Page 17 of Allure

I whirl around. Sure enough, a tall, thin Japanese man has entered the room. He places his briefcase on his desk.

“Mr. King,” the professor says with a nod. “It is good to see you. It is good to see you all. My name is Mr. James Kang. I interviewed a great number of you before you were accepted into the business program here at Oak Park University. For those I haven’t yet met personally, be sure to email me. My address is on this syllabus here. We will go over every page of it, and if you have any questions—”

A student groans. I'm pretty sure, based on his seat behind me, that it's one of Declan's friends.

“Yes, yes. I know this is your first day of classes your first year at a university, and today at least will be very boring, filled with syllabi, but we will be starting the course material tomorrow. In fact, tonight, you can start reading…”

Mr. Kang continues to talk, but I can sense a shift behind me.

"Have you been dreaming about having your legs wrapped around me?" Declan whispers a bit too loudly for my liking. Hell, his talking to me at all is a bit too much for my liking, period.

“I hate to burst your bubble, but I don’t waste my time thinking about you. Definitely no dreams.”

“Of course not. They would be nightmares because I would come for you and cream you on the mat. You’re wasting your time.”

“Do you try to chase off all of the white belts? What about the guy in his sixties? He wheezes like he needs to be put on oxygen.”

“Maybe he needs the exercise, so why don’t you cut him some slack?”

I wince inwardly at his harsh tone. “So what is it then? You’re just sexist? Think I can’t handle it because I’m a girl?”

He snorts. “What about Jackie? She’s put in the time, the dedication, the training. Believe me, I know she’ll get her black belt when she tests, but you? You won’t last a full week.”

Is that what his deal is? He doesn’t want to bother with me because he’s so damn sure I’ll quit? Why would he peg me as a quitter?

“Psst. Cock Biter,” says the guy sitting on the other side of me from the girl who went from pen biter to overt note taker. All Mr. Kang is doing is reading the syllabus line by line. I can skim this later.

I shift my gaze over to the guy. One of Declan’s friends, obviously. Did they all go to high school together or something?

“Do you prefer it up the ass?” he asks. “Because your ass seems a bit… tight.”

The other guys all snicker.

“What I’m wondering is how you’re able to sit in that seat considering the stick that’s up your ass,” I return coolly.

“Dude, you don’t even know him,” another guy says.

“Dude, how about you not call me dude?” I return even though I’m certain that will only make him call me that for the rest of the year. Honestly, I hope he does because dude isn’t all that bad, especially compared to Cock Biter.

Seriously, though, if Declan's going to hound me at the dojo and now he and his cronies are going to bully me in class… potentially classes…

Maybe this is the universe's way of trying to tell me that I shouldn't be so bitter, that I shouldn't try to tarnish my father's business. It's his legacy, outside of myself, that is. My father abused me, and I want revenge even though he's dead, and now, I have bullies trailing me everywhere I go.

But I don’t want to just give up, to give in, to let my father win. He’s dead, yes, but his evil business is still thriving, and I’m sure it’s still operating illegally to some extent.

No, I didn’t know about the illegal business practices while my father still lived. When the lawyer explained that the business would be handled by a board of trustees until I turned twenty-one or had a business degree, whichever came second, I looked into it. Naturally, the board didn’t want to talk to me, what with my being so young, but I knew how to use the internet, and I also knew the combination to my father’s safe at home, and it’s the same combination for his safe in his office, which they did let me into unsupervised because I pretended to be sad that my father had died.

That’s how I found out the truth. I think my father kept records so that he could blackmail people, but it’s all there, in black and white. If I found it so easily, the police could if they bothered to look, and I did think about leaving an anonymous tip.

But then I came up with the idea of building up his business only to turn around and burn it to the ground, and I prefer that. I want to destroy my father’s business like he almost destroyed me.

So Declan and his friends can try to needle me, to get under my skin, bullying me all they want, but it doesn’t hurt me. I have dragon-hide skin. Nothing can hurt me.

Nothing and no one.

CHAPTER7

Ihave three classes on Wednesdays, and all three of them I have with Declan. Not all of his cronies are with him for the other two, and I'm much more careful about my seat in the next two classes, picking one all the way over by the window so there's one less seat around me or else trying to claim one that already has people around it so Declan can't be too close to me.

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