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### **Chapter 1: The Hood Gets a Lawyer**
The first thing Elle Hoods learned about Harvard Law was that it smelled like expensive ink. The kind of ink used to write verdicts before cases were heard, the kind that stained suits whiter than fresh money. It was thick in the air—authority, judgment, the unshakable certainty that people here decided the world.
Elle walked into her first class with a sharp pink blazer and an attitude loud enough to be illegal. The room was sterile, filled with people who had spent their lives preparing for this moment. Legacy students with fathers who owned firms, intellectual prodigies who had read *every* Supreme Court decision before puberty, and the occasional lost soul trying to prove they belonged.
She wasn't any of those things.
She was a woman who had once seen a judge convict a teenager based on the way he walked into a courtroom. She had watched mothers cry behind bulletproof glass, fathers vanish into orange jumpsuits. And unlike these students, she knew law wasn't a theoretical debate. It was survival.
The professor—a man who looked like he had been scowling since birth—paused mid-sentence when he saw her. There was hesitation. A moment of calculation. And then the judgment.
"Miss—Hoods, was it?"
"Elle Hoods," she corrected, sitting down. "Like the neighborhood, but with a degree pending."
Snickers from the front row. Eyes darting to the syllabus as if confirming she was, in fact, supposed to be here. The professor sighed and went back to his lecture.
She watched them watching her, dissecting her presence like it was some kind of rare specimen that didn't belong in their carefully curated environment. And she smiled. Because she had seen that look before. It was the same look that police gave people in her community when they knew a warrant wasn't valid but proceeded anyway.
Harvard Law was just another courtroom. And Elle Hoods wasn't about to lose.