Chapter 4: Under Litt
What did I do for the next two days?
Mostly, I took care of my business.
Fantasy Entertainment was the most visible one, the one people would point to if they ever bothered to look closely, but it was far from the only thing I was running. I had my own investment platforms operating quietly in the background, and within that division I had already begun laying the groundwork for a cryptocurrency agency, specifically oriented toward long-term Bitcoin mining.
After all, if one had foresight, why would one not aim to become a trillionaire?
Bitcoin would peak around 2030 before experiencing a significant correction, though that was a problem for my future self, well after I had exited at the top and redistributed my exposure elsewhere. Until then, my intention was simple: monopolize as much of the ecosystem as possible while the market still underestimated what it was becoming.
I had learned something fundamental about money over the years.
The hardest money to make was the first million.
The second followed much faster, the third faster still, and then progress slowed again at the ten-million mark, slowed further at a hundred million, but once that barrier was broken, money stopped being a necessity and became a scoreboard. No human needed more than a hundred million dollars to live an absurdly luxurious life, at least in my opinion, and anything beyond that was no longer about comfort or security.
It was about ego.
And I had no intention of pretending otherwise.
I wanted more.
I wanted to stop operating purely from the background, but not by becoming the face of companies or the center of an industry I did not truly care to manage day to day. I wanted the legal profession, a space where power was subtle, where intelligence mattered, where dominance was established quietly and irrevocably.
And now, that part of my life was beginning.
It was my first day at Pearson Hardman.
Thursday morning came early, and despite official hours starting at 9AM, I was already in the building by 8AM, dressed, alert, and entirely ready. As I approached the reception desk of a firm I had watched countless times on a screen in another life, the receptionist was already seated, posture professional, eyes flicking up as I approached.
"Hi," I said politely, " My name is Michaelson Kent. I'm joining today."
She typed briefly on her computer, nodded once, and replied, "I'll call for Ms. Zane so she'll be able to take you to your office and give you a tour of the firm."
The name caught my attention immediately.
Zane.
For a split second, my mind went to Robert Zane, a man I had worked under for four years, a man who had tried to keep me, but then the context corrected itself. This was Rachel Elizabeth Zane.
Paralegal.
4.5 years at Pearson Hardman…that was as long as I was a lawyer.
Ambitious, intelligent, driven.
Someone who wanted Harvard Law badly enough that it had shaped much of her adult life, even though she would eventually attend Columbia instead, which in my opinion was an exceptional law school regardless of Pearson Hardman's odd fixation on Harvard exclusivity.
The only aspect of her character I had ever disliked, even knowing this was fiction bleeding into reality, was her infidelity, something I had never been able to reconcile casually.
Relationships, to me, were sacred.
That did not mean I was inexperienced, far from it, but commitment was commitment, and cheating was a line I did not blur.
It did not take long for Rachel to arrive in the lobby.
She was wearing a simple dress, understated and professional, and she looked exactly as the descriptions said she would, striking without being ostentatious, composed, confident, very much someone who belonged in this building. She was around my age, which from what I knew about her probably stung her a little...after all, I was everything she had wanted to be.
"Nice to meet you, Mr. Kent," she said as she approached. "I was already informed of your arrival. Your office is nearby, if you follow me this way, I'll also give you a tour of the firm."
The tour took about 20 minutes, moving through corridors, glass offices, conference rooms, and familiar spaces that felt surreal to see in person. Eventually, we reached my office.
Calling it an office was generous.
It was a small room, albeit one with a decent view, but it was not an upgrade in any meaningful sense. I did not mind. As long as no one was watching, I could work exactly as I needed to, and the physical space mattered very little.
Before I could bring up another matter I had been considering, Rachel spoke first.
"I wanted to let you know that the secretaries you have scheduled for interviews are going to be here at 10 AM. Until then, if there's anything you want, you can ask me. All the information is on that file, which will lead you to all of our servers on the company-provided laptop, and Ms. Pearson would like to meet you for lunch."
"Thank you Rachel, that will be all for now then."
She nodded once and walked away, leaving me to settle in.
I did not feel any need to rush interaction with her. Connections did not need to be forced, and there was time enough to let familiarity build naturally.
As I sat down and powered on the laptop, I thought about how I had spent the past 2 days. For the first time in a long while, I had not been working from morning until night, limiting myself to something close to eight hours a day, which felt almost indulgent. Friends from law school had already reached out to congratulate me on the move, messages coming in from across the legal world.
Some were in the Attorney General's office.
Some in the SEC.
Some in other BigLaw firms, others in mid-law.
Law school had been as much about networking as education, and the returns were already visible. Favours existed on both sides of the ledger, domestically and internationally, and a few of my friends had even moved to the UK to work under Darby International, encouraged by my own persuasion.
They had joked about it being a shame to finish law school in the United States only to work in a jurisdiction that did not require a Juris Doctor, but they were paid well, treated seriously, and positioned advantageously.
As I leaned back in my chair, cubicle quiet, building slowly filling with people, I felt the familiar alignment settle in again.
This was exactly where I was supposed to be.
And this time, I was not in the background anymore.
At 10 in the morning, I started the interviews.
One after another, structured, efficient, controlled, moving through candidates with the same focus I applied to documents, because in my experience, the people closest to you determined the ceiling of your effectiveness far more than titles ever did. Secretaries were not assistants in the traditional sense, not to me, because the right one became an extension of your judgment, your temperament, and sometimes your damage control.
A few hours in, somewhere between polite competence and forgettable adequacy, I saw a name on the schedule that made me pause.
Amy.
When she walked in, it clicked immediately.
She was the same Amy who would later work with Mike Ross during his investment banking stint, which meant she was here earlier than expected, earlier than the timeline I remembered, and that alone told me something about her trajectory. She carried herself with quiet attentiveness, eyes sharp, posture open, the kind of presence that did not dominate a room but absorbed it.
She had the same type of awareness that Donna had…well even I had that.
The ability to read people, to notice emotional shifts before words caught up, to understand what needed to be fixed before anyone admitted it was broken. She felt less like a secretary and more like a stabilizer, and that mattered.
As soon as she sat down, I asked her a single question.
"How long have you been a secretary?"
"I've only been a secretary for a year."
Before she could elaborate, I cut in.
"Are you good with working long hours?"
She nodded.
"That's fine," I said. "You start Monday."
That was it.
I stepped out of the room, straightened my jacket, and headed toward Jessica Pearson's office, intending to reset before lunch. Just as I reached the doorway, she was stepping out herself, timing precisely as always.
"Oh, Kent," she said, "I hope you've been settling in well."
"Yes, Ms. Pearson," I replied. "I have. I understand you wanted to meet me for lunch."
She glanced down at her watch and smiled slightly. "Ah, look at the time. I want to introduce you to someone else. How about you walk with me?"
We made our way through the corridors together, exchanging light conversation, nothing substantive, nothing that required careful parsing, until we stopped outside an office I recognized instantly.
This was someone I knew.
Not personally, but conceptually.
A specialist.
A weapon.
When it came to financial crime, regulatory exposure, transactional nuance, this man was the firm's hammer, and everything looked like a nail to him for a reason.
Louis Litt.
The door opened as we entered, and Louis moved toward Jessica immediately, energy sharp, posture forward, ready to launch into whatever urgency he had been carrying.
"Jessica—"
She raised a hand, stopping him cleanly.
"Louis, I want you to meet the newest hire we have, Michaelson Kent. He was previously working at—"
"At Zane's," Louis cut in without missing a beat. "I'm familiar."
His eyes were already on me, measuring, assessing, recalibrating whatever expectations he had walked in with, and I could tell instantly that this was not going to be a simple introduction.
This was a collision.
And I welcomed it.
All three of us were having lunch at a café near Pearson Hardman, a small place called Blue Jar Coffee, close enough to the building that you could be back at your desk within minutes if something went wrong, which was exactly why we were there instead of somewhere more refined. It was still working hours, clients could walk in at any moment, and this was never meant to be more than a quick lunch, an hour at most, just enough time to establish footing without losing momentum.
Jessica was patient, deliberately so, allowing Louis to take the lead if he wanted to, which told me immediately that this lunch was as much an observation as it was an introduction. I knew Louis well enough, at least conceptually. He was like a cat in the worst sense, resistant, territorial, needing to approach on his own terms, and even then prone to swatting simply to remind you that he could. Early Louis was difficult, abrasive, deeply insecure beneath the surface, and while I knew how much he would grow later on, I also knew that in season one, he was still a complete and utter asshole.
As we sat down, Louis said nothing.
He didn't fidget, didn't check his phone, didn't scan the room nervously, he simply waited, eyes forward, posture rigid, as if silence itself were a test. Jessica let it happen, calm and observant, clearly curious to see how I would handle it.
I had no intention of sitting there indefinitely.
"It's nice to meet you, Mr. Litt," I said, breaking the silence deliberately. "I was actually able to read a couple of your cases and build strategies for my own case of baseline."
That got his attention.
"Which case?" he asked.
"The Price Hall case is one of them," I replied evenly. "The way you were able to explain cross-border financial litigation to the jury so easily was definitely appealing to me."
I watched his face as I spoke, subtle shifts in expression that most people missed, the slight lift of the brow, the tightening at the corner of his mouth, the restrained satisfaction he tried not to show. He wasn't accepting yet, not even close, but he was pleased, and that was enough for a start.
Good.
Jessica waited just long enough for that moment to settle before she reached into her bag and pulled out a folder, placing it on the table with quiet authority.
"Kent," she said, "for the foreseeable future, you will be working under Louis. Louis is an expert in anything related to financials and is the head for financial crimes. Or one of the heads," she corrected herself smoothly. "As a Senior Associate, you usually will be working under partners. That is how the Pearson Hardman system operates. Louis will be the partner overseeing you right now."
She then slid another folder across the table, one toward Louis, one toward me.
"And I already have my first case for both of you."
I took the folder without comment, feeling the weight of it in my hands, not just paper, but implication. This was not busy work, not a test run, but an immediate insertion into the firm's machinery, paired with someone who would challenge me at every step.
Louis looked down at the folder, then back at me, expression unreadable.
This was not an olive branch.
It was a proving ground.
And I intended to make sure he never forgot the result.
…
This was definitely going to be a heavy case.
Back in my new office, if it could even be called that, I opened the file Jessica had handed us and immediately understood why she had chosen it as my first assignment. Tens of thousands of pages worth of documentation would eventually be involved, transaction records, internal communications, accounting schedules, disclosures layered on top of disclosures, the kind of work that crushed associates not because it was intellectually difficult, but because it was relentless.
It made sense.
Jessica had done her homework.
She knew my history at RKZ, knew that I had carried an unreasonable amount of grunt work on my shoulders there, and this was a test, not of intelligence, but of truth. She wanted to know whether the reputation I carried was earned, whether I really could shoulder this kind of load, or whether my success so far had been situational. Being valedictorian at Harvard was enough to get hired as a First Year, but it meant very little when the conversation shifted toward partnership.
Grunt work alone would never be enough for her.
She needed Rain-Makers.
People who could stand in court and dismantle an argument under pressure.
This case was likely meant to put me in the second chair under Louis, close enough for him to observe me, for me to absorb how he thought, how he approached financial crime, how he taught when he wasn't posturing. Shadowing before autonomy, observation before ownership. That was the Pearson Hardman way.
I understood that.
But I had no intention of treating this as just another case.
Yes, the work was heavy, yes, it required exhaustive review of transactions and documents, but that part was trivial to me. What mattered was leverage, and leverage came from visibility, from clients, from making yourself indispensable beyond the internal hierarchy.
It was time to start attracting my own clients.
The case itself was straightforward.
Blue Ridge Data Systems sold logistics and data software on multi-year subscription contracts, collecting payment upfront while delivering services over time. They had recently gone public, an IPO that should have been routine, but complications arose when a mid-level finance manager was terminated during a restructuring. He allegedly took information to the SEC, claiming that revenue had been recognized prematurely, booked before contractual obligations were fulfilled.
Classic revenue recognition issue.
Count the money too early, inflate the books, make the company appear healthier than it actually is, mislead investors, trigger regulatory scrutiny. The SEC was pursuing civil enforcement under federal securities law, and from their perspective, it was a clean narrative.
Our hearing with the judge was in two days.
Louis wanted both of us to fully understand the facts before reconvening later that evening, which was reasonable, given how little margin there was for error. I flipped through the documents, noting the structure, the flow, the pressure points, then glanced around the cubicle area, confirming that no one was paying attention.
No eyes.
No cameras.
The moment passed, and I felt it settle in.
The shift.
Two hundred pages, gone in ten minutes.
Not skimmed, not vaguely absorbed, but understood, indexed, cross-referenced, contradictions flagged, timelines reconstructed. Patterns emerged immediately, revenue streams mapped mentally, internal inconsistencies highlighted without conscious effort. This was one of the perks of my gifts, the ability to compress time when no one was watching, to turn hours of work into moments without sacrificing accuracy.
When I finished, I set an alarm on my phone to remind me when I needed to meet Louis, compensating for the fact that my secretary had not officially started yet. With the case work complete for now, I leaned back in my chair and let my thoughts shift.
I wasn't done for the day.
If I wanted to make a real impression, one that went beyond internal evaluations, I needed something else, something proactive. A company, a situation, a potential client that needed help, someone I could approach organically, guide quietly, and bring into the firm under my name.
That was how you moved from being useful to being necessary.
And I had every intention of doing exactly that.