Chapter 19 #2
I stepped forward before I could stop myself and grabbed the paper from his hand. It was a photocopy. Just a page of notes, but enough. A draft fragment. The same phrasing. The same structure. Her annotations in the margins, cramped and brilliant and unmistakably hers.
My hands went cold.
Katherine must have submitted something to another professor once. Or left a draft in a shared system. Or maybe Vincent had gone looking after he started suspecting.
It did not matter.
He had it.
He knew.
The paper trembled once in my fingers before I made myself still.
“That’s not what you think it is.”
“Isn’t it?”
“She helped me.”
“I imagine she did.”
“She helped everyone.”
“No,” he said quietly. “She carried you.”
For years, Katherine had corrected my work, rewritten my phrasing, and explained concepts until she grew exhausted and sharp. She had made me sound smarter than I was, and I had let her because Bellamont rewarded the finished version, not the hands that assembled it behind the scenes.
But this was different. This had been her work. Her proposal. Her chance. And I had taken it because I didn’t want to feel stupid.
I looked up slowly. “If you know, then why did you accept me?”
His eyes held mine. “Because the work is too good to waste.”
Something inside me twisted. He didn’t want me. He wanted it. The proposal. The idea. Katherine’s brilliance was preserved through my lie.
“You’re sick,” I whispered.
“Yes,” he said. “But I am also practical.”
I laughed then, quietly and without humour.
“So what is this? Are you going to report me? Is that why you dragged me in here?”
“No.”
“No?”
“If I intended to report you, you would already be gone, Selena.”
I looked at him, really looked, and saw no uncertainty in his face. No moral struggle. No professor weighing institutional duty against sympathy. He had already decided. Maybe he had decided days ago. Maybe the moment he first read the proposal.
“What do you want?”
His gaze moved over my face slowly. There it was. The real question. The one everything in this room had been circling from the beginning.
“You know what I want.”
“No,” I said, though my voice sounded thinner than before. “I really don’t.”
“Break up with Chad.”
For a moment, I thought I had misheard him. Then the absurdity of the meaning settled while I stared at him.
“You’re blackmailing me to end my relationship?”
“I’m giving you a choice.”
“That is not a choice.”
“It is. You simply dislike the available outcomes.”
My grip tightened around Katherine’s photocopied notes.
“You’re insane.”
“Frequently, according to you.”
“If I refuse?”
“Then I give Dean Waverly what I have.”
My lungs felt too small.
The room had become unbearably bright despite the storm outside.
Every surface looked sharp, overexposed, too clean.
The glass wall behind me showed the lab beyond his office, empty benches, organized equipment, the sterile world where contamination could be identified and discarded before it spread.
That was what I would become. Contamination. Removed quickly. Quietly. Efficiently.
“You’d ruin me,” I said.
“No,” Vincent replied. “You did that when you submitted Katherine Montgomery’s work under your own name.”
The sound of her full name between us made something in me recoil.
“Don’t say her name.”
“You still feel entitled to protect her from me?”
“I said don’t.”
“You stole her work, Selena.”
I stepped forward and slapped him.
The sound cracked through the office.
For one suspended second, neither of us breathed, and my palm stung.
Vincent’s face had turned slightly with the force of it. A flush rose slowly along his cheek where my hand had landed.
He turned back to me slowly.
His eyes were darker now. Not angry in the way I expected, but rather pleased.
My stomach dropped.
“If you ever say that again,” I whispered, “I’ll make you regret it.”
He touched the corner of his mouth with his thumb, then looked at it as if checking for blood. There was none.
“You really should stop threatening me with things I want to see.”
My pulse beat violently in my throat. I hated him. I hated how my body answered him even now, even with Katherine’s handwriting in my hand and my future sitting riskily on his desk. Heat pooled low and unwanted between my legs, a traitorous ache that had no business being there.
“You don’t get to decide who I date,” I said.
“No. But I do get to decide whether Bellamont learns its grieving golden girl built her academic life on a dead girl’s mind.”
Dead girl.
I closed my eyes for half a second.
That was a mistake.
Because Katherine appeared immediately. Not as she had been at the funeral, polished into stillness by flowers and soft lighting. Katherine alive, hunched over her desk, hair falling into her face while she rewrote a sentence for the fifth time because she said good science deserved clean language.
My throat tightened so hard I almost couldn’t breathe.
When I opened my eyes, Vincent was watching me too closely.
“I won’t be owned by you,” I said.
His voice lowered. “You already understand ownership, Selena. You have lived inside it for years. Thad owns the respectable future. Katherine owned the mind people praised when they thought it was yours. Bellamont owns the name Céline Martin because it invented her with you. I am simply the first person honest enough to tell you what the price is.”
“I’ll tell Thad,” I said suddenly.
His expression did not change. “Will you?”
“Yes.”
“What will you tell him?”
I opened my mouth. Nothing came out.
Vincent stepped closer, slowly, leaving me enough space to move back.
“You will not tell Thad because Thad only loves the version of you that makes sense beside him at dinner tables. You will not tell Sophia or Anya because you are terrified that their love has limits you have not tested yet. You will not tell your mother because it would destroy her to know how hard you have worked to become someone she cannot recognize.”
My vision blurred briefly.
“You are so cruel,” I said.
“Yes, my love.”
The honesty was unbearable, but the endearment was worse.
“But I am not wrong.”
I looked down at Katherine’s notes again. The handwriting was so familiar it felt alive. Something inside me began to splinter quietly.
“If you expose me,” I said, “the proposal dies too.”
“That would be so unfortunate.”
“You said the work was too good to waste.”
“It is.”
“Then you need me.”
A faint smile touched his mouth. There. Finally. An escape.
“I need the project attached to a student enrolled in my lab,” he said. “I do not necessarily need that student to remain you. I’m sure Christina would love to take your place.”
Cold moved through me. He was lying. He had to be, but the work mattered to him enough that he would protect it, but not enough to protect me for free. He was forcing me to understand the difference.
“What happens if I do it?” I asked. The question felt like surrender even before he answered.
“If you end things with Thad, I’ll keep your secret. You remain in the lab. We continue the work.”
“And what do you get?”
His gaze did not leave mine. “The satisfaction of watching you stop mistaking safety for ambition.”
I laughed softly, bitterly. “That’s all?”
“No, but we’ll get to that later.”
“You’re a monster,” I said.
His expression remained calm. “So are you.”
The words landed with terrible intimacy; there was no way he knew more than he did.
I placed Katherine’s notes back on his desk with careful hands.
Then I lifted my chin. “I’ll break up with him.”
Vincent watched me.
“When?”
“Soon.”
“Tonight.”
“You don’t get to dictate the exact hour.” My jaw tightened.
“I do when the alternative is your dismissal from the university.”
I stared at him. His cheek was still faintly red from where I had slapped him. The sight gave me one small, vicious thread of comfort.
“Fine,” I said.
“Good.”
“No,” I said, stepping closer now because fear had nowhere else to go except forward. “Not good. You think this means you’ve won something, but you haven’t. You’ve just taught me what kind of man you are.”
“And what kind is that?” He looked almost amused.
“The kind who thinks because he can find a weakness, he owns the person attached to it.”
Vincent’s smile faded slightly. I held onto that.
“You don’t own me,” I said.
“No,” he replied softly. “Not yet.”
I should have left immediately. Instead, I stayed still, breathing too hard, furious with him and with myself and with the fact that even now the room seemed to pull around him like gravity.
Then I turned toward the door before the anger could become something else.
His voice followed me quietly.
“Leave the file.”
I looked down. Katherine’s photocopied notes were still in my hand. I had not even realized I had taken them again.
For one irrational second, I wanted to keep them. Not only because they could help me, but because they were hers. Because some stupid grieving part of me wanted proof that Katherine’s mind had existed somewhere outside memory and accusation.
But Vincent’s gaze was waiting.
So I walked back to the desk and set the notes down.
He picked them up carefully and slid them back into the file.
I opened the door.
The lab outside smelled like ethanol and rain-damp wool from coats hung near the entrance.
At the threshold, I paused without looking back.
“If I end things with Thad,” I said, “it doesn’t mean I choose you.”
Behind me, Vincent was silent for a moment.
Then he said, “You misunderstand me, Céline. I don’t want to be chosen because he is gone.”
My fingers tightened around the doorframe.
“I want you to run out of places to hide.”
I left before he could see what that did to me.