“She died when I was fourteen,” he said, as though that explained everything. As though it were both the beginning of the story and the end of it.
“I'm sorry.” The words were out before I could stop them, and I meant them despite everything — despite knowing exactly who he was, what he'd done, and what he'd helped bury.
Something shifted in his expression, a hairline fracture in the prosecutor's mask. Not softness and not forgiveness, butsomething closer to memory. To a rage that had never found a clean place to settle.
I stayed quiet and let him talk.
“My father was one of those predators,” he said, his voice going flat and clinical. “Sixteen years of it. My mother finally called the police when I was fourteen — stood there with bruises still visible and a broken rib and promised the dispatcher that this time was different. That this time he'd actually kill us both if they didn't come.”
The rawness in his voice was real. I filed it away alongside everything else I was learning.
“They came. Took statements, photographed the evidence, made all the sympathetic noises.” He set the photograph back on the dresser and positioned it exactly where it had been. “Then the report got misplaced. The prosecutor said the evidence wasn't strong enough. Someone who played golf with my father had a word with someone else. He came home a week later as though nothing had happened.”
“And your mother?”
“Stopped trying. Stopped believing the system would protect her.” A pause that carried the particular flatness of a grief that had calcified into something harder. “Overdose six months later. Official cause of death. The sort that could be accidental or intentional and nobody looks too closely at the difference.”
I understood then — understood how a fourteen-year-old boy watching his mother destroyed by a system that refused to protect her might grow into a man who decided that protection meant control. How that particular trauma could twist over decades into justification for everything he'd done since.
“That's why you became a prosecutor,” I said quietly.
“That's why I became good at it.” He turned to face me fully. “The law doesn't protect people. It protects power. And if you want to be safe, you don't ask permission. You take control.”
He was looking at me differently now, as though I'd passed a test I hadn't known I was sitting.
“You're not what I expected from a cleaner,” he said.
“No?” I held his gaze. “What did you expect?”
“Someone less observant. Less willing to listen.” He moved closer, the vulnerability sealing behind him like a door, the predator stepping back in to fill the space it left. “What's your name again?”
“Ken.”
“Ken.” He said it slowly, tasting the syllable. “Tell me — are you as good at following instructions as you are at asking the right questions?”
I let my posture shift slightly, becoming less professional and more aware of the space between us and what it might be about to mean. “Try me.”
His eyes darkened. “Brave. Or stupid. I haven't decided which.”
“Maybe both.” I closed the remaining distance between us. “But you're still here. Still looking at me like you're deciding what to do with me. So maybe you're curious enough to find out.”
“Maybe I am.” His grip tightened on my jaw. “Strip. Everything except the trousers. I want to see what I'm working with.”
I obeyed, pulling off the shirt with deliberate slowness and letting him watch muscle shift beneath skin, making it clear that I wasn't just some cleaner who happened to look good in a uniform. His gaze moved across my chest, my stomach, the lines of muscle that came from discipline and years of training.
“Not bad,” he said. “Turn around.”
His hands settled on my shoulders and slid down my back, tracing the curve of my spine with a touch that was clinical butheated — assessing quality the way he'd assess evidence in a courtroom.
“You work out.”
“Regularly.”
“It shows.” His hands moved lower and gripped my arse through the tight fabric. “Though these trousers are doing most of the work. Take them off. Slowly.”
I unbuttoned them, slid the zip down, and pushed them off my hips at the same deliberate pace I'd used with the shirt, letting them pool at my feet before stepping clear. Standing in just my boxers now, the fabric already tenting with an erection I had no way to hide.
Harrow moved in front of me and studied my body with cold calculation. “Hard already. Eager.”
