It began with a schedule.
Ethan Cross didn't make to-do lists. He built battle plans.
Each morning—if you could call 4:00 a.m. morning—he rose from the stiff leather couch in his office's side room, brewed black coffee, and pulled up three separate encrypted databases. Passwords, ciphers, biometric logins. All muscle memory now.
He would sit behind his desk, back straight, sleeves rolled up, hair increasingly unkempt. Every keystroke was a scalpel. Every file opened was a vein he had to dissect. He was no longer defending. He was hunting.
Anna matched him hour for hour.
She'd take the bed—he insisted—but rarely used it. When she wasn't passed out in the corner chair, a law book half open on her chest, she was pacing the office barefoot, her mind always two pages ahead. She never interrupted, never hovered. Just read, wrote, and occasionally left notes in the margins of his work.
Ethan hated how much he came to rely on her eyes.
It became routine. Wake. Coffee. Pastries. Brief nod. Then the silent war resumed.
And it was a war.
They weren't just collecting dirt—they were building a bomb.
The plan was simple in theory: unravel Kellerman's network from the inside. Turn every hidden asset into a liability. Strip away his protections one layer at a time until all that remained was raw exposure.
But it required an obsession.
And obsession was Ethan's native tongue.
Case files were arranged by chronology, threat level, and proximity to current whistleblower cases. Phone logs were re-analyzed. Bank statements were flagged. He even mapped potential weak links in the chain of command and cross-referenced them with psychological profiles Anna had stolen from HR databases.
"I can't believe you had access to these," he muttered one night.
"I can't believe you're still pretending you're surprised," she'd replied without looking up.
Their dynamic began to morph.
He noticed it in the small things.
Her silence no longer felt like judgment—it felt like focus. Her interruptions—when they came—were surgical. She questioned inconsistencies, offered corrections, even suggested legal angles he hadn't considered.
Ethan couldn't help it.
He began to imagine her as a student.
Not just any student. The kind who made professors sweat. The kind who found the loopholes before the court did. He imagined her debating cases in lecture halls, tearing apart arguments with surgical calm. Her brain was wired for justice. But somewhere along the line, justice had failed her.
And maybe that's why she saw him as useful now.
Because once upon a time, Ethan Cross had bent justice until it broke—and now he was using the same hands to mend it, if only temporarily.
Sometimes, he caught her staring at him.
Not maliciously. Not fondly. Just...studying. As if trying to determine whether this machine of a man had any gears left that weren't rusted by guilt.
She didn't come here to see him as human.
He was the reason her father's death had been rewritten by legal fiction. The reason the man responsible walked away with a handshake and a promotion.
And yet...
There were moments when he looked up from a document, rubbing the pain from his wrists, only to find her handing him coffee before he asked.
Moments when she studied the same evidence with the same cold fire in her eyes, and he realized: they were no longer on opposite ends of the scale. They were the scale. A crooked, damaged balance trying to right itself.
One night, she fell asleep at the desk. Head down, arms folded, her hair spilling over his annotated witness summary.
He should have moved the file.
Instead, he moved the lamp so she wouldn't be in the dark.
He hated himself for that.
She was still the enemy. Still the detonator wired into his survival.
But it was getting harder to ignore that this alliance—built on blackmail and necessity—had begun to feel like something more treacherous:
Familiarity.
And that terrified him more than any threat she'd made.
Because Ethan Cross had survived courts, clients, and criminals by never letting anyone close.
And now?
Now he wasn't sure if Anna had slipped past his defenses...
...or if he'd started letting her in.
The soundscape of the office had changed.
No longer just keys tapping and pages turning—but breath. Presence. Two wolves in parallel dens, marking territory not with violence, but with raw intellect and the stifled growl of restraint.
Anna had instincts. So did he. And every now and then, those instincts clawed to the surface—primal, inconvenient, and electric. He felt it when she brushed past him reaching for a file. When her fingers briefly touched his as she handed him coffee. The way her scent lingered in his lungs longer than it should.
He knew he should shut it down. Draw a line. Reinforce the cold professionalism of their arrangement.
But he didn't.
Because Ethan Cross, for all his control, was still a man. And Anna wasn't just smart. She was sharp. Alive. Fire wrapped in steel.
And he—God help him—was beginning to feel the burn.
He didn't notice at first.
How the hours bled into each other. How the light through the frosted windows dimmed and returned, again and again.
He barely ate. Barely slept. When he did stretch, the pain in his back was like broken glass.
But she was still there.
That woman. That infuriating, determined, maddening woman.
She matched him beat for beat. Didn't complain. Didn't pace or whine or interrupt.
When she was tired, she simply retreated into the side room and passed out on the bed. When she was focused, she devoured the same files he did—sometimes silently mouthing legalese as if rehearsing battle spells.
Ethan hated how often he noticed.
The way her eyes narrowed when she read something incriminating. The bite of her lip when she wrote. The way her eyebrows knotted when she thought too hard.
It annoyed him.
Even more so that her presence—constant, tireless—wasn't a hindrance. It made him sharper.
Once, when she didn't realize he was watching, she took his scribbled legal notes and traced a margin comment with her finger like it was a wound.
He turned away quickly. Angry with himself.
She was the enemy.
She was the reason he was in this mess.
And yet—every time he moved; she was there. Every time he spoke, she listened.
The war had changed.
And for the first time in years, Ethan Cross wasn't sure who he was trying to defeat.
Or save.
When he worked late into the night, she was beside him, never asking for permission, never waiting for orders. Her hazel eyes narrowed with precision as she analyzed legal jargon like a predator sizing up a wounded target. Her lip bit when she was focused. Her breath hitched when something clicked. He memorized these things against his will.
She saw the system like he did—not as sacred, but as something pliable. Moldable. Ripe for dismantling.
There was power in that.
And danger.
They weren't friends. They weren't lovers. They were co-conspirators holding lit matches over an open barrel of gasoline.
Every moment they spent together frayed the line further.
One evening, she caught him watching her. Really watching. She said nothing—just quirked an eyebrow and returned to her notes.
But something in the air shifted.
The next morning, he poured two coffees before she woke.
Neither mentioned it.
But when she sat down, she drank it without a word.
He could no longer pretend she was just a means to an end.
Because somewhere, in this tangled mess of vengeance and survival, Anna had become something else.
And Ethan wasn't sure whether that made her a liability—or the only person in the world who could keep him from losing himself completely.
And somewhere between the silence and the screens, Anna found herself studying him—not as a monster, not as an enemy, but as something more complicated. She imagined him as a law student, hunched over thick books, scribbling notes in margins, eyes lit with purpose. The same intensity he now poured into destroying what he once protected.
It unsettled her.
Made her feel too close to the flame.
One evening, as he leaned forward to examine a clause in an old contract, a lock of hair fell across his brow. Anna stared at it a moment too long—then blinked hard, frustrated with herself.
She didn't come here to see him as human.
He was a big part of the problem. He was the reason her father's death never found justice.
But damn it, he made it hard not to.
And that was dangerous.
Because the more she watched him work...
The more she realized Ethan Cross wasn't the only one unraveling.
That night, as the storm outside cast flickering shadows across the office walls, Ethan Cross stared at the trigger file—the one he'd been holding back. The one that could begin the domino effect.
It was a sequence of shell transactions. Offshore account linkages buried deep within dummy corporations—cleaned, erased, and refiled again. But he'd found the pattern.
And now, he was ready to set it loose.
He ran his fingers along the edges of the document like it was a live wire.
Anna glanced up from across the room, sensing it. "That's the one, isn't it?"
He didn't answer. Just slid the file into the center of the desk.
"What happens if you push it through?" she asked.
"His Cayman accounts freeze within seventy-two hours. It'll trigger an automatic flag with Interpol," Ethan replied, voice quiet but tight.
Anna stood, approached slowly. "And the chain?"
"Two more fronts collapse. His legal defense fund evaporates. And an internal audit in Zurich gets activated. Kellerman won't even have time to hide the bodies."
They stood shoulder to shoulder, the quiet hum of servers and distant thunder the only witnesses.
"This is it, then?" she said, breath barely above a whisper.
Ethan didn't look at her. "No. This is the first match. The fire comes next."