Page 4 of The Hunter's Empire

"That’s exactly what I was thinking." He replies, closing the file halfway but not taking his eyes off me.

Of course he was.

A brief silence settles between us, structured and unspoken. I shift my gaze to the documents on the table, though I am not really reading them. My thoughts are still catching up, still dragging themselves out of everything that came before this moment.

Sebastian steps closer and places the file on the table with controlled precision.

"The smaller divisions are stabilizing faster than expected." He says.

"They had to." I answer. "Loose ends don’t last long in this kind of system."

He studies me for a second, something measured passing through his expression. "You’ve handled it well."

"I’ve handled it." I correct, my tone even.

There is a difference, and he understands it well enough not to argue.

He leans one hand against the table, shifting the conversation forward as he always does. "Once everything settles completely, there’s room to expand. International routes, new partnerships. There’s a lot that can be done with what you have now."

I tap my fingers once against the table, slow and deliberate. "Expansion isn’t the priority yet."

"No." He agrees without hesitation. "But it will be."

I look at him properly then. Sebastian Hayes is composed as always, his thoughts moving ahead of the moment, already shaping possibilities before they are spoken aloud. There has never been chaos between us. No unpredictability. Only alignment where it matters most.

Sebastian built Hayes Shipping alongside the rise of ZK Extraction Group, our companies growing in parallel until their paths inevitably began to overlap. My company specializes in high-risk extractions, recovering people and information fromplaces they are never supposed to escape. His ships move goods across oceans.

Then I inherited the Krogen Empire and the shipping network that came with it, and suddenly our worlds fit together far too neatly to ignore.

We are going to be married. The decision was ours, made shortly after that shift in the balance between our companies became impossible to overlook. Separately, we were powerful. Together, we would become something neither of us could build alone.

Our engagement sits between us the same way everything else does. Structured, understood, unquestioned. His ports and shipping lanes. Our infrastructure and distribution networks. Influence that stretched further together than it ever could apart.

We chose each other because it made sense. Because it worked. Because it would lead somewhere useful. I used to think that was enough.

"I built my company five years ago." I say, my voice quieter now, though steady. "I kept it separate. Clean. No overlap with anything else."

"I know." He replies.

"My dad helped me start it." I continue after a brief pause. "But after that, it was mine."

"And it still is." He says, without hesitation.

I nod faintly, though my thoughts have already shifted again, settling somewhere deeper beneath the surface. Everything looks the same, but nothing is. Not really.

Sebastian picks up the file again and flips a page, continuing as if nothing has changed.

"With everything consolidated, the structure you’re sitting on is significant." He says.

"That’s one way to put it."

"There’s potential here." He adds. "More than what it’s been used for so far."

His tone remains professional, but there is something beneath it that does not go unnoticed. Interest. Calculation. Possibility.

I watch him for a moment, longer than necessary.

"It’s a lot to manage." I say.