Love in a City of Knives

A doctor in 1990s Hong Kong sets out to get close to the heir of a crime family. She has her own reasons for picking him and does not say what they are, and he does not take her at face value either, so the first stretch of it is the two of them testing how much the other knows. In that city the police and the gangs are not separate things. Her work is in cardiology and the manner she presents with reads as harmless, both of which she uses. Outside the family he is ruthless, and inside it he is loyal past any sense, with something in his past he will not discuss. What comes out over time is that both of them want revenge on people who hurt them earlier. They stop working against each other and go after those people together, which is also the point at which what is between them stops being an act on either side.