Page 228 of The Rules
She’s real. She’s strong. And she’s his.
The thought roots in him like a curse.
He studies her features—the delicate lines of her face , the faint tremble in her breath, the unshakable clarity in those dark eyes—and something inside him caves and hardens all at once.
He doesn’t breathe.
Because if he does, he’ll say it. He’ll name the feeling that’s tearing through him like a blade.
Instead, he lets it burn.
And in that fire, a truth crystallizes—monstrous, absolute:
There is no line he wouldn’t cross.
Not for the law. Not even for justice.
But for her.
He’d sink into the darkest part of himself without hesitation. He’d become whatever the world needed him to be—so long as she stayed safe. So long as she stayed his.
His expression hardens. Not from conflict.
From surrender.
The decisionis already made.
She sits beside him, and the world tilts into place.
And Ben? Ben stops pretending he has limits.
???
The war room is chaos. But not the kind born of disorder—it’s the kind that breeds truth.
Papers blanket the table in a hurricane of data: court records, offshore accounts, sealed settlements. Most of them courtesy of Julian—documents no one should legally have, and yet here they are, flipped through by trembling fingers and sharp minds. Screens glow with spreadsheets, bank logs, and digital trails so deeply buried they might as well have been scrubbed from existence.
The air hums with intensity, with caffeine, with something brittle and close to shattering.
Ben stands at the center of it all, sleeves rolled to his elbows, shirt creased and stained with ink and fatigue. One hand flips through pages with surgical precision, the other scrawls notes in slanted, relentless script. His eyes don’t blink enough.
"There's a pattern here," he mutters, voice low, clipped, dangerous. "Crawford’s money isn’t just moving. It’s being used to buy people. Detectives. Witnesses. Entire units in the department, maybe."
His pen hovers above the page as the truth sinks in.
"The police are compromised."
Kath is beside him. Her hair brushes his arm as she leans in, scanning the screen he’s been dissecting. Numbers. Dates.
Wire routes.
Her eyes sharpen. "This account—it's the same one that paid off the man who attacked me. Both times."
Ben’s head lifts, slow, deliberate.
“We confirmed it. Got itout of him.”
Kath’s expression hardens. “Did he say anything about Aria?”
