Page 18 of Lock Up the Darkness

For now, anyway.

With this new girl in the mix, I wasn’t sure how long it would hold.

From Kill’s reports and Asher’s policy regarding her, she really seemed to be something.

I couldn’t fucking wait until she and I crossed paths.

If she knew what was good for her, she’d do everything she could to delay that for as long as possible.

5

~Aurora~

Since my run-in with the infamous Killian Carmichael over a week ago, things had gone from bad to worse at Hexwood U. From a social standpoint, anyway. Just like he’d predicted.

Well, more like just like he’d enforced and made happen, using his popularity and misplaced power to turn his legions of cult followers on me.

I’d become the college leper. Someone had even scrawled that across my seat in one of my classes. I liked routine, so I always gravitated to the same seat each time in the far back corner of each auditorium or classroom. Something I was sure Killian had realized and then whispered in his followers’ ears.

As I made my way toward my Business Ethics class, another shove came my way, trying to knock me off-kilter. Unfortunately for them, my training had schooled me well on how to hold my ground against attempts to destabilize me—both physically and mentally.

An elbow in the side came next, that I deflected with my messenger bag.

Fools.

They had no idea who they were dealing with.

They also had no idea how much they were actually testing my mercy.

Or what the consequences of that snapping would truly have for them.

They were extremely lucky that they weren’t my targets and that I was able to recognize that they were nothing but pawns in the bigger picture.

More than that, they were distractions I wouldn’t waste my time entertaining.

It was both sad and disturbing that they were so easily led, so completely subjugated by the will of the Infidels and their need to stay in their good graces and serve their whims.

But that wasn’t my role here.

Fixing that, freeing them from this disgusting subservience wasn’t why I’d come here.

If I lost sight of that, it could delay and even compromise my mission.

A few years ago, I wouldn’t have been able to stop myself from helping the downtrodden, from doing whatever I could to rectify such an injustice.

I would’ve felt sick about even thinking of turning a blind eye to it.

But I wasn’t that idealistic fool weighed down by principles any longer.

I couldn’t be.

In order to do what needed to be done I had to be above it.

I had to be cold.

I had to be calculated and focused.

That wasn’t to say I hadn’t been acquiring data with my specific set of technical skills that could prove useful to those who secretly didn’t support them. But I had to keep that data for leverage first and foremost. Using it to help some uprising against the Infidels had to remain secondary. Intel was precious. It took a bitch of a thing to get your hands on the kind that could actually impact what you needed it to, I wouldn’t waste it. It had to be used with the precision of a scalpel.

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