help teach the students safe magic use,” he explains.
He checks his wrist watch, “Speaking of foundations. We have one more meeting before we head home. Anik was very insistent that we be home for dinner.”
I look at the clock on the tablet, and my mouth drops open. How has an entire day gone by with me just twiddling my thumbs?
Oh wait, I had an incredibly sexy and stoic gargoyle in a perfectly tailored suit to gawk at all day.