Chapter 446: Chapter 446 - A Hallucination or Mental Manipulation of a Devil

That in ninety minutes she could be back in her apartment with her books and her silence and the particular comfort of not sharing air with anyone.

’Eighty-nine minutes.’

’Eighty-eight.’

"Professor Thornwood." A male voice, unfamiliar. Closer than she expected.

She glanced up.

One of the junior faculty members stood at her elbow — young-ish, mid-thirties maybe, square-jawed and too self-satisfied — holding a glass of pale gold liquid toward her. Not wine. Something thicker. Juice, she assumed, though the color was too light for orange and too dark for white grape.

She looked at it.

"I’m fine, thank you," she said.

"Freshly pressed — the kitchen just brought out a new round. Elderflower and pear." He smiled like he was doing her a favor.

"I said I’m fine."

"Thornwood." Dean Aldris’s voice again, carrying that particular tone — the one that wasn’t quite an order but was designed to make refusal feel rude. "Take the drink. Professor Henning is being hospitable."

Marla looked at the dean.

He looked back at her with bland expectation.

She took the glass.

She lifted it to her lips and drank because she was sitting in a room full of men who had built careers on the comfort of women accommodating them, and refusing the dean twice at the centenary banquet would follow her in paperwork for months.

The liquid was cool. Slightly floral. Fine.

She set the glass down and picked up her spoon again.

And somewhere in the architecture of her exhausted, quietly furious mind, something else surfaced.

’Unbidden.’

She didn’t chase it. She didn’t invite it. It arrived the way certain memories always did — sideways, through the back door of her concentration, slipping in during the exact moment she was trying hardest not to think.

His hands.

The way one of them had found the inside of her thigh like he’d mapped it before. Like it belonged to him. The rough press of his fingers against the wet seam of her underwear — not hurried, not clumsy, deliberate — the specific deliberateness of someone who had no intention of being rushed.

His mouth.

Her own face felt warm. She pressed the back of her fingers against her jaw and stared at the cereal.

’Stop it.’

She hadn’t seen him in seventeen days.

Seventeen long, agonizing days since she’d woken up in her own bed, the lingering scent of his cologne mixing with the sight of his precise handwriting burning itself into her bedroom wall in pulsing purple light. Her body still simmered constantly, her skin flushed with everything he’d started that night and sadistically refused to finish.

She’d gone straight to the administration office. Checked the massive leather-bound enrollment records. She knew he was somewhere in the college—she’d seen his name typed in the course listings, and deliberately walked past the large lecture halls when she calculated he might be sitting inside them.

But she couldn’t approach a student. Not like that. Not openly. She couldn’t go looking for him without becoming exactly what she refused to become.

She’d checked her bedroom wall three times today alone.

The writing was still there, mocking her. She’d tried to paint over it twice with thick, white primer.

The glowing purple kept bleeding through the fresh paint, a stubborn reminder.

’I hate men,’ she reminded herself fiercely. The firmness belonged to someone who’d repeated the phrase so many times it had literally worn a deep groove in her brain.

She believed it. She meant it.

Every single one of them.

Except—

Her teeth automatically found her plump lower lip, biting down hard.

She pressed her incisors into the soft flesh until the treasonous thought dissolved into a sharp sting of pain.

Suddenly, the room tilted.

Not dramatically. Just a subtle, half-degree shift in perspective. The heavy crystal chandelier above seemed slightly brighter, the low hum of voices blurring together at the edges into a dull roar. Marla blinked rapidly, setting her silver spoon down onto the pristine white tablecloth.

’Strange.’

She breathed slowly. In. Out.

To her immediate left, a soft, sudden sound broke her focus. She turned just in time to see Professor Yinna tip sideways in her ornate chair. Her delicate wine glass slid from her manicured fingers, bouncing off the thick, plush carpet without breaking. Yinna’s body folded neatly, elegantly, her chin dropping heavily to her chest. The bright, practiced laugh she’d been offering the man beside her remained half-shaped on her parted, glossy lips.

"Yinna—"

Marla started, her voice catching.

Across the wide table, the third woman—Professor Harline, wide-shouldered, fifty-something, and sharply dressed in a tailored suit—pressed one shaking hand flat against the tablecloth. She made a small, deeply confused noise in the back of her throat before going entirely still. Her head drooped lifelessly. A stray, limp hand knocked her water glass, sending it rolling slowly toward the edge to shatter on the floor.

The men at the table didn’t rush to help them. None of them even flinched.

Marla blinked, her vision swimming.

The room was still tilting, the angle growing sharper.

’What’s in the juice.’

The terrifying thought arrived cold, clean, and clinical. Three seconds too late to matter.

"I need to—" Her voice came out thicker, slurrier than she intended. She pushed her heavy oak chair back, the wooden legs scraping loudly against the marble floor. "I need to use the washroom."

She stood up, her knees wobbling.

The floor felt drastically further away than she’d calculated. Her sharp stiletto heels made the dizzying distance worse. She compensated, steadying her swaying frame against the table edge with two trembling fingers, let go, and forced herself to walk.

’Walk in a straight line. You know how to walk.’

The men around her were rising slowly from their chairs. She could feel it more than she could actually see it. That particular, unsettling quality of male attention shifted drastically, morphing from polite social observation to something slower. Darker. Weightier. The sly foxes she’d been cataloging all evening, their subtle glances and knowing, polite nods—gone in an instant.

This was entirely different.

These were starving wolves who’d collectively decided that pretense was no longer required.

"Professor." A large, calloused hand closed tight around her bare elbow. Another hand settled firmly at her waist—wide-palmed, possessive, and familiar in a way it had absolutely no right to be.

"Let go of me." She yanked her arm, trying to pull free.

The grip held firm, her pale skin bruising under his fingers.

"You seem quite unwell—"

"I said let go." She turned her head quickly, and the sudden movement made the banquet hall swing hard. Her voice emerged much louder than aimed for, a genuine, panicked snap cutting sharply across the low hum of the room.

Heads turned toward her in unison.

The eyes fixing on her weren’t concerned.

They were hungry, predatory, and completely stripped of their academic masks.

The thick hand at her waist tightened—not helping her stay upright, but holding her captive. Marla’s stomach lurched violently. The sudden, cold clarity of a woman who knew better than to trust a locked room full of men hit her like a physical blow. She had drank something tainted. Now she was completely alone in a hall full of them, her long legs becoming unreliable, and—

A wet, low, disturbing sound echoed from the far end of the long table. The harsh scrape of a heavy chair being shoved backward.