CLAIMED BY MY ALPHA STEPBROTHER AND STEPFATHER: MC EROTICA

CHAPTER 33 - INVISIBLE

Dominic hands my essay back at the end of class and his fingers brush mine during the transfer. The contact lasts less than a second but the place where his skin touched mine burns for the next forty-five minutes like he left a chemical residue that my nerve endings are still trying to metabolize.

The essay has more red ink on it than black, which means he spent longer writing on my paper than I spent writing the paper, and the density of his annotations is so thorough that every paragraph has been dissected and reassembled in his handwriting.

Everyone leaves after class. I don’t.

I stay in my seat in the third row and flip through the red-marked pages and feel him watching me from behind his desk the way gravity watches objects from below. The amphitheater is empty except for the two of us and the sound of pages turning and his pen tapping against his desk in a rhythm that might be impatient or might be something else entirely.

“You have questions about the feedback,” he says, and it’s not a question because Dominic Voss doesn’t ask when he can declare.

I stand and walk to his desk and put the essay down in front of him and lean forward to point at a passage he’s circled on page four. The position puts my hand six inches from his hand on the desk surface, and neither of us moves to close the gap and neither of us moves to widen it.

“You said my analysis of the domestic threshold as a liminal space was ‘close but not brave enough,’” I say, and the act of reading his criticism back to him while standing close enough to smell his cologne is doing something to the wetness between my legs that would be embarrassing if I had any capacity for embarrassment left, which Knox has systematically eliminated over the past two weeks.

“Because it isn’t.” He stands and moves behind me the way he did before, and his presence at my back makes every hair on my arms stand up and the double heartbeat in my chest – Knox’s heartbeat, which has been a constant background rhythm since the Level 2 shift – thumps harder as if it senses the proximity of the other wolf even through his human disguise.

“You identified the threshold but you didn’t cross it,” he says, and his voice is close enough to my ear that I can feel the warmth of his breath against the side of my neck, and my body responds to the sensation with a flush that starts at my chest and climbs to my jaw.

I can feel myself getting wet, actually feel the slickness gathering, and the knowledge that I’m having this response to a man who hasn’t touched me while standing in a classroom where his son made me c*m on his lap two weeks ago is the kind of psychological complexity that I should be writing my thesis on instead of living through.

He reaches past my shoulder to point at a passage and his chest grazes my back – barely, the ghost of contact through two layers of fabric – and the point of contact sends a current through me so sharp that my thighs clench together and I grip the edge of the desk because my knees just lost structural integrity.

“Your writing reveals more than you intend it to,” he says, and his finger traces along a sentence I wrote about women who build invisible walls as survival mechanisms and then resent the men who refuse to see them.

His fingertip follows the words like he’s reading braille, and I wrote that sentence at 2 AM without thinking about what it meant and he read it and understood it and the understanding is right there in the pressure of his finger against the page.

He straightens up and the warmth of him leaves my back and the absence feels like a door closing.

“Thursday,” he says. The dismissal.

I stand on legs that are shaking badly enough that I have to press my thighs together to stabilize them, and the pressure of my thighs pressing together against how wet I am sends a spike of sensation through my core that I have to absorb without reacting. I pick up my essay and turn to leave.

I pause at the door.

He’s watching me leave the way he always watches me leave – with the stillness of a man who is exerting more effort in NOT moving than most men exert in a full sprint.

“What did you write at the bottom of the last page?” I ask, because I noticed it during class – red ink in the margin of my final paragraph, separated from the academic annotations by a space that felt deliberate, and the handwriting was different there, slightly less controlled, like the pen moved faster than his usual precision would allow.

His expression doesn’t change. “Read it in the hallway, Ms. Cross.”

I close the door behind me and stand in the corridor with students flowing past me in both directions and I flip to the last page of my essay and find the bottom margin where his red ink sits apart from the rest.

You write about invisible women like someone who has been one. You don’t have to be. Not in my classroom. Not anywhere.

The words blur because my eyes are wet, and I’m not crying because I’m sad, I’m crying because I’ve spent my entire life building walls that made me invisible on purpose, and this man – this composed, terrifying man who grades papers with a fountain pen and hides a wolf behind reading glasses – looked at my writing and saw the architecture of my hiding and instead of walking past it the way everyone else has, he reached through the wall and touched the thing underneath.

Knox sees my body. Knox wants my body. Knox has claimed my body with a thoroughness that borders on territorial warfare.

Dominic just saw my soul, and he did it with a red pen and a single sentence in a margin, and the precision of the incision is so clean that I didn’t feel it until I was already open.

I stand in the hallway with my essay pressed against my chest and the red ink bleeding through the page onto my shirt like a wound I can’t cover, and my head hops dangerously between the man who takes everything I have and the man who sees everything I am.