Semester break began the day after finals ended.
Campus emptied almost overnight—students fleeing to airports and family homes, faculty scattering to conferences or sabbatical hideaways. By December 20th, the university felt like a ghost town: snow dusting the quad, empty lecture halls echoing with wind, the library locked tight.
Eliza’s apartment lease had conveniently ended mid-December… orchestrated, she suspected, by a certain professor’s discreet influence. She’d packed two suitcases and driven straight to Lucian’s house.
He’d greeted her at the door in jeans and a black sweater, no pretense of professionalism now.
“Leave the bags,” he’d said. “You won’t need clothes for the first few days.”
That was ten days ago.
Since then, time had blurred into a haze of total immersion.
No
