Chapter 2
1256 Words
Her thighs were still shaking when she walked into the lecture hall.
The heavy oak doors of the amphitheater shut behind her, cutting off the freezing wind of the Blackwood University quad. It was eight in the morning. Advanced Microeconomics. She usually sat in the third row, center, right where the professor could see her taking immaculate notes. Today, she bypassed the lower tiers entirely. She climbed the carpeted stairs to the back row, wanting a dark corner where no one could see the faint, plum-colored bruise blooming right where her jaw met her neck.
She dropped her canvas bag onto a desk. The lecture hall smelled like damp wool, stale espresso, and chalk dust. Two rows down, a guy with a terrible head cold was aggressively blowing his nose.
Julia gripped her plastic iced coffee cup until the sides bowed inward. The numbness she had carried like a shield for four days was gone. In its place was a live wire of adrenaline that made her stomach clench every time she blinked.
When the deadbolt had clicked in the varsity locker room last night, she thought she understood the transaction. She offered her body. He offered his power. She thought she was renting a weapon to destroy Chase.
She was wrong. Theodore Thorne did not negotiate. He consumed.
The phantom weight of his hand was still wrapped around her throat. She could still taste the bitter, metallic tang of the ammonia from the ice rink.
She did not hear him approach. Men his size usually made noise. They dragged their heavy boots or bumped into desks. Theodore moved with the terrifying, silent grace of an apex predator that had already mapped the exits and identified the weakest target in the room.
He sat down in the chair directly to her right. The attached wooden desk groaned in protest under his weight.
Julia stopped breathing.
He wore a black, unbranded hoodie pushed up to his elbows, exposing thick forearms corded with heavy veins and a faded, jagged scar running down his left wrist. He smelled like expensive cold cedar and the exact industrial soap from the varsity showers.
Julia stared straight ahead at the blank chalkboard. She tried to force her heart rate to slow down. She needed to be the clinical, detached girl she was twenty-four hours ago.
"You are in my seat," she said. Her voice was flat, a perfect, hollow imitation of boredom.
Theodore did not look at her. He opened a pristine notebook. He did not take out a pen.
"I sit where I want," he said. The volume was barely above a whisper. It was completely deadpan. Lethal.
He shifted his massive frame, crowding her space. His knee bumped hers under the desk. He did not pull back. The heat radiating off his body was suffocating, burning through the oversized wool of her sweater.
Julia reached for her notebook. Her fingers were trembling. She hated herself for the weakness. She hated him for noticing it.
Before her fingertips could brush the cardboard cover, Theodore's large hand closed over hers.
The contact was electric. Violent. He pressed her hand flat against the cheap laminate of the desk. He did not squeeze to hurt her. He just held her there, an immovable, suffocating weight.
"Let go," she whispered, glancing frantically around the filling lecture hall. A group of girls two rows down were already turning their heads, their eyes wide as they registered the untouchable hockey captain sitting in the back row with the disgraced ex-girlfriend.
"No."
He turned his head. His eyes were so dark brown they swallowed the harsh fluorescent lighting above them. He looked at the high collar of her sweater. He knew exactly what she was hiding underneath it. He put it there with his teeth.
"You belong to me now," he said. The words lacked any theatrical inflection. It was a statement of fact, delivered with the same clinical certainty as a weather report. "That means you do not flinch when I touch you. Not in private. Not in public."
She swallowed the dry lump in her throat. She tried to pull her hand back. It was like trying to move a cinderblock.
"This is a transaction," she shot back, her sarcasm bleeding through the panic. "We agreed to ruin him. We did not agree to hold hands in Microeconomics like a couple of freshmen."
Theodore slid his hand off hers.
For a fraction of a second, Julia thought she had won. She thought the sarcasm had worked.
Then his hand dropped below the desk.
His heavy, taped fingers closed over her left thigh.
Julia choked on a sharp inhale, her spine snapping straight against the plastic chair. He gripped her hard, his thumb pressing deeply into the soft flesh just above her knee, right through the fabric of her black leggings. The pressure was borderline painful. It was a brand. It was ownership.
"Look at me," he commanded softly.
She turned her head. Her gray eyes met his dead ones.
"I am not your business partner," Theodore whispered, leaning in until she could feel his breath on her cheek. "I am your owner. I dictate the terms of this arrangement. If I want my hand on your thigh, it stays on your thigh. If you try to move it, I will pull you onto my lap right now, in front of three hundred people, and show them exactly what you agreed to last night. Do you understand."
She did not nod. She just stared at the monster she had chained herself to. The heat pooling in her stomach was a betrayal. She was terrified of his control, but the darkest, most broken part of her did not want him to let go. The numbness was gone, replaced by a visceral, terrifying addiction to the friction.
The heavy oak doors at the bottom of the lecture hall swung open again. The dull roar of student chatter dipped into a sudden, uncomfortable hush.
Chase walked in.
He wore his varsity jacket like a shield, his golden-boy hair perfectly styled, but the dark circles under his eyes betrayed his underlying panic. Since he leaked her photos, he had walked around campus like a king, untouchable and arrogant. Today, he looked like a man waiting for a firing squad. He had a weak chin, and he jutted it out now, trying to project an authority he did not possess.
He scanned the steep stadium seating. He was looking for her. He wanted to see her broken, sitting alone, completely ostracized by the social slaughter he had orchestrated. He needed to see her ruined to validate his own cowardice.
His eyes tracked up the center aisle. They hit the back row.
Chase stopped dead on the carpeted stairs.
He saw Julia. Then he saw the mountain of a man sitting entirely too close to her.
Theodore did not look away from the chalkboard. He just shifted his weight, pulling Julia fractionally closer to his side. The movement was entirely possessive, an apex predator dragging its kill out of the light.
Chase's gaze dropped. The desks in the back row lacked modesty panels. There was no wooden barrier hiding the lower half of their bodies from the stairs.
Chase froze. The color completely drained from his conventionally handsome face. The nervous tick in his jaw fired off in rapid succession, a visible spasm of pure terror.
He was staring directly at Theodore's massive, heavily scarred hand, resting high and unapologetically on Julia's thigh.
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