Marcus
Marcus Vale had always been a man who understood leverage.
He had understood it young — the specific mechanics of knowing what someone wanted, what they were afraid of, and how to position yourself between those two poles. He had been a brilliant student of human desire and human fear, and he had built his professional and personal life on the application of that intelligence with the efficiency of someone who had decided very early that the systems of fairness other people believed in were not the actual systems the world ran on.
He had not been wrong. The world did run on leverage. The people who pretended otherwise were either naive or using the pretense itself as a form of leverage.
What he had been wrong about — and he sat with this on a Thursday morning in the Riverton c
