All Chapters of Teach me to desire : Chapter 41 - Chapter 50

Leo’s ConcernThe locker room was mostly empty, smelling strongly of sweat, disinfectant, and a faint lingering scent of desperation from the day’s practice. I was sitting on a wooden bench, pulling off the tape from my wrists, the adrenaline from the field finally starting to wear off, leaving behind a deep, bone-aching exhaustion.Leo was sitting next to me, meticulously tying the laces on his street shoes. We hadn’t spoken much during the cool-down. The silence was heavy, but not in the easy way it was at Igor’s penthouse. This silence was charged, like the air right before a thunderstorm.“You’re going to blow a gasket, K,” Leo said finally, not looking at me. His voice was low, careful not to carry across the tile floor.“I’m fine,” I replied automatically, the lie so automatic it didn't even register as a falsehood anymore.“No, you’re not fine. You ran ten plays today where you looked like you were seeing ghosts. You almost got sacked by Marcus three times, and that guy has the

The Forbidden Touch in PublicThe annual Founders’ Day Mixer at the university was everything our world demanded: crowded, loud, and utterly superficial. It was held in the grand hall, a space designed to impress visiting dignitaries and wealthy alumni. The air buzzed with nervous energy, ambition, and the faint, sweet smell of expensive champagne.I was there as the perfect student athlete, the heir apparent of the Hayes fortune. I stood with Serena, who was chatting effortlessly with a trustee about real estate holdings. I was nodding politely, my attention split three ways: tracking Serena’s mood, ensuring my father wasn’t observing my posture, and monitoring the entrance, because I knew Igor would have to make an appearance.He was a major donor, a professor, and an essential part of the university's public image. He couldn’t be absent.I felt the familiar, sharp pull of awareness a full minute before I saw him. It was a purely physical sensation, a tightening in my chest, an invo

Marcus's PhotoMr. Sterling, the private investigator, sat silently in the back of a black, unmarked sedan, positioned three blocks from the service entrance of the Thorne penthouse tower. It was just after 3:30 AM. The street was quiet, washed by the cold glow of the city lamps. He had been there for six hours, monitoring the discrete entrance point, confirming that Killian Hayes’s registered car—the one he supposedly drove to the North Campus Library—was, in fact, parked in the underground garage of this very building.He checked the time again. His client, Mrs. Vance, had provided the information about the skipped dinner and the flimsy excuse: an "emergency final review" with Professor Thorne. Sterling was a professional; he didn't deal in suspicion, only evidence. But in his line of work, a desperate, transparent lie from a wealthy heir meant only one thing: the reward was about to be immense.The subject is predictable in his haste, which is always the great flaw of the young. He

Igor's Protective StanceThe morning after the nightmare, the penthouse was quiet, but the air was still heavy with the memory of Killian’s terror. Killian had rushed off before dawn, back to the Hayes mansion to face the fallout of skipping dinner and to maintain the façade of his busy schedule.Igor sat alone at his immense glass desk. His untouched coffee was cooling beside a stack of reports. He wasn't looking at the financial models or the market trends. He was staring out at the city, but his focus was intensely internal.He had always approached life as a game of chess, calculating risk, maximizing reward, and eliminating threats with cold logic. His relationship with Killian had been a delicate, high-risk maneuver, but the goal had always been strategic: to hold on until the six-week deadline passed, at which point they would execute a controlled separation from the Hayes family.But the nightmare had changed everything.The raw, unfiltered terror in Killian's eyes, the sound

Killian's ExamThe lecture hall was unnervingly silent, save for the scratching of pens and the faint, rhythmic whir of the ventilation system. We weren't taking the comprehensive final yet, but the three-hour midterm for Professor Thorne’s Advanced Financial Risk course felt just as weighty. It was the final strategic checkpoint before the ultimate confrontation.I was seated near the front, my usual spot—a habit of compliance that I maintained even now. The exam paper in front of me was a dense field of complex derivatives and stress-test scenarios, the very language I’d been speaking to my father for the past two weeks to cover my absences.But the real source of the unbearable tension wasn't the quantitative analysis. It was the man at the front of the room.Igor was standing behind the central lecture podium, his posture rigidly composed, observing the thirty students with an expressionless professionalism that was both flawless and devastating. He was Professor Thorne now, the a