Page 10 of Virgin Sacrifice

She let out an exasperated sigh.

“All I am saying is to tread lightly with Locke Blackwell. Even if the rumors aren’t true, as the school’s founding family, they tend to get their way around here.”

“Thank you,” I said, meaning it. I appreciated the advice, even if I wasn’t convinced that the school’s founding family was secretly a group of exclusive killers-for-hire.

“Besides, let’s be honest,” Autumn joked, “you couldn’t actually afford to be killed by a Blackwell.”

“True.” I laughed. “Guess I get to live for another semester.”

Chapter five

Locke

I was going to kill Luz Torres . . .

Not in the literal sense, that would be like wasting my skills squashing ants.

No, in the sense that I was going to make her life a wretched hell, unworthy of living, until she came to her senses and dropped my class.

If only that insufferable brat realized how easy it would be for me to snap my fingers and take it all away from her. Her scholarship . . . her reputation . . . her place at Hollow Oak. I was a Blackwell. I would merely have to will it and it would be done.

But that wasn’t the victory I craved. Oh no, not over her.

Pulling out of my private parking spot, I headed off of the university grounds to the family’s estate. The Tesla Roadster was quiet on the backroads I took to get there, leaving me in silence to ruminate. Still seething, I reached over to turn on some music, allowing Prokofiev’s “Dance of the Knights” to wash over me.

The girl hadn’t so much as buckled before me. Oh yes, I saw the tears welling in her eyes, the quivering of those plush lips as she bit down on them. But not a single tear had fallen. She never even raised her surprisingly husky voice. For all my so-called might and power, Luz Torres was still enrolled in my class.

My knuckles turned white as I gripped the steering wheel.

I was the fucking inquisitor of my family. I could make a grown man scream with my words alone, and yet this little creature had stood there before me, dressed like a fucking naughty schoolgirl in her knee socks and sneakers, and she had refused me.

Someone who had never had the pleasure of torturing someone to death, ensuring that their last days on earth were full of such profound, nauseating suffering that it would break a sane man to deliver such depravity, wouldn’t understand that everyone buckled at some point.

I don’t mean they broke. Speaking as a professional, I could say that there were some men who couldn’t be broken.

I meant that they buckled; they cried, they whimpered, they flinched, they screamed. The truth of the matter was that some responses to pain were inevitable, primed into us on a biological level.

If I held a flamethrower to a man’s flesh, he was going to scream, no matter what his training or background.

But Luz Torres didn’t shed a single tear, no matter what the neurons firing in her brain were telling her to do. She didn’t lose her temper, no matter how loudly the voice in her head whispered that I was a bastard.

So no, a simple phone call to the dean to have her removed from Hollow Oak would not suffice. I needed to break her on my terms, with my skills. It was the only victory that I would accept.

Slowing the car down, I turned down the sole road leading in and out of the Blackwell Estate. The pristine land that made up the oceanfront property included acres of woods on the three remaining sides and had ensured the seclusion and privacy of the Blackwell family since the 1700s.

The truth of the matter was that I hadn’t picked on the girl for any particular reason. Or rather, I didn’t single her out solely for the sin of being four minutes late to my class on the first day. I couldn’t care less about when the students walked through the door of my classroom—they were the ones paying an embarrassing amount of money just to rub shoulders with the likes of me and my cousins.

What I did care about was maintaining my reputation and establishing control.

Every year, on the first day of class, I made a point of singling out one student for some perceived transgression and berating them into absolute submission. It was my gift, finding those pressure points on any stranger in a crowd and breaking them down. The students I singled out almost always dropped out of my class, and several times they had dropped out of Hollow Oak altogether.

To the rest of my class, I was jovial, approachable, and knowledgeable, and would remain so for the remainder of the course. But they all got to witness a brief taste of my wrath that first day, thus ensuring they would do anything to avoid being on the receiving end of it. When you combined that with the Blackwell name, I was easily both the most respected and most feared member of the faculty.

So, when I heard the door to my classroom cracking open just moments after I had begun to introduce myself, it was an obvious opportunity.

And then I saw her, petite and curvy, with round hips swaying beneath her skirt in time with her long dark hair as she quietly attempted to sneak into class, and my mind was made up instantly.

I didn’t fuck my students. It wasn’t a matter of ethics. The university’s bylaws forbidding relationships between faculty and students were of no concern to me.

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