Chapter 8 #2
But I will go and see what this is all about.
Right now, I have to move my arse and get to English Lit before I have to slink in late and sit at the front.
I grab a quick shower, dress in black jeans, a fitted grey tee, and my belled Docs.
My hair goes into a low ponytail at the nape of my neck with a hair slide, and I check the mirror.
The scrapes on my palms look angry in the daylight, red and raw against my skin.
I pull on a pair of fingerless gloves that cover the worst of it and will keep my thumb a bit more supported.
Henrietta goes into her usual spot at the small of my back. After last night, I’m not handing her over again to anyone.
The walk to campus is bright and sharp. April has decided to behave this morning, the sun cutting through a thin veil of cloud and warming the air in a way that makes it almost pleasant.
I scan the spot where the three of them sat last night.
No sign of them now, and nothing to prove they were ever there except the memory of their silhouettes and the infuriating certainty that they’ll turn up again whether I want them to or not.
The quad is busy when I arrive, students moving between buildings with the easy confidence of people who know exactly where they belong. I don’t have that yet. I might never have it. But I can fake it well enough that no one can tell the difference.
English Lit is in the Fitzgerald Building, a smaller, less imposing structure tucked behind the library.
I find the lecture hall on the first floor and slip in with two minutes to spare.
It’s a smaller group of about thirty students.
The room has the intimate, wood-panelled feel of a gentleman’s study.
I take a seat near the back, aisle-side.
Roisin, to nobody’s surprise, is here. She catches my eye from three rows ahead and gives me a look that says we need to talk. I glare at her with loathing, but she turns back around, unbothered.
The lecturer is a woman called Dr Aisling Keogh. Mid-forties, dark hair cut sharp at the jaw, lipstick the colour of arterial blood. She walks in, sets her bag on the desk without looking at anyone, and says, “Paradise Lost. Book One. Who’s read it?”
About half the hands go up. Mine stays down, not because I haven’t read it, but because I want to watch how she operates before I volunteer anything. Gallagher taught me that lesson yesterday, and I’m a fast learner when the stakes are high enough.
“Good. For those who haven’t, you’re already behind. Catch up or drop out. I don’t chase.” She pulls a battered copy from her bag and holds it up. “Milton wrote the greatest villain in the history of English literature and made you root for him. Today, we’re going to talk about why.”
She launches into a dissection of Satan’s soliloquy in Book One with the kind of ferocity that makes Gallagher look gentle.
She doesn’t just teach the text—she inhabits it, pacing the front of the room, reading passages aloud in a voice that makes the words sound like they were written yesterday by someone who’s been personally wronged by God.
She’s brilliant. I hate that I’m enjoying this.
“Satan’s argument is seductive because it reframes defeat as autonomy,” she says, turning to face the class.
“He doesn’t say, ‘I lost.’ He says, ‘Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.’ He takes the narrative of his own destruction and rewrites it as a choice.
That’s not delusion. That’s rhetoric. And it works because every single one of you has told yourself the same lie at least once. ”
Her gaze sweeps the room and lands on me for a beat longer than anyone else. I don’t look away. She doesn’t either.
“The question isn’t whether Satan is right,” she continues, moving on. “The question is why we want him to be. What does it say about us that we find his defiance more compelling than God’s omnipotence? Why do we root for the rebel?”
A guy in the front row raises his hand. “Because obedience is boring.”
“Boring. Interesting word choice. Expand.”
He stumbles through an answer about narrative tension, and Dr Keogh dismantles it before rebuilding it into something worth saying.
She does this with three more students, taking their half-formed ideas and sharpening them into arguments, and I realise she’s not testing comprehension.
She’s training them to think under pressure.
It’s the same thing Gallagher does, but where he uses a scalpel, she uses a forge.
Heat and force until the metal takes shape.
I like her. I don’t want to, but I do.
She assigns a close reading of Books One and Two for next week, plus a fifteen-hundred-word essay on the rhetoric of rebellion. “I want you to make me believe Satan’s argument,” she says. “Not because you agree with it, but because persuasion is a skill, and most of you are terrible at it.”
The room empties in a shuffle of bags and whispered conversations. I rush to pack up so I can disappear into the crowd, but Roisin is faster than I give her credit for. She materialises at my side as I sling my bag over my shoulder.
“Walk with me,” she says.
“Hard pass.”
“It wasn’t a request.” She falls into step beside me as I head for the door, matching my pace with an ease that suggests she’s had practice keeping up with people who don’t want her around. “You look like shit, by the way.”
“Rough night.”
She snickers. “Yeah, sorry about that.”
I stop dead, enjoying that she keeps on walking for a beat before she realises. She turns to me.
“You’re sorry?” I snap. “Fuck you with malice.”
She has the decency to look mildly uncomfortable, but only mildly. “I deserved that.”
“You deserve worse. You told me to come find you after my initiation, like you were inviting me for coffee. You didn’t tell me it would be so fucked-up.”
“Would you have gone if I had?”
“That’s not the point.”
“It’s exactly the point.” She adjusts the strap of her bag, and those three rings catch the light. “Everyone who matters at this university went through the gauntlet. The details are different every time, but the bones of it are the same. You can’t warn someone. It defeats the purpose.”
“The purpose being to traumatise people into compliance?”
“The purpose being to see what you’re made of when everything is stripped away. No allies, no weapons, no control.” She holds my gaze without blinking. “You got Apex. You knocked Aidan O’Connell off his position, and that is saying a lot.”
“Well, lucky me. So now I have an enemy turned more of an enemy to deal with, along with a bunch of robed fuckers accusing me of murdering my dad,” I hiss.
She frowns. It’s not an apology. It’s fury. It’s curious. Who is this woman who sits among students but turns up as part of the Board? “That shouldn’t have happened. Isla has been reprimanded.”
“Isla? The cunt who none of you stopped last night from accusing me?”
“Yeah, her. She’s a total cunt, by the way.”
“Don’t try to make nice with me,” I snap, but it’s hard not to smile. Roisin has this way of pulling you under her thrall. Bitch.
“I’m not. I’m being as honest as I can. Go to the meeting at one.” She saunters off as the crowd parts for her.
Interesting.
She is definitely more important around here than she looks.
Unfortunately, as she disappears, the trio of hot stalkers swim into view, and I hiss at them before spinning on my heel and striding off in the opposite direction.