THE XANDERIA LAW FIRM: LOVE, LAW AND THORN.

CHAPTER 4 - JOSH

Morrison & Hall — it was the kind of establishment so prestigious, people spoke its name like legend. Scholars whispered about it. The externship pool was overflowing with Ivy League harpies—kids with last names that opened doors just by being spoken. I had no edge. Just despair… and a mind that devoured everything it touched.

And then it happened.

During a deposition fix session, I’d scribbled a counterargument in the margins of an elderly associate’s notes—not out of arrogance, but sheer frustration. Gregory Hall, the CEO himself, found it. The next day, I was called upstairs. Not for a scolding, but for something else entirely.

"You've got the mind of a scalpel, son," Hall told me. "Let me teach you how to cut."

Those words never left me.

I built Xanderia six years later. Brick by legal brick. A firm where no one dared to ask where I came from ever again.

As the elevator doors slid open to the upper floors—my floors—Eliana and Branley flanked me like sentinels. We passed staff in perfectly tailored suits. Greetings rippled through the hall. Posture straightened. Eyes sharpened. And the ones who feared me… well, their tails quietly uncurled.

Some of them looked at me with something more than respect, like as if I were God. Others, like I was the devil who just paid very well, well enough to keep them to work.I stepped into my office. The doors closed behind me with a whisper, like they knew better than to make noise.

Bronze and black ruled the space—cold, elegant, deliberate. The desk, sleek and surgically clean, sat like a throne waiting to be used. Behind it, the shelves held every legal text I’d ever conquered: ancient constitutional treatises, obscure arbitration codes, things most attorneys couldn’t even pronounce. This wasn’t decoration. It was ammunition.

I took a sip of coffee. Black. No sugar. No time.

Then I began to type.

> Dear Mr. Chambers,

Per Rule 26, your client's failure to disclose discovery items constitutes a breach. If the requested documentation isn't produced in 48 hours, we will motion for Rule 37 sanctions and pursue an adverse inference jury instruction.

Send.

I glanced at the time. The morning was already pacing ahead of me.

“Eliana,” I said into the intercom.

“Yes, sir?”

“Bring in the first interviewee.”

“On it.”

I didn’t get up. Just remained seated, head tilted slightly over the laptop, fingers still tapping restlessly as the door creaked open a few minutes later.

Candidate One walked in.

Polite nods, firm handshakes, predictable answers. I asked the questions. They stumbled or danced. One by one, they filed in, ten of them, each with the same desperate gleam in their eye.

“Next candidate incoming, sir,” Eliana said through the intercom.

“Send in,” I replied, voice flat.

I didn’t look up right away. I never did.

Let them walk into my world before I let them into my line of sight.I felt her before I saw her.

I’ve never been one for dramatics. I deal in logic, in statute, in things that can be proven, footnoted, cross-examined. That’s the way I’ve always kept myself sane in a world that rarely is. But when she walked into my office that morning—when she stood there—I swear, reality bent.

I didn’t see her at first. I only heard the sharp, clean click of heels against the marble, confident but not arrogant. Purposeful. Rhythmic. The kind of sound that didn’t belong to someone uncertain or eager to impress. No, this was someone used to attention. But she didn’t announce herself. No awkward cough or forced greeting. She simply… existed.

That should’ve been my first clue.

I kept typing, pretending not to notice, finishing a final line in a memo regarding a deposition we’d been preparing for. Rule 26 disclosure issues. Routine. Mundane. The kind of legal minutiae I could file away with half my brain.

But my hands paused.

Fingers suspended above the keys like a chord waiting to be resolved. Something about the air shifted. It was subtle but tangible—like how the room stills before a verdict is read. That tiny breath of anticipation before everything either fractures or sets.

I looked up.

And time… slipped.

She was standing just at the edge of my desk, the sunlight pouring through the window behind her, outlining the curve of her jaw, casting delicate shadows along her cheekbones. Her face was still unreadable. Her posture relaxed but dignified. Like she belonged there.

And for a terrifying, unsteady second—my entire body froze.

That face.

My pulse thudded once. Loud. Unmistakable.

Agatha?

The name punched its way up from the basement of my brain, where I had long since locked it behind steel doors and reinforced emotional concrete. But now, it burst out, all uninvited, like it still owned the place.

I blinked.

Once. Twice.

No. It couldn’t be.

The hair was different, slightly shorter, a warmer tone. There was something subtly altered in her stance, too, something more grounded. But her face, God, her face, was so close to Agatha’s it was like the universe was playing a cruel joke.

Her eyes met mine with the kind of composure most people reserve for job interviews or funerals. Neutral. Calm. But that neutrality only made it worse. Because it gave me no clues, no lifeline to tell myself this was coincidence.

She didn’t speak. Not yet.

She just stood there, sunlight washing over her like she was part of some old oil painting.

And I....

I was drowning in ghosts.

The memories didn’t hit all at once. They snuck in, soft-footed and cruel.

Agatha’s laugh in the backseat of my car the night we ran from her sister’s engagement party. The smell of her perfume, citrusy with a hint of jasmine, that used to linger on my collar days after she’d left my apartment. The way she used to rest her head on my chest, one hand curled around my shirt like she was afraid I’d disappear if she let go.

Gone.

All of it.