Page 20 of Lock Up the Darkness

One that he wore extremely well, disturbingly so.

And with every look he sent my way, he dropped that mask, his caramel pools flaming with a sinister promise that the man beneath was barely restrained, that one false move on his bad side would burn you to ash at his very feet.

My body tensed, my muscles locked as he took his seat and discreetly fired his merciless glare my way.

I looked away and tried to focus on typing notes as the Professor began the class.

But the hairs on the back of my neck were standing to attention.

A chill rolled through me.

And worst of all, it threatened to cut through the numbed state I’d put into effect, so that I could carry out my plans here. It threatened to provoke a reaction in me.

And the pathetic bullying had just been worsening the situation. The relentlessness of it chipping away at my control moment after moment, with shove after shove, insult after insult, infraction after infraction.

I didn’t take things on the chin.

I retaliated.

I fought the fuck back.

Professor Richards snapping his fingers in rapid-fire succession—something he always did when he was opening up the floor for discussion—brought me back to the immediate.

It was then that I realized I’d been zoning out for hell knew how long, my fingers hovering above the keys of my laptop like some zoned-out zombie.

Crap.

I eyed Liza beside me and saw that she’d thankfully had her head in the game. Lucky break, because it was usually the other way around. According to her laptop screen, I’d only missed two paragraphs’ worth of material. Still, I needed to get my shit together. And fast.

I shifted my weight, sitting up straighter, paying full attention as Professor Richards opened up a discussion on the possible reasons behind the violation of business ethics.

He was the only professor that I’d known to open up a discussion during a lecture. That was usually reserved for tutorial groups and all that, not when you had hundreds of students sitting around a theatre-style setup lecture hall all staring at a freaking whiteboard, where the professor was the size of a pin off in the distance. The guy was a bit of a rebel to begin with though, rocking a mohawk, always wearing jeans paired with a wrinkled open collar shirt.

“Money is power,” one student spoke up from hell knew where in the mammoth lecture hall. Somewhere to my left, if I had to guess.

“Way too simplistic,” another returned. “And a fuck of a sweeping generalization.”

That awful awareness shuddered through me ten-fold.

That melodic voice.

The unapologetic, cemented-into-his-daily-vocabulary cursing.

It was him.

Freaking Killian.

He went on, “Wealth doesn’t necessarily guarantee power. Besides, power can take many different forms. Power over what, exactly? Or, are we talking about absolute power? Again, a different entity entirely, and something virtually impossible to acquire. No single individual can attain that. No matter how hard they try.”

“But they wouldn’t even come close without the money aspect,” the student who’d first spoken up argued back.

“It opens a few doors, sure. But there’s a lot more to factor in than that,” Killian continued, like he was on a mission.

I could feel the intensity rolling off his every word, the vehemence with which he believed in what he was putting out there.

I was more than a little surprised, because he never spoke in class. He watched me like a hawk as I did, doing his best to unnerve the crap out of me.

“It’s greedy, is what it is,” another student spoke up.

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