And I decided, that night, that his fear had ruled my family long enough.

What came next was not going to be decided by what Julian Vance might do to us.

It was going to be decided by what we chose to do about him.

Chapter 21 — Marcus Vance, No Relation

The next morning, I began, quietly and carefully, the way an archivist does anything, to build a case.

And within a week I was sitting across a desk from a lawyer named Marcus Vance, who shared the villain’s surname by pure coincidence and was, he assured me with a dry smile, no relation whatsoever.

Marcus Vance was a civil rights attorney with a reputation I had researched thoroughly before I ever called him, a man who had spent twenty years taking apart corrupt city officials and powerful men who believed themselves beyond consequence, and who had a particular and well-earned hatred for people who used money and position to prey on those who had neither.