جميع فصول : الفصل -الفصل 80

Knox texts me at 4:47 PM and the message is an address I already know because I’ve sat in the building it belongs to twice a week for an entire semester listening to the man who owns the desk inside it lecture about confinement in Victorian literature while his son’s hand crept up my thigh.Dominic’s classroom. 5:30. Door’s unlocked.I should ask why. I should ask what he’s planning and whether this is a trap or a provocation or the opening salvo of a war that’s been building since the night he told me he could smell his father’s cologne on my skin, but the thing about Knox’s texts is that they don’t invite negotiation – they announce a destination and assume my body will follow the coordinates, and my body has never once proven that assumption wrong.The humanities building is empty at 5:30 on a Friday because professors have gone home and students have gone to bars and the hallway that leads to Dominic’s amphitheater smells like floor wax and old paper and the specific institutional

IVY’S POVThe janitor’s cart squeaks past the door and the sound of metal wheels on linoleum has never been louder than it is right now with Knox still inside me and Dominic standing four feet away with his arms crossed.All of us are holding our breath and from a viewer's pov, it would be the worst family portrait ever composed – practically naked students and a lecturer, stepdaughter on desk, stepbrother mid-shift between her legs, stepfather watching from the front row with his shirt unbuttoned and his composure held together by nothing but practice and spite.The wheels pass and the squeak fades down the hallway. A door opens and closes somewhere on the floor below us.Knox exhales first and his shift retracts in increments – hands shrinking back to human scale, claws retracting into fingernails, the gold draining from his eyes, full frame becoming more human – and he pulls out of me and steps back and tucks himself into his jeans with casual efficiency.I sit up on the desk with

DOMINIC’S POVThe post has been live for forty-seven minutes.In that time it has accumulated two hundred and fourteen comments and been shared to four secondary accounts and tagged the university’s official page twice.I know this because I’ve been refreshing the screen from my office chair with the methodical regularity of a man tracking the trajectory of a bullet he watched leave the barrel and cannot redirect.My son’s motorcycle. Identifiable. Unmistakable. The only matte-black custom bike on this campus because Knox has never owned anything that didn’t announce itself from a distance. The girl in his lap is blurred but the speculation in the comments has already narrowed the field to Ivy’s name.My career is in that photograph. My cover. The Veil. Twenty years of composure and professional distance and the careful fiction I had created. Professor Dominic Voss, a man who teaches literature and marries appropriate women and certainly does not harbour a wolf behind his glasses – a

My mom finds the gossip post before the risotto finishes cooking the next night. I know because she’s standing at the stove with her phone in one hand and a wooden spoon in the other and the exact expression on her face that she gets when she’s reading something she doesn’t fully understand but suspects she should be concerned about – the same expression she wore when boyfriend number two’s ex-girlfriend sent her a Facebook message at midnight and she spent forty minutes at the kitchen table trying to decode the subtext before deciding it was “probably nothing.”“Is there drama at school?” she asks, sliding the risotto bowl across the table with the tone of a woman who hasn’t decided whether to be worried yet. “Someone at book club showed me some campus gossip page. Apparently there’s a photo of a girl on a motorcycle? Beth said it looked like Knox’s bike.”The risotto hits my stomach like cement. Knox’s boot presses against my ankle under the table – not comforting, ASSESSING, monito

Theo finally looks at me. The crack in his face has widened into something that looks like the beginning of understanding – because the fear on my face which is real and unperformable is carrying information that his rational mind can’t decode but his survival instinct is starting to read.He walks past me and down the stairs, and immediately the front door closes, I stand in my room shaking with the taste of his mouth fading on my lips and the knowledge that the kiss just activated a countdown I cannot stop.I rush to the bathroom.I brush my teeth twice, then I wash my face with soap and water and press a cold cloth against my neck and my wrists, because those are the pulse points where scent concentrates. I learned that from Knox, and I’m now using it to protect Theo FROM him.I’m patting my face dry when the motorcycle engine cuts through the apartment like a blade.He’s home.I hear the front door open and his boots on the hardwood – the deliberate heavy pace that means he’s scan