Page 9 of His Verdict
Another command, disguised as an invitation. I take the glass, the crystal cool and heavy in my hand. The whiskey burns a smooth, clean fire down my throat, warming the places inside me that have been cold for years.
We sit in silence for a moment, the unspoken tension crackling between us. He seems in no hurry to speak, perfectly content to just look at me, to let the weight of this place and the power emanating from him do the work.
“So,” I finally say, setting my glass down. “Let’s discuss what you needed.”
“Impatient.” He takes a slow sip of his own drink before he leans forward slightly, his voice dropping. “You graduated ninth in your class from Columbia Law. Editor of the Law Review. You had offers from some of the best law firms in the city. Sullivan & Cromwell. Cravath. Skadden. Firms where you’d be pulling down seven figures within a decade.”
My blood runs cold. This isn't public information.
“Instead,” he continues, his gaze unwavering, “you took a job that pays you seventy-five thousand dollars a year before taxes, leaving you with a student loan debt of… let’s see…” He cocks his head, as if accessing a file in his brain. “One hundred and eighty-seven thousand, four hundred and thirty-two dollars and nineteen cents.”
The specific number hits me like a fist to the stomach. I can’t breathe. My carefully constructed professional armor cracks, shatters, and falls away, leaving me utterly exposed.
“How…” My voice is a choked whisper.
“The same way I get everything I want,” he says simply, dismissively. He leans back, the picture of calm. “You took this job because of a misguided sense of idealism. To fight for the little guy. A noble sentiment. But your idealism is starving you, Olivia. It’s a luxury you can no longer afford.”
He lets that hang in the air, a brutal, undeniable truth. My idealismisstarving me. It’s why I eat ramen three nights a week.
“And then there’s Marcus,” he says, his voice a silken dagger.
The name feels like a violation coming from his lips. My heart seizes. “Don’t you dare.”
“Marcus Thorne. Junior Partner at Sterling Thorne LLP,” Jasper recites, ignoring my warning. “He saw your ambition, your brilliance. But he couldn’t stomach your morality. He called it your ‘savior complex,’ didn’t he? A flaw in an otherwise promising young woman.”
Every word is a precise, surgical cut. I feel dizzy, nauseated.
“What is the point of this?” I ask, my voice shaking with a fury that feels powerless. “To humiliate me? To show me how easily you can peel back my life?”
“No,” he says, his voice softening just enough to be terrifying. He reaches across the table, not to touch me, but to place a small, rectangular object wrapped in tissue paper before me. It’s heavy. Solid. “For you.”
My fingers tremble as I unwrap it. It’s a book. A very old book. To Kill A Mockingbird. It’s a first edition. The kind of thing I’ve only ever seen behind glass.
I look up at him, my eyes stinging. “Why?”
“Because CEOs and corporations like to believe in one thing: power. And they use the law as a cudgel to keep it. They hide their crimes behind shareholder reports and NDAs. They operate in a world where justice is for sale. The system you worship, Olivia? It’s a lie. A beautifully crafted illusion to keep people like you noble and poor, while men like Meridian’s Ceo bleed the world dry.”
He leans forward again, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. The air is thick with the scent of his whiskey and his quiet, absolute conviction.
“I didn’t steal from Meridian to get rich. I did it to get leverage. To expose them. But the game is rigged. The evidence I took is already being buried by their army of lawyers. The courts will move slowly, methodically, until the entire truth is sanitized and forgotten.”
He pauses, letting the weight of his words settle. This is it. The pitch. The reason he brought me here.
“You believe in justice,” he says. “But you are fighting with a shield against an army with cannons. I am offering you a cannon.”
“What are you asking me to do?” I ask, though I already know. I can feel the precipice under my feet.
He slides a single piece of paper across the table. It’s a draft of a legal memo. A motion to compel. It’s well-written, meticulously argued. It cites a piece of digital evidence—a server log—that I’ve never seen. I’d studied what little bit there was available and this wasn’t in the discovery files.
Because it doesn’t exist.
My blood turns to ice. “This is fabricated,” I whisper, the words tasting like ash. “This log file… it’s a fiction.”
“It’s a key,” he corrects me, his voice smooth as silk. “It’s a lie, yes. But it is a lie in service of a greater truth.”
I stare at the paper, my world tilting on its axis. Rule 3.3 of the Model Rules of Professional Conduct flashes in my mind in blazing neon letters:Candor Toward the Tribunal. A lawyer shall not knowingly make a false statement of material fact or law to a tribunal or fail to correct a false statement of material fact or law previously made to the tribunal by the lawyer.
Filing this memo isn’t just unethical. It’s a potentially career-ending, disbarment-level offense. It’s professional suicide. It’s everything I have sworn an oath against.