Page 151 of Ulune's Daughter

I tap the point of my knife on my desk. “Rowan, why are you here?”

He slaps his hand down on the edge of my desk. I’m sure his little displays of temper intimidate academics who have never had their mind rolled by a Crow Queen, but Rowan losing his cool is literally the least scary thing that’s happened to me recently. Was he this petulant when we were dating? I don’t remember it if he was.

I narrow my eyes further. “Yes?”

“Your TA provided incomplete information that my students and I have been working on for weeks. Our translations are worthless. Hundreds of hours wasted, Kellan. My translations are up on ARKANUS. I look like a fool. You will post a public apology. You will take full responsibility.”

Will I? I don’t think I will. “And if I don’t?”

He leans over my desk so his hot breath fans my cheeks. “You’ll regret it.”

I nod and resist the temptation to knock him on his ass with a flick of my claws. Does he really think coming at me in my office, my hearthspace, is a power play? “There are a lot of things I regret when it comes to you, Rowan. Making you look like a fool? Not among them.”

“I’ll file a grievance against you and your TA. You’re not thinking of applying for tenure this year, are you, Kells?”

I scratch behind my ear with the point of my knife. “Were you always this much of a prick? I mean, I knew you were an asshole, denying me funding for my dig, trying to claim credit for my discovery. But I didn’t remember you beingquitethis much of a prick.”

He slaps my desk again. “I won’t be made a fool of!”

“Then stop trying to stick your dick where it doesn’t belong. I didn’t ask you to assist me with the translation because it’s not your area of specialty. Stay in your lane, Professor Wright, and you won’t get caught with your pants down.”

His lips curl back from his too-small teeth. Rowan’s always been cultured, a few years away from distinguished. Today, he’s wearing a gray suit with a black pin-stripe that brings out the silvering wings in his hair. I used to tease him that he looked like a fox, with the gray wings against his russet hair.

If he’s a fox, he’s a fox with one foot in a trap.

“I tell you what to do, Kellan. You do not tell me what to do.”

“No, youtoldme what to do. Quite a while ago. And I listened to you when we were in the bedroom. Never out of it. Because I never respected you that much. Withdraw your translations from ARKANUS. I won’t make a fuss.”

“Not good enough.”

I twirl my knife between my fingers. “That’s all that’s on the table.”

He steps back from my desk, flares the vents of his suit jacket dramatically, and sits in one of my guest chairs. He crosses one long leg over the other.

“You’ve done well for yourself, Kells. The exhibit. Chance at full professorship. I hear you’ve been spending time at Cait House.” His eyes flick up and down the charcoal zip-up I’m wearing under a black leather blazer. “You always dressed like you shopped at Walmart. I see you’ve upgraded.”

I still shop at Walmart. Their jeans actually fit me.

“Your point?” I ask.

“Who are you fucking?”

A harsh laugh escapes me. “Actually, several people.”

His cheeks darken. “You always were crude.”

“Yup. What did you call it ... my middle-class roots showing? Sorry to offend your patrician sensibilities. What does it matter who I’m fucking so long as I’m not fucking a student?”

That feral smile comes and goes. “Because it’s clearly someone of importance. You couldn’t have gotten all of this on your own.”

Of course. I couldn’t haveearnedmy success. People like Rowan will never believe that, it upsets their world view. Rowan needs my success to have come from connections, just like his, and if I don’t have those connections via the accident of birth, then I must have gotten them by spreading my legs.

“I would say that’s shockingly misogynistic of you, Rowan, but given what I’ve come to know about you since we parted ways, it’s not actually shocking. Anything else?”

He pulls a small card out of his suit pocket and drops it in the middle of my desk. “Formal invitation.”

I don’t bother looking at it. Whatever it is, I’m busy that day. “Sorry, I won’t be able to make it.”

---