Page 24

Atta blinked at him, certain she’d misheard. “I’m sorry. Observe?”

“Yes.”

“For a few weeks? That’s more than half what’s left of the term, Professor.”

“Yes.”

Maybe she was too hungover for this, but she was getting pissed. “Then what?”

“Then, maybe we can discuss you making some copies for me, or fetching coffee like you so generously suggested the other day.”

Nope. Not just hungover.

Atta shifted in her seat. “Let me get this straight. You need me to observe your classes before I can even be allowed to make copies for you or bring youcoffee?”

He didn’t even move, let alone respond.

A bitter laugh escaped her. “Unbelievable.”

“You know,” Murdoch said, leaning forward on his elbows, his clasped hands sliding across the desk closer and closer to her with the movement, “most students would find this the easiest way to free tuition, not complain about it.”

“I’m not most students,” she shot back, failing to keep the ire from her tone despite the flush rushing up her neck.

“You’ve never taken my courses, Miss Morrow.”

“I don’t need to take a course to know how to make copies of Page 45,” the pitch of her voice rose there at the end, making her accent thicker, and she took a deep breath when one of Murdoch’s eyebrows dragged upward. “I have been performing autopsies since I was practically a child. It’s wildly inappropriate how young I was the first time I cracked a rib cage open. I’ve studied pathology myself for six years, and I might not know every detail of your courses, but I’m uniquely qualified in that regard to at least makecopiesof the damned diagrams.”

“So I’ve heard.”

Jesus, she wanted to slap the brooding right off his face. “Do you want to see my CV?”

“I already have that. What I don’t have is proof.”

“I don’t understand. Do I really have this position or not?”

“You have it as a favour to a friend. If you have it for being actually useful remains to be seen.”

Common sense told her to rein in her temper. To take the easy way. To listen to the handsome, infuriating professor holding her fragile future in his hands. But she’d never been very good at things like that and the fire was hot and the scent of his lingering tobacco smoke was intoxicating.

“You know, these students are all spooked by you, but I don’t think you’re scary. I think you’re just a bastard.”

One side of his mouth twitched and Atta stood, unable to sit there a moment longer.

“I think I need to go.” Her words hardly carried. If she’d said them above a whisper, she would have shouted them.

She was halfway to the wrong dorm when she realised she’d left her bag and books and probably the whole of her tuition in that office.

Sitting down on the nearest bench, she wilted, pushing against her eyelids with her fingers. The scent of cigars and books—the scent ofMurdoch—was still cloying with her senses, embedded in the fabric of her clothes.

This time, the migraine that came from nowhere and everywhere brought a song, student passersby disappearing, replaced with synesthesia in shades of warmth, nostalgia and a forest in winter.

God, it was beautiful. Tears sprang to her eyes, but she couldn't make them stop, the fog only breaking long enough for her to see strong, slender fingers gliding over an old piano, the notes filling up her soul before she could see her bare legs in a tub, covered in suds, a melodic voice reading her fairytales.

Then everything was slashed in red. Garish gashes of black blood, the notes cut short, a scream tearing through her so forcefully she thought it must be real—now. Everything trembled, the world shaking, crumbling. It all went black and Atta gasped, opening her eyes to see students on the green staring at her.

Tears streaming down her face, she ran for Briseis House, ripping off her clothes as soon as she hit the door to the suite. She neededawayfrom the scent of that man.

Showered and changed, Atta realised she had to go back. Every iota of her coursework was in that office.