Page 44 of They Break Beauty

I continued working away, the sound of the rapid clacking of fingers flying across keyboards filling the room, one of my favorite sounds. It had a sweet, meditative-like effect on me.

I was fully immersed and in the zone, enjoying every moment of the work, the challenge before me.

So much so that I startled when Professor Martina Ruiz came up on my side.

I jolted and looked up to see her studying my screen. Her dark curls were cascading about her face and brushing the collar of her sleek pastel-blue pantsuit.

“An impressive solution to the problem you were given,” she praised. “Intricately coded too.”

“Thanks,” I said, smiling up at her. “It’s getting there.”

“It’s far more than that. You’re first up to share with the lab.”

“I am?” This was a far cry from last year where I’d run into problems and been admonished for my code not being clean, for it being written in an overly complicated way that had only been readable to me. Over the summer I’d spent a lot of time working on that. Although it seemed like a small issue, when it came to the bigger picture, it could actually become a major one when you got into creating larger programs with pages upon pages of code. I’d actually learned that the hard way when I’d tried to create my first app.

It just showed how far I’d come that now I was being asked to present my code first. Usually when we had one of these show-and-tell coding mini-presentations, I was near the last up and everyone had tons of notes for me.

“Absolutely,” Professor Ruiz confirmed, smiling.

I couldn’t believe it.

I pushed out of my seat and grabbed my laptop, taking it with me as I walked up to the front of the massive lab full of almost forty students, and set about connecting my laptop to the HDMI cable so my screen could be displayed on the big screen at the forefront of the room.

“Out-of-the-box thinking can go a long way,” I heard the professor saying, as I got ready. “Pay attention to the novel workaround Brianna has found to the problem I provided for you all to overcome.”

As my code appeared, I was about to start walking them through my reasoning when something suddenly flashed on my screen.

What the—

In the next moment, an audio file started playing of its own accord.

A chill ran down my spine as Levi Knight’s voice emanated.

“You’re going to be my good girl, yes?”

“Oh God, Levi.”

“You don’t like it nice and easy. Isn’t that right? You’ve been craving the rough and wild touch of a vicious bastard like me, haven’t you? You want to be consumed, utterly owned.”

It was from our encounter in the recording studio at his place the other day.

No. No.

He hadn’t even distorted his voice or anything.

Of course not. He wanted people to know—or to believe—that I was his.

While embarrassing me at the same time.

Well, embarrassing me didn’t even cover it.

It was absolutely humiliating.

“Oh God, Levi.”

“I’m certain if I reached under your skirt and dipped my fingers beneath your panties, you’d be soaking wet for me too.”

“Oh God, Levi.”

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