The Alpha's Tutor: His Forbidden Luna

Chapter Three

Lara

"You are such an annoying and selfish person!" Joy roared behind me.

I didn't turn. I continued with my breakfast, sipping my tea gently before placing the cup back on the table.

"I hate you," she added.

I could hear her footsteps storming up the stairs. I didn't care. I never did — or at least, that was the lie I fed myself every time this happened, which was most mornings now.

Joy was my only family left — my elder sister, who still hadn't managed to hold her life together five years after it fell apart for both of us. Her mornings were like drugs, and her nights were like clubs—literally, some weeks.

I had every reason to be angry with her. She wasn't the only one who'd been hurt when Mum and Dad died in that accident. A lot of dreams had died with them — mine included, if I was being honest with myself, which I tried not to be too often before nine in the morning. But I survived. I had done my best to keep living, keep functioning, keep showing up.

At least, I was trying.

A knock on the door made me turn.

It was Clara, my best friend, letting herself in the way she'd done for years.

"Hey, girly!" she said cheerfully, dropping into the seat beside me at the dining table.

"My love." I managed a real smile, the first one of the morning.

She studied me for a second, the way she always did when she already knew the answer to the question she was about to ask.

"You guys fought again this morning?"

It wasn't really a question. We always fought. Joy never seemed to tire of it, and some days I wondered if I did either.

"She wanted me to lend her money," I said. "We both know what it was for."

Clara didn't look surprised — she never did anymore, not about Joy. She just sighed, the sigh of someone who'd run out of new things to say about an old problem.

"We have to do something about her," I said, the words finally spilling out. "I want my sister back. I'm just so angry at her I don't know where to start."

Clara reached across the table and covered my hand with hers.

"She isn't as strong as you are. We have to remember that."

I pulled my hand back, gently. "What am I supposed to do, Clara? Let her drain me dry while she hides in the clubs and calls it coping?"

She wasn't the only one who'd lost her parents that day. She just wasn't the only one who chose to survive it either.

"I can't keep living like this," I said, finishing the last of my tea.

Clara's smile turned gentle instead of amused. "Let's talk later. We've got a job to get to."

She stood, and I followed, grabbing my bag and glancing back at the house once before I climbed into the car. I told myself I wasn't worried about Joy.

I mostly believed it.

Clara and I taught together at Roberts University — she in the general sciences building, me two floors up, in the department I'd never expected to end up in. If you'd told me ten years ago, back when I still believed I'd spend my life in scrubs instead of standing at a whiteboard, that this was where I'd land, I would have laughed you out of the room.

I'd finished medical school. I'd matched into a residency I was supposed to love. And somewhere in the second brutal year of it, watching people die of things I couldn't fix fast enough, I'd realized the thing nobody warns you about becoming a doctor — that loving medicine and being able to survive practicing it are not always the same gift. So I left the hospital, finished my postgraduate certification in physiology instead, and found, to my own surprise, that I was good at this. Better than good. Teaching people to understand the body instead of racing the clock to save one felt like a version of the dream I could actually keep breathing inside of.

I still miss it, some days. I just didn't miss the version of it that had been quietly killing me.

We pulled into the university lot, and I still had an hour before my first lecture, so I stayed in the car while Clara headed off toward her building, blowing me a kiss over her shoulder.

I'd barely picked up my phone when a knock rattled my window.

Kelvin Clark. This man simply would not let me breathe.

I opened the door just enough to let him get his sentence out before I had any intention of stepping out myself.

"You came early," he said, like that was an invitation to something.

I looked at him — genuinely, thoroughly unimpressed — grabbed my bag, locked the car behind me, and walked away without a word. Kelvin had a talent for sounding pleasant while somehow still making my skin crawl, and I'd long since stopped pretending I owed him more patience than that.

My office was quiet, at least, until it wasn't.

A knock. Of course.

"Come in," I said, settling behind my desk.

"Olivia."

I laughed despite myself. She was one of my favorites — always in the front row, always finding a reason to linger after.

"Miss Lara!" She practically threw herself into the chair beside my desk. "We have a new student in Human Physiology."

I raised an eyebrow, more out of habit than actual curiosity, and pulled up the department portal. There it was — a new name added to my second-year physiology roster, the one course I still taught with something close to the intensity I used to reserve for actual patients, because it was the closest thing I had left to the hospital floor.

"Why does that excite you so much?" I asked. It was too early in the morning for this.

"He's cute. You'll see when you see him." She was blushing, actually blushing, over a name on a screen.

I smiled and let it go. "I guess I'll see about that."

Olivia eventually excused herself, and I sat with the new name a moment longer than I needed to. Something about the photo attached to his student file made me pause — not because I recognized him, exactly, but because some small, useless part of my brain insisted that I should. He looked older than the rest of my second-years, steadier somehow, like he'd already lived through something the others hadn't.

I checked the time and dropped the thought along with my phone. There would be time to figure out why a stranger's photograph had unsettled me. Right now, I had a lecture to give to a room full of students who never did their assigned reading.

I gathered my things and headed for the classroom, nodding to the handful of coworkers who bothered to nod back.

The moment I stepped through the door, the noise died.

"Good morning," I said, my voice carrying easily across the room — a habit left over from years of needing to be heard over monitors and machines and other people's panic.

"Good morning, ma!" came the ragged chorus back.

I wrote the course code across the whiteboard and turned to face them. "Before we start — the reading I assigned on cardiac conduction."

A low, guilty hum answered me. Of course they hadn't done it.

"Class president, collect what exists of it and bring it to my office after the lecture," I said, already moving on, because physiology waited for no one's excuses, least of all mine.

Olivia's eyes kept drifting sideways until she finally leaned in. "What about him?"

I followed her gaze to a table near the back.

There he was. The new student.

He wasn't looking at his notes, or the board, or anyone else in the room. He was looking directly at me, with an intensity that had no business belonging to a first lecture, like he was trying to solve something written across my face that I didn't know was there.

Our eyes met, and for one disorienting second, the noise of the classroom fell away entirely.

There was something about him. I couldn't name it. I didn't try very hard to.

He said nothing. I turned back to the whiteboard, ignoring the small, insistent voice at the back of my mind that swore, absurdly, impossibly, that I had seen those eyes somewhere before — somewhere far from any classroom, somewhere dark and cold and half-forgotten.

I finished the lecture. I was assigned the next chapter. I dismissed the class and told myself, walking back to my office, that it meant nothing — that new students stared sometimes, that eyes were just eyes, that whatever this feeling was, it would pass by lunch.

By the time I sat back down at my desk, an email from the department chair was already waiting in my inbox, subject line blunt and unceremonious: New Physiology Tutoring Assignment.

I opened it. Reading through.

The name rang in my head.