Elena Blackwood-Vance grew up knowing her father's history, her uncle's crimes, the weight of the blood in her veins. She grew up also knowing her mother's strength, her father's choice, the possibility of being more than your inheritance.
She became a lawyer, specializing in cases where psychology and crime intersected. She visited her uncle once, against her parents' wishes, to look into the face of what she might have been.
"You have his eyes," Caleb said. "But you look at me the way she did. Your mother. Like you understand, and pity, and refuse to be afraid."
"I understand that you had choices," Elena said. "And you made them. So did my father. So do I."
"And what choices will you make, niece? When the darkness comes, as it will?"
Elena smiled, her mother's smile, her father's determination. "I'll build something better. It's the family business, after all. We just changed the product."
She left him there, designing in the dark, and walked out into the light where her parents waited, where her own children played, where the future stretched open and unwritten.
The design continued.
The End