Page 118 of The Rules

Except now, hedidunderstand.

And suddenly, it wasn't just about Winters.

It was abouthim.

He stared at the memo, memories crashing through the carefully constructed walls he'd built around them.

He had grown up in a house where truth wasn't optional—it was legacy. The Sinclair name meant something. It stood for justice. His father was a federal judge, his mother a renowned defense attorney. Dinner conversations were laced with case law and moral responsibility. They never asked himifhe wanted to fight for justice. They simply raised him to believe hewould.

"Always seek the truth, Benjamin," his father would say, voice steady as stone. "The law is nothing without it."

The Sinclair line was a proud one—long, storied, and righteous. Well,mostly.

His younger brother had broken the chain. Walked away. Chose grey zone over principle. And they've rarely spoken since then. Julian had laughed when Ben took the internship, warned him the system wasn't what their parents pretended it was.

Ben had dismissed it as bitterness, as weakness.

But he? He still believed. When he landed the internship, fresh out of law school, sharp suit and idealism intact, he thought this was it.Thiswas where he'd earn his name. Where he'd carry the Sinclair flame forward, like every generation before him.

Until the day he realized the courtroom was never the battlefield. It was the cleanup site.

Ben's fingers tightened around the folder as memories surged back—memories he'd spent years burying under success and control.

They were defending a high-profile client—wealthy, influential, polished like a goddamn showroom floor.

Sterling & Co. Investments, one of the largest investment firms in the country, accused of defrauding pensioners. The kind of case that makes or breaks careers.

And the defendant? Niel Winters. Middle-aged. Humble. Steady hands and tired eyes—like a man who’d spent his life doing the right thing, and now didn’t understand how it had all gone so wrong.

The evidence had been clear—or so Ben had thought. Documents that traced the money trail clean as bone.Testimonies from coworkers. A timeline that painted a picture of deliberate fraud—by someone else.

He had gone over the file a dozen times, confident they’d prove Niel’s innocence. It was clear that he was fighting on the wrong side.

He could still see the courtroom.

The too-bright fluorescents. The judge's flat tone. The hollow echo of the gavel as it fell like a guillotine. That sound had never left him. It crept into his dreams, bleeding into sleepless nights, whispering through the cracks of otherwise perfect days.

Guilty.

He hadn’t stood. He’d watched. Sat in silence like a fucking intern while they gutted a man’s life six feet from him.

No power. No title. Just eyes and shame.

He hadn’t been a player back then. He’d barely been more than a shadow in someone else’s game. They’d handed him files to carry and orders to follow—and he had followed. He watched as they twisted the truth, buried the facts, steamrolled a man’s life for convenience and optics and wins on paper.

He remembered the accused’s wife—how she broke in real time, folding into herself like a building set for demolition.

The way the man’s eyes didn’t even fight. They just… dimmed. Like heknewno one in that courtroom had come for justice.

Ben had gone home that night and punched a hole in his apartment wall.

He hadn’t known what else to do.

Years passed. He built his name. His empire. Brick by cold, controlled brick. But the nightmares stayed. Sometimes he woke with his fists clenched and no air in his lungs. Sometimes he still heard that gavel and felt like that powerless twenty-something kid again, watching someone drown while he stood frozen on the shore.

So he made a promise to himself: never again. No more irrelevance. No more silence. He would rise so high no onecould shut him out. Control. Precision. Power. That was how you survived. That was how you won.

And now—Winters.