Chapter 3
“Excellent academic resource?”
Anger pushed me past laughter. I advanced step by step, forcing Emma back into the dead corner by the bookshelves. “You use the power of tenure to drag a moron who can’t even hold a scalpel into your bed, and you call that ‘tailoring instruction’?”
“Shut up! You filthy-minded lunatic!”
Emma screamed and raised her hand. Smack. A crisp crack—my left cheek flared with heat, my gold-rimmed glasses knocked crooked.
After the slap, she shrank back as if frightened by her own violence. She covered her mouth and squeezed out a few fake tears. “Oh my God, James—I didn’t mean to… It’s your controlling nature that forced me!”
I tasted the blood at the corner of my mouth, tore off my glasses, and returned the favor—one hard slap across her right cheek.
“This one,” I said, voice like steel, “is from my father—whose heirloom you stole!”
She stared at me in disbelief, clutching her face as she fell to the floor. I looked down at her, each word carved out of blood:
“You’re not some lofty academic goddess. You’re a cheating thief.”
She was about to explode into hysterics when the doorbell shrieked, ripping through the congealed air of the study.
A doorbell at this hour meant trouble.
I strode out, yanked open the front door.
On the steps stood Lucas, trembling.
He’d changed into a thin white hoodie, shoulders hunched like a startled deer, eyes rimmed red. “Dr. James… I’m sorry to disturb you this late. I’m just here to get my personal item back.”
“Personal item?” My fingers tightened around the silver cross in my pocket until my knuckles cracked.
“That’s a prop Professor Emma kindly lent me,” Lucas said timidly, looking toward Emma as she rushed out. His voice carried a wounded, innocent tremble. “For rehearsing Shakespeare. If I upset you somehow, I apologize. But please don’t take it out on an innocent professor.”
The green-tea, black-is-white performance churned my stomach. And in the blind spot of Emma’s view, I saw it clearly—the corner of Lucas’s mouth curled into an openly provocative smirk.
“Lucas! Why are you out here dressed so thin?” Emma gasped, heartbroken.
Right in front of me, without the slightest shame, she rushed to him and wrapped both hands around his cold fingers. The tenderness in her eyes overflowed.
“Get away from him!” I snapped, stepping forward.
Emma spun and shoved both hands into my chest, driving me back.
“Are you done yet?!” she roared like a mother beast guarding her cub. “You’re not just a tyrant—you’re a sadist who persecutes underprivileged students. I have to drive him back to his apartment myself, before you traumatize him further!”
She grabbed her keys, pulled the pretty boy—still making faces at me—tight against her, and slammed the door as she left.
The heavy oak door boomed like a verdict, vibrating straight through my sternum.
I barely had time to breathe through the absurdity when my phone in my pocket started vibrating like it had gone rabid.
My cousin Mike had sent more than a dozen screenshots—Twitter and anonymous Reddit threads.
On the screen were one-sided, bold red headlines firing at me like bullets:
[SHOCKING! Ivy-affiliated hospital surgical director uses his authority to bully disadvantaged med students!]
[Toxic old white man jealousy: Wife too brilliant, so he threatens her star student at a bar!]
In those posts, I was painted as a twisted control freak—crushing undergrads, emotionally abusing his wife. The comment section was tens of thousands deep, calling for hospital protests, calling to cancel me into the ground.
Reading the poison, I didn’t feel rage.
My brain slid into the same absolute calm I had on an operating table facing catastrophic hemorrhage.
Lucas—the bottom-feeding punk—wasn’t just stealing my wife. He was trying to step on my reputation to climb upward, striking first.
“Mike.” I called him, my voice cold as a scalpel quenched in ice. “Ignore the bot army. Track the original posting IPs. Now.”
“Bro, this kid’s playing with fire. Should we send a lawyer’s letter?” Mike growled.
“No. Too slow.” I walked to the floor-to-ceiling window and watched Emma’s taillights disappear into the night.
“American universities take Title IX extremely seriously—teacher–student relationships, coercion, abuse of power. Once confirmed, tenure gets shredded.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Pull Lucas’s last six months of financials. Bank flows. Luxury purchases. Everything.” I clenched the cross, its sharp edge cutting into my palm, my gaze going dark.
If he wanted an opinion war, I was done defending.
I was going to drop a nuclear payload—drag him and his protective professor straight to hell.
