Page 87 of Spearcrest Queen

Marcel Roth.

The shift in the room is instant and undeniable this time. There’s a rustle of recognition, the sharp intake of breath from those who understand the weight of what I’ve just done. Roth isn’t just another case study. He is one ofours,a man we’ve all met or been in the same room as at some point this year.

Students turn to each other in low, urgent whispers. Even the professors are moving uncomfortably in their seats, swapping glances, tugging at their collars or leaning ever so slightly forward.

Marcel Roth is a man who’s built his reputation on excellence, a celebrated figure in our field, known for having mentored many Harvard students, some sitting right in this room—like Dahlia, whose eyes are wide and glassy and fixed on mine.

I hold her gaze.

“Unlike what we’d all like to believe—what we’reledto believe—NDAs don’t just protect Hollywood moguls and misbehaving celebrities. They protect the peopleweknow. The respected, lauded men who built their careers on justice and the practice of law itself, the people who swore oaths to uphold it only to weaponise it. Marcel Roth is one such man: a decorated legal mind, a trusted mentor—and a known predator.”

Silence.

It’s almost a presence in the room: the weight of what I’m saying, like Lady Justice herself stands at my side, blindfolded and unsmiling, brandishing the sword, this time, rather than the scales.

“Over the past fifteen years, multiple women—junior associates, interns, even clients—have settled cases against Roth. His name is absent from headlines, but it’s everywhere in sealed court filings, in private arbitration records, in confidential settlements hidden behind layers of legal red tape. The same toolswestudy here, the same strategieswediscuss in class, were used to ensure that his victims could never speak. That their careers could never recover. That their stories would never be told.”

Dahlia’s expression is impossible to read, somewhere between shock and something else. The gleam on her cheeks could be tears or the glow of her bronzer. I can’t tell from where I am.

But it doesn’t matter. She’s just watched me crack open the gold cage of silence she and other women just like her have been trapped into. She’s watched me declare open war on someone untouchable, someone who wields great power in the very field I’m going into.

What she feels and what she does, going forward, really doesn’t matter to me.

Marcel Roth is only the first of many, anyway.

“This isn’t an anomaly,” I tell the room. “This isn’t one bad actor in an otherwise just system. Thisisthe system. Marcel Roth’s name is just one of many. You could swap it out for a thousand other names—different city, different firm, different field—and the story wouldn’t change. Because when men like him get away with it once, they don’t stop. They never stop.”

Click.

A new slide.

Senator Fitzpatrick.

Not just his name: his face, too, his grey suit and pallid eyes and self-satisfied smile as he shakes hands with a former president.

The tension in the room crackles into something electric. I speak calmly over the wave of whispers rippling through the lecture hall.

“Of course, NDAs aren’t just the domain of those who practise law.” My voice is steady. “They’re most powerful in the hands of those who shape those laws at the highest of degrees. Even politicians need assistance to make themselves untouchable.”

All around the lecture hall, people are turning in their seats, craning their necks to look up to the top of the room.

There, Max has stiffened, his body as rigid and frozen as if rigor mortis has set in while he’s still alive.

His smirk is finally wiped clean. His fingers are clamped on his pen, his jaw locking, his eyes on me wide and straining, as if he’s trying to strike me dead with the very force of his gaze.

But that’s always been his greatest mistake: thinking he has what it takes to bring me down.

“Senator Maximilian Fitzpatrick Senior has spent decades navigating allegations,” I continue, deliberately enunciatingthe senator’s full name so that anybody that’s failed to make the connection can be made aware. “Each one has quietly disappeared behind a sealed settlement. The pattern is clear. The victims are real. The money always flows in the same direction, and the course of justice follows in the path money’s carved for it. Silence is powerful: its life is long. It has the ability to erase memories in its wake, to make people forget so that the cycle may continuead infinitum.”

I step away from the lectern.

“NDAs were never meant to serve as get-out-of-jail-free cards for the privileged. And yet, time and time again, they do. These agreements, these legal mechanisms, these well-rehearsed suppression tactics: we study them here as tools of the profession, but it’s also our duty to question them. If we don’t interrogate their use, their consequences, then the truth is that we are complicit in their abuse. Complicit with men like Mr Roth and Senator Fitzpatrick.”

A final pause. One last sword stroke of silence.

Then, I smile.

“Questions?”

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