Chapter 1 : Introduction
It was two in the morning, and the conference room still smelled faintly of coffee…I needed a lot of caffeine to sustain myself inside of this environment.
I sat alone at the long table, jacket folded neatly beside my chair, sleeves rolled just enough to keep fabric away from my wrists, posture straight without effort, the glass walls reflecting a man who looked composed even when no one else was around to see it.
At 6'2, broad shoulders earned through intense work in the gym for a long time, blonde hair that was wavy and was always styled neatly, blue eyes fixed on a screen that scrolled faster than most people could read, clean-shaven since this was a professional work environment…
My fingers moved.
Not quickly in the way people described speed when they were impressed, but at a pace that crossed into something else entirely, keys blurring beneath my hands as documents collapsed into summaries, summaries reassembled into arguments, arguments nested seamlessly into filings that aligned perfectly with precedent and internal logic.
There was no hesitation, no backspacing, no visible process of thought, just output, dense and continuous, as though the machine was finally keeping up rather than the other way around.
No one ever noticed when I worked like this.
They never could, because it only happened when I was alone.
The moment the conference room door opened, the rhythm broke as cleanly as if a switch had been flipped, my hands slowing into something recognizably human, imperfect enough to pass, restrained enough to avoid questions.
Annoyance surfaced before I could suppress it, not because I disliked interruption in principle, but because it forced me back into limits I did not normally inhabit.
"I'm sorry for interrupting you, Mr. Kent, but I just wanted to remind you that we have a deadline to send over all these files to Pearson Hardman in 4 hours."
"Yes, I know, Pauline, thank you for the reminder, work's almost done."
The door closed again, and the room returned to silence.
I exhaled slowly, pushed myself back from the table, and stood, knowing there was no point forcing the rhythm to return immediately now that it had been disrupted. I crossed the room and leaned against the glass, looking out at the city sprawled beneath me, lights scattered unevenly across the dark like evidence of lives that never fully powered down.
Late nights were routine here, expected without being acknowledged, and recognition was something that moved on different currents entirely. I had understood that when I joined, that this firm's name alone would open doors later, that the cost would be anonymity now, buried under layers of hierarchy and unspoken assumptions about who belonged where.
It had been a little over ten years since I had entered this world, a number that still carried weight when I let myself consider it.
I had been fourteen when I realized the truth, standing in a kitchen that mirrored the one from my first life closely enough to feel like a mockery, flipping through a newspaper out of habit from my past life.
Reading the paper had been something I picked up in my mid-thirties the first time around, a quiet routine formed after realising that I needed more information about the world...
I had been forty when I died back then…and I spent the majority of my youth binging media content to escape from life.
I blamed everything bad that happened in my life on my parents…but when I had reached a true adult age I realised that everyone's life was their own responsibility.
Anyways, what had caught my attention inside of the newspaper surprised me.
Gordon Schmidt Van Dyke.
The realization had not been dramatic, the kind of certainty that settled into your bones without asking permission. This was not simply another life, not merely a second chance wrapped in familiarity, but a world where Suits existed as reality rather than fiction, where timelines were fixed, players were known, and outcomes could be anticipated with frightening accuracy if one was patient enough.
That was when I decided I would become a lawyer.
Not because of ambition alone, but because proximity mattered, and law was the axis around which power rotated most quietly. There were other decisions made that day as well, less glamorous but more urgent, particularly the understanding that my family's future followed a path I had already walked once and had no intention of walking again.
I stayed for the required years, fulfilled obligations without attachment, and left the moment adulthood made departure irrevocable.
I had not seen my parents in 10 years.
The absence did not trouble me, largely because I knew exactly where they would be now, how their choices would have unfolded, and how little my presence would have altered the result. Some outcomes were not tragedies but inevitabilities.
I stretched, rolled tension out of my shoulders, and returned to the table, sitting down with practiced ease. My hands found the keyboard again, and the pace shifted, accelerating beyond anything that would have seemed reasonable if someone had been watching, the skill surfacing only in solitude, only when there were no witnesses to ask questions I could not answer.
It was one of the things I had been given, though I had never named the giver aloud.
Harvard had been easy, moot court easier still, three years at the top without needing to announce it, yet here I was, trusted with volume but not with voice, valued for endurance rather than judgment, confined to desks while others argued with credentials thinner than mine.
The last file saved with a quiet click, and I leaned back, eyes on the screen, already certain of the conclusion forming in my mind.
It was time to move to a new firm.
The lights were still on at the assistant desks when I stepped out of the conference room, the floor quieter than it would be during the day but far from empty, because this was the hour where real work settled in and people who mattered stopped pretending they had lives outside the building.
Pauline was still there, shoulders slightly hunched, eyes fixed on her screen in the way people did when they were trying to push through exhaustion rather than acknowledge it, and I slowed my pace just enough to make sure she noticed me before I spoke.
"Pauline, I finished and sent you the file summarizing all of our documents. How about you send Pearson Hardman the soft copy over? And then ask them to come over and pick the hard copy of the files if required. I'll be heading home for now, take the morning off, you deserve it."
I did not wait for a response, not out of dismissal, but because this firm ran on momentum, and lingering invited complications neither of us needed. I kept walking, past empty offices and dimmed lights, into the elevator that carried me down toward the lobby without ceremony, my reflection staring back at me from the mirrored walls with the same composed neutrality it always wore.
Outside, the night air was colder than I expected, sharp enough to cut through fatigue, and I stepped into the first cab that pulled up without breaking stride, giving the address automatically as the car merged back into traffic.
One of the few perks of working at a firm like Rand, Kaldor, Zane was that after ten at night, transportation home was covered without question, along with meals that no one bothered tracking because at this level, everyone was either still in the office or pretending they were working from somewhere else.
It did not matter much to me.
By the time you reach Senior Associate, the distinction between office hours and personal time stopped existing in any meaningful sense, and work simply became the backdrop against which everything else occurred.
Tomorrow I would need to be back by 8 AM for a new client meeting, sitting alongside a Junior Partner who would do most of the talking while I absorbed context, took notes, and quietly fixed whatever cracks appeared beneath the surface.
That meant going home, changing, heading to the gym, and then looping back into the same rhythm that had defined my life here, with maybe two hours of sleep if timing aligned and nothing unexpected surfaced, which was never guaranteed. This was the life at RKZ and I had accepted it when I signed on, but acceptance did not mean satisfaction.
The truth was that partnership slots here were functionally full.
Everyone knew it, even if no one said it outright, because the firm was heavy with names that had already solidified their claims, partners who had been here long enough to be immovable, and advancement followed a schedule that rewarded endurance more than excellence. I had recently been promoted to senior associate, younger than anyone else in the firm's history had managed it based purely on performance, but even that achievement felt hollow when viewed in context.
Another two or three years, that was what people whispered, as though time alone was justification, as though seniority outweighed capability.
I did not agree.
Four and a half years of relentless output, of efficiency that bordered on uncomfortable for the people above me, of cleaning up messes without credit and solving problems without applause, and still the idea of naming me the youngest Junior Partner the firm had ever seen seemed to make people uneasy. Work-wise, I already was the youngest senior associate they had ever had, and at 28, having finished law school at 24…Typically people took slightly longer.
Most people took gap years, clerked, drifted, hesitated.
I did not.
But it was not enough for me, not for my ambition, not for the quiet hunger that had shaped every decision since I was fourteen years old and realized the contours of this world. I wanted more, and I did not see a reason to pretend otherwise, because there was no one in this firm who was better than me at the due diligence behind the scenes…and I deserved an opportunity to show myself to be more than a grinder.
I deserved a partnership.
And if RKZ could not give it to me in a timeframe that matched reality rather than tradition, then I would go somewhere that could.
The cab slowed as it approached my building, and I paid without looking, stepping back into the night with the certainty already settled in my mind. If my calculations were correct, there were six months left, six months until the beginning of the plot that would reshape the legal landscape of this city in ways most people would not understand.
Six months until Suits truly began.
And for what came next, there was only one firm that mattered.
Pearson Hardman.
Unless something unexpected intervened, I would be submitting my transfer request within the next few weeks, positioning myself exactly where I needed to be when the time came, because I did not believe in waiting for miracles, but I did believe in preparation.