Play The Villain

Rhett

I am so fucking tired of this.

I stand there, the blood rushing so loudly in my ears. Cassian is staring up at me with a smug smirk etched onto his face. It’s quite obvious that he expects me to panic and then beg him to take down that stupid ass petition before it lands on my father’s desk and seals my doom.

But as I look at his smug, perfectly sculpted face, something snaps inside me—it’s all the clarity I need.

I’ve allowed myself to be a punching bag for seventy-two hours simply because of my own guilt due to what happened in the past. Truth be told, I deserve it, but still it feels unfair that my life is beinf ruined by him and he is going to keep doing it if I don’t stand up to him. Another reason I have been lax is because my wolf, Rook, is hopelessly compromised by a fated pull I am still desperately trying to deny.

But here’s one thing Cassian doesn’t know. I’m the fucking Alpha’s son. And my dad owns the fucking university.

He wants to play the villain? He doesn’t know what he’s in for.

“You think you’re so smart, don’t you?” I say in a dangerously calm voice. I don’t yell—yelling is what weak people do when they’ve lost control according to my dad. It’s ironical because he yells at me.

I take a step back from his desk and stand straighter despite the fact that my bones are screaming at me. “You’ve had your fun—in fact, too much fucking fun. But trust me when I say you’ll regret ever messing with me.”

Cassian tilts his head. His stupid, annoying smirk is still there on his face; the idiot doesn’t believe I am capable of doing that. “Is that a threat, Rhettie?”

“It’s a reality check,” I snap, grabbing my jacket off the back of the chair. “And stop calling me that for fuck’s sake.”

I need two things right now: to show this bastard exactly who the boss is, and to force his hand into scrubbing that petition from the internet.

I walk out of the room, slamming the door behind me so hard the frame rattles.

I spend the rest of the night in my car, parked in a corner of the library lot and making phone calls. Being the Alpha’s son means the university administration belongs to my family. Every digital footprint left on the Blackridge servers is all accessible if you know which throat to squeeze. Sure, it takes a while, and I have to be careful of what I do before word gets out to my father that I am threatening his staff to give up information I, as a student, am not supposed to have.

Cassian is still fast asleep when I finally return to the room around 6:00 AM. He looks so innocent like this, but I don’t let myself soften. My stupid wolf tries to whimper in the back of my mind, but I push him down as hard as I can.

I walk over to his side of the room and stand directly over his bed, and then reach down, violently ripping the comforter off his body, tossing it onto the floor.

Cassian bolts upright instantly, looking completely confused as he blinks rapidly. He rubs his face and yawns, then looks around before his gaze finally lands on me standing over him.

“What the fuck are you doing?” he asks in a groggy voice as he stares up at me. There’s an annoyed scowl on his face. “Why the hell are you standing over me? Get the fuck away from my bed.”

Instead of answering, I reach into my back pocket, pull out a stack of the server logs that I had printed, and then slap them hard across his face.

The paper smacks his cheek and scatters across his lap. Cassian flinches, his eyebrows still furrowing in confusion as he looks at the papers.

“You know academic fraud is a federal crime, right?”

Cassian blinks at the paper, then looks up at me, trying to maintain his unbothered smirk, though I catch the slight twitch in his jaw. “Well, yeah. Obviously. But I haven’t done anything. If you think a bunch of random—”

“Read it,” I command.

Cassian hesitates for a fraction of a second before picking up a few of the papers. His eyes scan the documents inside, which show the exact timestamped logs of a forced administrative bypass into the Blackridge University housing registration database. It shows the precise MAC address of his personal laptop altering the digital registry to faking a one-year residency in my specific dorm room.

“I have undeniable proof of you hacking into the school system,” I say, leaning down until my face is barely inches from his. “You forged university documents just to get in my way as my roommate. You manipulated secure data. And if you’re capable of doing that just to play a petty revenge game with me, what is to say you haven’t been doing it for other things? What’s to stop the administration from believing you’ve been helping wealthy students change their failing grades in exchange for cash?”

Cassian’s breath hatches and color begins to drain from his face. “You can’t prove that.”

“I don’t need to prove it to a court of law, Cassian. I just need to suggest it to the people who control your future,” I spit. “You see, I know how to tell stories very well. I am an expert at it, so I could just walk right down to the Dean’s office at 9:00 AM, lay this file on his desk, and spin a beautiful narrative about an underground academic cheating ring run entirely from your IP address. You were pretty daft not to conceal that, by the way. Expulsion would be the easy way out for you. You’d be looking at a criminal record before lunch.”

Cassian stares up at me, his knuckles turning entirely white as he squeezes the paper so hard. The smirk he had on his face has been wiped off, and now he looks at me coldly, and there’s an underlying hint of panic in that expression.

“So here is how this is going to go,” I whisper. “You are going to open that laptop of yours right now. You are going to permanently take down that petition, and then you are going to issue a public, written apology to the athletic department stating it was a targeted prank. If you can’t do that within the next ten minutes, you are going to find out exactly what I am capable of when someone tries to ruin my life.”