Chapter 8 Caius
The room reeks of fake lemon, whiteboard marker, and a slow bleed of pheromones from the legacy girls who wear perfume like blood. The windows are sealed. Every sound—cough, click, pen tap—grinds my gears.
Ophelia comes in three minutes early, in a white uniform.
Her hair is down and it makes her look softer.
More manageable. She sits, adjusts her skirt over her thigh, then does the same with her jacket, as if daring someone to find a crease.
Her bag is canvas, thrifted, covered in ink and stickers; it does not belong.
She pulls out a notebook, opens it, and immediately lines her pens in order: black, blue, red, green. OCD, or just a need for control.
I lean back, spread my knees, and let myself look. The angle is perfect; I can see the fine cords in her neck as she writes, the triangle of bare skin above her neck, the way her breathing hitch-steps every time someone new enters behind her.
She’s alert. She’s afraid. She’s pretending not to be both.
The teacher—some bitter asshole, Mr. Cabot, who won’t last the semester—stumbles in at exactly 2:00, but nobody notices. All eyes are either on me, or on her, or on the silent message that passes between us every time I tap my pen or shuffle my chair.
She doesn’t look back. But she knows.
Cabot starts his spiel: “Power structures, the cycle of domination and collapse, what separates the sovereign from the serf.” He drones on, his voice scraping over the silence like a razor.
I don’t hear a word, because Ophelia is tracing circles in the margin of her notebook, and each pass of the pen makes her sleeve ride up a little farther. I can see the pale spot on her forearm where a scar sits, erased now except for the memory of damage.
She tucks a strand of hair behind her ear, once, twice. She doesn’t want it to fall in her face. Her hand shakes, barely, when she writes a date in the header. She’s a machine, running on spite and habit.
I imagine, for a second, what it would take to break that habit. To force her to stop writing, stop controlling, stop pretending she’s not thinking about the night before. I imagine her bent over this very desk, fingers white knuckling the edge, mouth full of my name.
I shift in my seat, letting my knee bump the back of her chair. She tenses, then pretends not to notice.
Perfect.
Cabot tries to get a discussion started: “What does power mean to you?” He says it like he wants someone to be clever, but all he gets are the same answers—control, influence, respect. A few students throw glances back at me. They know who owns this room, and it isn’t the man with the chalk.
Ophelia doesn’t answer. She just keeps writing.
She thinks she has no power.
Except she does.
She holds all the power she could ever imagine… over me.
I wait until the lull, then kick her chair again, this time harder. She snaps upright, spine rigid. Her hand clamps the pen so tight the plastic flexes. Still, she doesn’t turn.
She’s learning.
But not fast enough.
After five minutes, the teacher starts calling on people at random. Most of the room is legacy kids—names that have been carved into this building for generations. The rest are hangers-on, scholarship cases, and Board-experiment fuck-ups like Ophelia.
Cabot breathes before his nasally voice is unleashed, “Ophelia Morrow, what is the difference between authority and power?”
She’s caught off guard. I savor the second it takes her to recover.
She speaks, voice bored. “Authority is permission. Power is what you take when permission isn’t enough.”
Cabot blinks. I try not to laugh.
“Excellent,” he drones. “And how does one acquire power?”
She flips her pencil, balances it on her knuckle, never once looking behind her. “You find someone weaker and make them bend.”
The room shivers. I want to stand, right now, and show her how that works.
But I wait.
She keeps her posture perfect, head down. The air between us vibrates. If I reached out, I could snap her neck or her resolve, either would be satisfying.
Cabot stumbles through the rest of his questions, but the room’s attention is broken. Every time I shift, every time my breath gets a little louder, she feels it. She tries to keep her focus on the page, but her pen starts to slip, the writing less legible with each line.
She taps her foot. She bites her lip. Her body is betraying her, even if her face refuses to show it.
If the clench in her thighs is anything to note, she’s thinking about this morning. About last night.
I want that fear in her blood. I want her to think about my hand over her mouth, my cock inside her, the way I forced her to wake up with my cum in her pussy, taking root.
I let her stew in it for the whole hour.
Cabot assigns a project—partners, of course. I already know what he’ll do, because he’s a coward and a suck-up: he pairs me with Ophelia.
“Montgomery and Morrow. You’ll present first. The topic is ‘Coercion: The Invisible Architecture.’ Figure it out.”
She doesn’t look at me. She just circles the assignment in her notebook, then draws a straight line through it.
She gathers her things with mechanical speed, but I’m faster. I stand, blocking the aisle before she can slip past. She looks up, finally, and the look in her eyes makes me want to ruin her in front of everyone.
Her mouth is a flat line, but her eyes are screaming.
I lean in. “You didn’t eat lunch.”
She doesn’t answer.
“Eat before our meeting, or I’ll feed you myself. You’re losing weight and being thin doesn’t suit you.”
A flush rises on her neck. She wants to tell me to fuck off, but she doesn’t. She just moves past, brushing my arm with her shoulder.
A jolt, electric.
When she’s gone, I linger in the empty room, replaying the way her throat pulsed, the way her hand shook on the pen. I imagine, next time, making her hold still while I do whatever I want. I want her to fight. I want her to lose.
I run my tongue over my teeth and taste the ghost of her, still stuck in the creases of my memory.
Leaning against the door frame, I watch her saunter off, ignoring the world and pretending like she doesn’t want to come apart for me.
I give her a full thirty-second head start. Enough for her to think I might not follow. Enough for the hall to fill with students, voices, bodies. That’s when she relaxes, just enough to let her guard down.
I leave the classroom at a lazy stalk, ignoring Cabot’s attempts at a farewell. The corridor is a cattle run of kids in pressed uniforms, each pretending they’re not inbred descendants of the same six founding families. They part for me without thinking. They always do.
Ophelia is halfway down, stopping at the water fountain. I watch her from the end of the hall, arms folded, letting the other students create a buffer around her.
I wait.
She bends, hitting the button and taking long, grateful sips.
The heat in my veins triples as I close the distance. No rush. No noise. Just a steady walk.
I’m coming, and you won’t outrun me.
She senses it too late. When she stands, I’m already there.
She backs up, shoulders hitting cold metal. Her eyes flick up, and I see it—fear, then anger, then the desperate calculation of what she could get away with before someone noticed.
I cage her in, palms flat against the wall on either side of her head. Our bodies don’t touch, but the space between is just a formality.
“Miss me?” I say.
She snorts, rolling her eyes, but the sound is forced. “Like herpes.”
I laugh. “Good. You never really get rid of it.”
She tries to slip sideways, but I block her with a shift of my hip. Her body tenses; she won’t fight, not yet, but she wants to. I can feel it.
There are eyes on us. A girl in a plaid skirt, a boy with braces—both glance our way, then away. No one will step in. They know this has nothing to do with him. They know who wins.
I lower my head, mouth near her ear. She shudders, just enough for me to notice.
“Are you going to eat?” I ask.
She doesn’t answer. Instead, she hunches her shoulders, tilting her chin so she won’t have to meet my gaze. It’s a challenge and a plea at once.
I slide my hand down, brushing her arm, then lower, fingers grazing her side. I can feel the heat through her jacket. She’s burning up.
“I said, are you going to eat?” I repeat, voice pitched low enough that only she can hear.
She bites out, “None of your business.”
I trace the inside of her elbow, slow, drawing a line from bone to wrist. Her breath stutters, then picks up. Her hands clutch the edge of her bag. She thinks about swinging it at me—I see the thought bloom and wither in real time.
I press in, just enough to let her know I could take more.
“You’re shaking,” I say.
She grits her teeth. “You’re crowding me.”
I bring my lips closer, so close I could bite the lobe of her ear if I wanted. “I like the smell of fear.”
She tries to twist away, but I use my knee to pin her against the wall. Her hips slam into mine, and for a split second, we are fused—two animals, one challenge.
I grind my thigh between her legs, slow, calculated. “I like this, too.”
She slaps my hand away. “You’re disgusting.”
I grin. “Oh baby girl, you’ve seen nothing yet. But keep provoking me.”
Around us, the hall thins. Kids shuffle by, some glancing, most pretending not to see. I make sure to hold her gaze for them, let them all know that this is a warning: she is mine. I’ll break every bone in the first idiot who tries to claim her.
I want her to see what it means to be prey. I want her to know, bone deep, that she’s already lost.
I ease my grip, but only to tuck a loose strand of hair behind her ear. My fingers linger on her jaw, thumb pressing under her chin, forcing her to look at me.
“You’re going to meet me in the quad after your last class and we are going for a little walk out to the fountain. After that, we will walk to my dorm together, where you will kneel,” I tell her. “Or I’ll find you. And if I find you, you won’t like what happens.”