Total pages in book: 78
Estimated words: 73233 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 366(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 244(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 73233 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 366(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 244(@300wpm)
It’s fury.
Controlled. Banked. The kind that doesn’t burn hot but cold, the kind that sits behind a man’s eyes and turns everything it touches to arithmetic. He’s standing in a university hallway calculating the cost of what Agnes just did, and I can see the numbers running behind his expression.
“Luciano.”
His name in my mouth, in this hallway, where anyone could hear. I say it anyway because I said it against a gallery wall two nights ago and he trembled, and I won’t go back to Professor Salvatore, not even here, not even now.
His jaw tightens. But he doesn’t correct me.
“My office.” Two words. Low. Clipped. Professional. A door closing in real time.
I follow him.
HIS OFFICE IS COLD.
Not the temperature; the radiator is ticking its familiar rhythm, the room is the same warm box of books and dark wood and the clock on the wall. But something in the atmosphere has changed, and I feel it the moment the door closes behind me.
He doesn’t sit behind his desk. He stands at the window, the way he stood the night he told me about his father. Back to me. Hands in his pockets. Shoulders carrying something heavier than a suit.
I sit in the wooden chair. The one with no cushion, the institutional one that I’ve sat in too many times now, each time for something different.
“The formal review.” His voice is flat. Aimed at the window. “I know about it.”
“I know you know.”
“And the meeting. What she said.”
“Yes.”
He turns around. His face in the lamplight is sharp, stripped, held together with force. He’s controlling himself the way he controls his lectures: with structure and the absolute refusal to let anything crack.
“This has to stop.”
My circle, which had been tracing the arm of the chair, freezes.
“What has to stop?”
He doesn’t answer immediately. He looks at me across the desk with loss already in his eyes.
“If she files a formal complaint, your scholarship is revoked. Your thesis is dead. You’ll be removed from the program.” Each sentence is placed on the desk between us like a stone. “If the university investigates and finds evidence of an inappropriate relationship between a student and a faculty member, your academic record is flagged permanently. Every graduate program, every employer, every recommendation—it follows you.”
“I know what the consequences are.”
“Then you know this has to stop.”
He’s not asking or agonizing. He’s doing what he does when something threatens a system he’s responsible for: he eliminates the vulnerability.
I’m the vulnerability.
“She can’t prove anything.” My voice is even. My hands are still. “We haven’t done anything that—“
“She doesn’t need proof.” His voice cuts through mine without rising. “She needs suspicion. She needs the F on your paper and a formal review on your file and a hallway where she saw you leaving my office at nine PM with your hair undone. She needs a room full of scholarship students hearing her talk about professors and personal arrangements, and she needs one of them to look at you and wonder.”
My throat tightens. Because he’s right. Agnes doesn’t need evidence. She needs a story, and the story she’s building—the farm girl, the powerful professor, the late nights, the closed doors—writes itself, and it doesn’t matter that the truth is more complicated than the story, because the story is the thing with teeth.
“So what are you saying?” I ask, and my voice is smaller than I want it to be, and I hate that, I hate that Agnes Cuthbert has made me small in this office where I once stood six inches from this man and told him I would never hurt him.
“This is done, Miss Lively.”
The name hits like a closed fist.
Not Elsa. Miss Lively. The barricade. The formality. The proper distance he had set aside for me, rebuilt in a single word.
This is done. Not go home, Elsa, said tender and aching. This is a man slamming a door with both hands and bracing his weight against it.
“Don’t.” My voice breaks in the way I don’t want it to. “Don’t do this.”
“It’s already done.”
“No, it isn’t. You don’t get to decide that alone.” I’m rising to my feet as I make my case, feeling like everything’s about to fall apart. “She smiled at me in that hallway because she knew this would happen. She knew that if she pushed hard enough, you’d cut me off. Not because you’re afraid of her. Because you’re afraid of me.”
His jaw locks.
“You’re afraid that I’ll stay,” I say. “That I’ll sit in your third row and draw my circles and look at you the way I’ve always looked at you, and that it’ll cost me everything, and you can’t stand it. You’d rather lose me clean than watch me lose my future.”
“You don’t understand what I’m capable of.” His voice has dropped to something I haven’t heard before. Below everything else. This is the basement. This is the place where the boy who ran at fourteen keeps the things he ran from. “What my name brings to anyone standing near me. You think Agnes is the threat. Agnes is a bureaucrat with a grudge. The threat is me. It’s always been me.”