"Faculty offices now, princess. Third floor, Economics department. Professor Williams' desk drawer, the one he never locks because he's an idiot who trusts the honor system."
Kilian slides the package across his marble kitchen island like he's dealing cards in a game where everyone loses. It's wrapped in what looks like a dissertation on Keynesian economics, because apparently drug dealing needs thematic consistency.
"Williams just got fired for fucking a student," I point out, shoving the package into my bag between my actual homework that I'll never finish. "His office is probably crawling with security."
"Which is why nobody will expect it. Beautiful misdirection, don't you think?" He circles around the island, predator checking his trap. "Besides, scandalized professors leave the best hiding spots. All that shame creates negative space."
My phone buzzes. I glance down automatically, that Pavlovian response to hoping Victor finally found his spine in the lost and found of his moral philosophy department. But it's just Ashley asking about study plans I'll have to cancel.
"You're distracted, princess." Kilian's hand closes around my wrist, thumb pressing into my pulse point like he's taking my vitals. "Waiting for someone specific to text? Someone who teaches dead philosophers, perhaps?"
"Just checking the time. I have Chen's class in an hour."
"Liar." He pulls me against him, his cologne suffocating as his attention. "You've been checking that phone obsessively for days. Like an addict waiting for her dealer to call."
"That's ironic, considering what you're making me deliver."
"What I'm making you do is protecting you from yourself." His grip tightens, and I know tonight's going to be one of those nights where he needs to prove his ownership with more than surveillance photos. "Don't make me remind you who you belong to."
The reminder comes anyway, because Kilian's nothing if not predictably possessive. His penthouse bedroom has floor-to-ceiling windows that make me feel like the whole city's watching him stake his claim. He's rough, methodical, treating my body like territory he needs to mark thoroughly for any competing explorers.
"Say his name," he demands, fingers twisted in my hair while he fucks me from behind. "Say Victor's name when you come."
"That's sick even for you."
"Say it, or those photos go to his wife tonight."
The threat works because threats are Kilian's love language. When I come, Victor's name tears from my throat like a confession under torture, and Kilian laughs like he's won something nobody else was competing for.
"Good girl," he says, pulling out and immediately reaching for his phone. "Now, let me show you something special."
The photos load in high definition—Victor leaving my dorm at three AM, looking properly destroyed. Our Montreal hotel, shot from a building across the street. That desperate kiss in the classroom after Connor saw us, captured through the window like we're an exhibit in terrible decision-making.
"I own every moment," he says, swiping through more evidence of my spectacular self-destruction. "Every text you send him that he doesn't answer. Every time you look for him in hallways. Every desperate little hope that he'll choose you over his comfortable life."
"You're psychotic."
"I'm thorough. There's a difference." He sets the phone aside, already hardening again because surveillance makes him horny in ways therapy could unpack for decades. "Now, shall we go again? Maybe this time you can scream his name louder. Really perform your heartbreak for me."
Campus the next morning feels like walking through a museum dedicated to my social execution. Sophia passes me outside the library, her eyes sliding over me like I'm a disappointing architectural feature. When I wave, she suddenly becomes fascinated by her phone, typing urgently about absolutely nothing.
"Hey, Sophia—"
She's already gone, practically jogging away in her designer sneakers that probably cost more than my scholarship. The message is clearer than any text: I'm contaminated goods.
Mia's worse because she makes eye contact first, that split second of recognition before she executes a turn so sharp it could qualify for the Olympics. She actually walks into a trash can trying to avoid me, which would be funny if it wasn't so surgically deliberate.
"Real subtle, Mia," I call out, but she's already disappeared into the Economics building, probably to warn everyone else that the campus pariah is approaching.
The whispers follow me like a particularly judgmental soundtrack. In Chen's class, I hear fragments: "professor's pet"—and not the cute kind with good grades. "Home-wrecker" floats past me in the coffee line. "Whore" gets coughed into someone's hand as I pass.
Jess must have leaked something. Not the photo—that's her nuclear option. But enough hints, enough strategic whispers to turn me into social uranium. Even Chen looks at me differently now, his usual disinterest sharpened into something that might be disgust or pity or both.
"Elisa, we need to talk."
Liv corners me after class, her face carrying that expression of someone who's been building up to this conversation in the mirror. She pulls me into an empty study room, closing the door with the kind of deliberate care usually reserved for defusing bombs.
"Just tell me the truth," she says, and her voice breaks on the last word. "Are you fucking my dad?"
The lie tastes like acid mixed with everything I ate at Kilian's this morning. "No."
"Look me in the eyes and say it."
I meet her gaze, those trusting eyes that brought me soup when I was sick, that kept my secrets about Kilian before I went back to him, that called me sister when I was already betraying her. "I'm not sleeping with your father, Liv."
She wants to believe it so badly that she does. I watch her shoulders drop with relief, watch her choose the comfortable lie over the uncomfortable truth, and somehow that makes it worse. She's doing exactly what her family trained her to do—picking the version of reality that hurts less.
"Jess said she saw something," Liv continues, still searching my face for cracks in my performance. "She's been telling everyone you're involved with someone inappropriate. She won't say who, but the way she looks at my dad when she says it..."
"Jess hates me because I don't have a trust fund and I dared to be friends with you anyway." The half-truth comes easier than the full lie. "She's creating drama because that's what bored rich girls do."
"You're right." Liv hugs me suddenly, desperately, like she's trying to hold onto something that's already slipping away. "I'm sorry. I should have trusted you. You wouldn't do that to me."
"Never," I whisper into her chlorine-scented hair, the word burning my throat like swallowing glass.
She pulls back, attempting a smile. "Want to study together tonight? I'll even share my color-coded notes."
"I have to work on something for Chen. Rain check?"
"Always rain checking lately," she observes, but there's no accusation in it, just sadness. "But yeah, sure. Whenever you have time."
She leaves, and I stand in the empty room, surrounded by whiteboards covered in other people's equations that actually balance. Unlike my life, which is just variables that don't add up to anything but destruction.
My phone buzzes. Finally, finally Victor: We need to talk.
I delete it without reading the rest. We're past talking. We're past everything except watching this slow-motion catastrophe reach its inevitable conclusion.
"Professor's pet," someone whispers as I leave the building, and I don't even turn to see who.
They're right anyway. I am his pet. Just not the way they think.
The noose tightens with every whisper, every avoided glance, every lie I tell Liv. But the worst part is that I can't tell if it's killing me or if I'm already dead and just haven't stopped moving yet.