Legal occupies the twenty-sixth floor. The carpet is darker, the lighting cooler, and every person I pass communicates in subtext, precedent, and the specific silence of wolves who've learned that the wrong word in the wrong clause can dismantle a fortune.
Blake Wallace runs it the way a surgeon runs an operating theatre—no wasted motion, no small talk, no tolerance for anything that hasn't earned its place. His desk holds exactly what the current case demands, and nothing else.
"The Kellerman merger file." He doesn't look up when I walk in on Monday. "Tab seven, subsection C. Tell me what's wrong with the indemnity clause."
"Good morning to you too." I set my bag down and flip to the section. "Is there coffee, or does Legal run on contempt and fluorescent lighting?"
"There's coffee when you've found the error." His pen moves across a document with unhurried precision. "You have ten minutes."
Spencer gave instructions and waited. Miles gave context and encouraged. Blake drops me in the deep end and times my drowning with the same expression he uses for everything—granite patience and gunmetal eyes that miss nothing.
I find the error in seven. A liability cap that contradicts the force majeure provision three pages later—the kind of conflict that would detonate in arbitration.
"The liability cap in seven-C doesn't survive section twelve." I slide the file back across his desk. "If force majeure triggers, the indemnity evaporates. Your opposing counsel either missed it or buried it on purpose."
His eyebrows shift by one millimetre—from Blake, this is a standing ovation, a ticker-tape parade, and a tearful acceptance speech compressed into a single micro-expression. He sets the pen down for the first time since I entered.
"Who taught you to read contracts?" He leans back in his chair. Those grey eyes recalibrate something behind the geological composure.
"Nobody. Two years fighting my mother's insurance company." I drop into the chair opposite. "Medical billing disputes are basically contract law with worse fonts."
"Sit in on the Kellerman call at two." He picks up the pen again, already moving forward. "Take notes, don't speak unless I ask directly."
"Should I also refrain from breathing, or is that still permitted in Legal?" I pull the next file from the stack. His mouth does that tectonic thing—the fault line shifting beneath the surface.
"Breathing is discretionary." He flips a page without looking up. "Opinions are earned around here."
The days unspool with a rhythm that runs on precision instead of warmth. Blake expects me to keep pace without being told the speed, and when I stumble, he waits at exactly the distance where I have to sprint to close the gap.
I rise to it—partly because stubbornness is the only inheritance my father gave me that works. Partly because Blake's standards register in my bones as respect, and that assumption warms my chest more than I want it to.
His proximity is the most unsettling of the three. Miles turns the volume down on every alarm I run; Spencer sharpens everything to a blade. Blake strips things away, layer by quiet layer, until I'm standing in whatever's left beneath the armour I've spent twenty-four years welding shut.
Cedar and cold metal fill the space between us. The exposure has nothing to do with skin—it's the parts of myself I've been keeping locked in rooms I thought nobody could find.
Thursday evening. The office has emptied and we're three hours into a partnership agreement bleeding red ink. Blake sits close enough that his sleeve brushes my forearm when he reaches for a page.
"Clause nineteen." I tap the paragraph. "The non-compete radius is unenforceable—it covers the entire Pacific Northwest. No court upholds that."
"The point isn't enforcement." He leans closer to read and his scent thickens between us until my lungs stall mid-function. "It's leverage. You make the clause absurd so the negotiation starts where you actually want it."
"So you're bluffing." My voice comes out steadier than the pulse hammering my wrists deserves. "That's a strategy?"
"That's litigation." His eyes lift from the page and meet mine, and the distance between our faces is a number that should require a permit. "Everything in a contract is a conversation. The question is who's listening."
"And who's listening here?" My throat works around the sentence. Cedar floods my chest like smoke filling a sealed room.
"I am." Two words—a closing argument requiring no elaboration. His grey eyes hold mine long enough that my vertebrae fuse one by one from the base of my spine upward.
I pull back to the documents because staying in that proximity is a bravery I'm currently rationing for more critical operations. My pen finds the margin and writes something I won't remember, motor function substituting for cognition.
I catch him watching me twice more that evening—not my body, my face. Like he's translating something written in a language he hasn't decoded. Each time I look up, he returns to the document without hurry, unconcerned about being caught.
At nine I stack my files and reach for my bag. "Goodnight, Blake. Try to leave before the cleaning crew stages an intervention."
"Bailee." My name stops me at the door, and I turn to find him standing six feet closer than the room requires—when did he move? Cedar floods my senses and my spine goes rigid.
"You're good at this." His voice drops to a register that bypasses my ears entirely. "Not the assistant work—the survival. The way you walk into rooms that don't want you and refuse to leave smaller."
My jaw locks. The sentence lands somewhere I can't reach to remove it—below the sarcasm, below the armour, in the place where a girl spent twenty-four years being told she didn't belong and never once heard someone say she belonged anyway.
"Goodnight, Blake." My voice holds—barely. I nod once and make the stairwell before my face betrays everything happening behind it
My back hits the concrete wall. The fluorescent buzzes overhead while my eyes burn and my hands press flat against my thighs, shaking with something I refuse to name or examine under this lighting.
My phone buzzes against my hip. Then again. Then a third time—all within four minutes, a coordinated strike disguised as professional correspondence.
Miles's subject line: Why Technology Is Objectively the Best Choice (With Data). Blake's: Legal Department—Formal Rotation Summary. Spencer's: A Brief Note on Your Placement—which, knowing Spencer, will be neither brief nor a note.
I scroll through them in the stairwell, mascara compromised, and my mouth curves. Three wolves built a bidding war for my attention and wrapped it in corporate formatting, the competitiveness so thinly veiled it's practically transparent.
I'll have to choose—department, brother, direction. A decision that means something none of them are saying out loud and all of them are asking with every carefully neutral sentence.
My hand drifts to my stomach, pressing through cotton to the secret underneath. Choosing has never been the hard part—the hard part is choosing when every option reshapes a life I'm already building in silence, and the people asking don't know the blueprints exist.
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