5. Justin
JUSTIN
Clara slips into my office with a tablet tucked under her arm and that sharp, unreadable smile she wears like armor.
“You’re back already,” she remarks. “I thought you’d still be at St Augustine’s.”
I glance at the clock on my screen. She’s right—if I were still on assignment, I wouldn’t have been back until late afternoon at the earliest.
“It didn’t take long,” I say.
She closes the door behind her, deliberate. That alone tells me she’s curious. Clara never asks questions she doesn’t already have half the answers to.
“So,” she leans against the edge of my desk. “How did it go?”
I don’t answer right away. I turn my chair slightly, look out over the city instead. The silence stretches. Clara lets it. She’s good at letting my thoughts lead the way.
“They wanted reassurance,” I say finally. “Not solutions.”
Her mouth tightens. “That’s usually the case.”
“They wanted us to make it go away,” I continue. “Containment. No ripples.”
“And?” she prompts.
“About two hundred and fifty reasons why we couldn’t do that.”
“Such as?”
“Two hundred and fifty students as witnesses. You can’t put a lid on that. Plus, there was no vetting of the attendees.”
“Ouch,” she winces.
“Exactly. You know the amount of misinformation that arises from situations like this. We’d be chasing our tails.”
“So what do you think happened?”
“Honestly? My gut tells me this was targeted. Nothing to do with the university. It’s specific to the victim.”
“But he was on university grounds,” she argues.
“He’s a grown man. There’s no place on our campuses for alumni to come in and spend drunken weekends with our students. That’s a recipe for disaster, Clara. You know that as well as I do.”
Clara straightens, the tablet forgotten. “But we’ve never turned down a university request.”
“I know.”
“Including the ones that should’ve been turned down,” she adds.
“I’m aware.”
She studies me for a beat, recalibrating. “So what’s so different about this one?”
“The dean’s a pompous ass who’s more worried about losing support from a donor family than any form of justice,” I tell her. “That’s the difference.”
Clara exhales through her nose. “You’re talking about values.”
“I am.”
Goliath doesn’t operate on paper. There’s no manifesto, no mission statement framed on a wall. But there are lines we don’t cross. We don’t exist to protect institutions from consequences. We exist to prevent chaos from spreading when systems fail to do their jobs.
The St Augustine’s aren’t interested in prevention. They want insulation.
“They asked for damage control,” I say. “Only because of who the victim is. I don’t recall a similar outcry with that attack on a female student last summer.”
“That made you mad.”
“It did,” I answered.
“So you walked.” Clara doesn’t quite believe it.
“Even monsters such as I have principles, Clara.”
She shakes her head once, slow. “That’s going to rattle some people.”
“It should.”
Clara considers that, then smiles faintly. “Titan would’ve done the same.”
The name settles between us.
“How is he?” I ask. Because I miss the damn bastard enough to care.
“He’s pretending he’s retired.”
“Let him pretend all he wants,” I say. “He earned the right.”
She softens for a moment. “You miss him.”
“I miss the certainty,” I say. “Not the chaos.”
Clara nods. “Fair.”
She taps the tablet against her arm. “Massery’s going to ask why we declined.”
“I’ll tell my father the truth.”
“That the dean wanted us to prop up a reputation instead of fix a problem?”
“Yes.”
“And if he pushes?”
I meet her eyes. “Then he can take the call himself next time.”
That earns me a quiet chuckle.
She turns to leave, then pauses at the door. “For what it’s worth, I think you made the right call.”
“I know.”
She smirks. “You really are running this place now.”
I don’t correct her.
I mute the sound and keep my eyes fixed on the banner crawling along the bottom of the screen. I have no idea what Channel FY1 was thinking when they hired an ex-model with a whiny voice to deliver the news, but I’m certain it didn’t involve competence.
Police investigating Harrold Jacobson’s political ties to Haitian mercenaries which may have played a role in the judge’s disappearance.
I scoff at how spectacularly wrong the news reports are.
It’s almost comforting, in a way. Let them chase ghosts.
Let them stitch together theories that don’t come close to the truth.
The last thing I need is a federal task force sniffing around because someone figured out I dissolved a sitting judge in an acid bath.
There’s no version of that story that ends well for me.
But he earned it. Every last second.
Titan was the one who flagged him first—his name buried in a little black book lifted off a known pedophile. Just another entry at a glance. Just ink. But ink tells stories if you know how to read it. And once we started pulling the thread, it unraveled fast.
Six high profile cases over the span of fourteen years. All dismissed. All involving crimes against children, quietly swept aside by the same man wearing the same robe, preaching justice while selling mercy to monsters.
That wasn’t negligence, it was participation. Judges like that don’t make mistakes—they make choices. And every choice he made told us exactly who he was.
Goliath exists for many reasons, but this is the spine of it: we do not look away. Not when money is on the table. Not when power protects its own. Not when the system decides some lives are easier to erase than others.
So no, I don’t lose sleep over him.
The law failed those kids, but we didn’t. We won’t.
The phone buzzes on my desk, short and precise. It’s the work phone which signals that this isn’t a social call. I check the ID and answer without greeting.
“Talk to me.”
“Evening, boss.” It’s Evan, my Digital Intelligence Officer. His voice is calm, clipped—the sound of a man who likes to get to the point then get on with things. “I’ve got something you’ll want to see.”
I lean back in my chair, eyes on the darkened window. “How urgent?”
“This one’s different. It surfaced this morning in a local campus paper. It’s a student-run print with low circulation, but it matters. And it has an anonymous byline.”
“I haven’t seen one of those in a while.”
“It’s gaining traction,” he continues. “Shares are spiking off-campus. Comment sections are… lively. And the language? This is not just some student off on a rant.”
My jaw tightens.
“What’s it about?”
“Vigilantism.”
The silence stretches. My heartbeat spikes.
“I emailed you the article,” he adds. “Read it. Get back to me if you want me to take appropriate action.”
I glance at my inbox. There’s one new message without a subject line.
The line goes dead. I open the email. And I start to read.
Who Do You Turn To When Justice Stops Working?
We like to pretend vigilantism is a relic.
A symptom of lawless eras.
Something that belongs in comic books, old westerns, or history textbooks with neat moral conclusions.
That belief is comforting. It’s also wrong.
Vigilantism doesn’t emerge because people enjoy violence. It emerges when institutions fail so consistently that faith becomes irrational. When victims are told to wait. To be patient. To trust a system that has already proven it won’t lift a finger to uncover the truth.
We are living in one of those moments now.
Across the country, cases collapse quietly. Assault charges disappear into plea deals. Wealth and influence determine outcomes long before a courtroom is involved. Survivors learn - quite quickly, one might add - which stories are worth telling and which will cost them more than they’re worth.
Justice has become procedural instead of moral. And people notice.
When official channels stop delivering consequences, society doesn’t become more forgiving. It becomes more creative. Accountability doesn’t vanish - it relocates.
This is where vigilantism enters. Not as chaos, but as correction. Balance.
Contrary to popular belief, vigilantes aren’t reckless. They don’t act randomly. Historically, they emerge with rules - lines they won’t cross, codes they enforce more strictly than the laws that failed them. They appear when the gap between what is legal and what is right becomes unbearable.
We ask why people cheer when powerful abusers fall outside the system.
We ask why juries hesitate to condemn those who “took matters into their own hands.”
But maybe the better question is this: why are we surprised?
We’ve spent years teaching people that justice is slow, selective, and negotiable. That harm is contextual. That consequences depend on status.
And now we’re shocked when someone decides not to wait.
This isn’t an argument for vigilantism. It’s a warning.
Because once a society begins to quietly accept extrajudicial justice, it’s not the vigilantes who hold the most power - it’s the failures that created them.
You can dismantle individuals. You can condemn methods. You can even pass new laws and issue public statements.
But until justice becomes consistent - until victims stop paying the price for telling the truth -
something else will keep stepping in to do the job.
And history shows us one thing very clearly: once people stop believing in the system, they don’t ask permission to replace it.
— Anonymous