The months behind him had been heavy, each week weighted with decisions that carried blood on their edges. By April of 1926, Thomas Shelby moved through London as a man who had endured both war abroad and war at home. The vendetta that nearly broke his family had ended, his rivals buried or scattered, his influence consolidated.

On paper, he stood unshakable: a figure respected in boardrooms, feared in alleys, whispered about in Parliament. Yet triumph had not brought peace. In private moments, silence pressed on him like a trench wall, the ghosts of the past still murmuring in the quiet hours. He told himself that what mattered now was business, strategy, expansion—something to occupy his restless mind.

That morning he walked into the London bank with the same detached poise he wore in every setting, coat brushing against polished marble, the air heavy with ink and old money. Clerks shifted uneasily when they saw him, some recognizing his face, others simply reacting to the weight of his presence. His eyes swept the room without warmth, cataloguing details as a soldier might scan a battlefield.

And then he noticed her.

Near the tall windows, where the light fell pale on oak desks, a woman sat over ledgers, pen steady in hand. She didn’t glance up at the movement around her. She didn’t react to whispers or footsteps. Her focus was absolute, her composure unshaken. Dark hair fell softly around her face, and her blue eyes moved calmly across the numbers as though the rest of the world had ceased to exist. To Thomas, she seemed out of place among the clerks—too poised, too assured, as if she belonged to another sphere entirely, yet had chosen to sit among them.

He paused longer than he meant to, watching with the quiet intensity that unnerved men accustomed to hiding their fear. There was no fear in her. Only stillness. That, more than her beauty, held his attention.

Crossing the floor, his footsteps echoed against marble until he stopped at her desk. At last she lifted her gaze, and in that brief exchange, he felt something unfamiliar: not recognition, but a sharp sense of curiosity. She was no ordinary clerk, of that he was certain, though he could not yet say why.

The silence stretched, and then, in his low measured voice, he broke it.

“Miss… do you handle foreign accounts?”