Annie was ten years old when she first saw him. She did not understand, then, what she was looking at. Only that something in her recognised something in him - the way the ocean recognises the shore it has been carving for centuries without knowing why. He was a criminal. A mastermind. A man who wore two faces so seamlessly that even the world's most powerful institutions could not decide which one was real - or whether either of them was. Governments tried to hold him. They could not. Laws reached for him like hands through smoke. And yet - it was not law, nor power, nor the cold machinery of justice that came closest to him. It was a girl. Obsessed. Certain. Patient in the way that only those who have loved something unreachable can be patient. Nine years passed. The obsession did not diminish. It deepened - quietly, dangerously - the way roots grow in darkness, unseen, until one day the ground above them shifts. For Annie, the ocean was never merely water. It was a memory. It was him. She returned to it the way she returned to thoughts of him - compulsively, hungrily - because in its fathomless depths she recognised the same thing she saw in his eyes: so much still undiscovered. So much that might swallow her whole, and she would go willingly. He was a mystery she could never break. But God help her - she would spend a lifetime trying.