Page 32 of Wings of Ashes (Wings of Ashes #1)

CHAPTER

“ W hat?” Nix asked after Professor Thierry yelled her name at her.

Nix bent further down on her knees to examine the lock on the gate to the restricted section of the library.

“What are you doing?” Professor Thierry asked in an absolutely scandalized voice.

“Do you happen to have a bobby pin?” she asked. “Or screwdriver? Actually, the metal edges of the temple tip ends of your glasses could possibly—”

“Are you trying to pick a lock in front of a professor?” Professor Thierry asked incredulously. “You do not think I will report you?”

“I need a book or two that is behind this gate.”

He quirked one eyebrow and narrowed his gorgeous slate gray-silver eyes on her. “If the academy blocked off this section from students, it did so for a reason.”

Nix, struck with new anger, looked up to glare at her studly professor. Her glare elicited a reaction from him of stunned blinking. “You agree with the gatekeeping of knowledge, withholding information from certain select groups?”

Professor Thierry’s plush mouth opened. Closed. Opened again. “I agree that some topics may be too…dark for the younger generation.”

“You’ve spoken about shifter species genocide in your class. What topic could be so ‘dark’ that it should be forbidden to curious students?”

The student seemed to ask too difficult a question for the professor to answer.

“I want to learn about self-defense. Does not seem like too ‘dark’ a topic for a shifter student?” she asked.

Nix fumbled with the lock but knew she lacked the tools to get into it tonight. Giving up and promising to return later, she stood and turned to face her professor.

She informed him, “All books on combat, self-defense, or any type of fighting are locked up in that section.”

“You wish to learn how to fight?” Professor Thierry asked an obvious question, so Nix did not expend the energy to answer him. “Do you wish to learn this to…not require a husband at graduation? For your safety?”

Nix crossed her arms over her chest.

Professor Thierry exhaled sharply. “I told you in my classroom that I would protect you.”

“ You? Protect me?”

He flinched at her harsh tone. “You think me incapable?”

Professor Thierry stepped closer to her. His breath noticeably played with a lock of her hair hanging over her cheek.

He told her in a low voice, “I may not have the outward appearance of massive muscles like a dragon shifter, but I assure you that gargoyle shifters are capable of much strength and much destruction.”

“Oh, I believe you are plenty capable of destruction,” Nix said. He was a privileged, strong, male alpha shifter after all.

Professor Thierry did not read into her tone—maybe he only read stuffy facts printed on paper. He added, “You said it yourself; you need a protector.”

“ That was what your big professor brain absorbed from our conversation?” Nix snorted, again letting her frustration bubble and boil over. “I don’t want some alpha to protect me.”

She pressed a finger into his chest, paused at the hard muscle there, and pulled her finger back to a safer, less my-professor-has-abs location.

“I want someone to challenge the school—challenge the council and the societal reasons why I require protection,” she said. “Let the female prey shifters take combat classes. Hold alphas accountable for abducting prey shifters off the street. Change the rules.”

“The council, regrettably, will not listen to me,” Thierry admitted, grating the words.

“Then, maybe we need a whole new council,” she snapped.

Thierry’s eyes widened, and he glanced around, as if looking for cameras in the back of the library. He grabbed her shoulders and slid his hands down until his long, warm fingers handcuffed her arms.

“Do not say treasonous things like that,” he commanded her in a stern voice, shaking her. His black pupils grew, dominating the silver iris.

Nix tipped her chin up and stared into those mind-numbing black and silver eyes of his. “Truth uttered by the oppressed is always called treasonous at first.”

Thierry shook his head and urgently tightened his hold on her upper arms. His grip tingled over her skin. “I am serious; do not say such things in front of others. The council is dangerous. They have eyes and ears everywhere, especially in the academy.”

“Fuck the council.”

Thierry bit back a curse and covered her mouth with his warm fingers. They smelled like dark chocolate cherries. “Do not say things like that.” He gawked and tore his palm away from her lips after she— “You dare bite your professor?”

“Do not muzzle me. Or I will do worse than nip.”

“Do you think anything through before you do it?” he criticized her.

Nix shrugged off Thierry’s grasp on her. He reluctantly let her go. “If I appear to be acting before I think, then you are just thinking slower than me.”

“You planned to pick a lock and steal an off-limits book in front of your professor. Why? ”

“Maybe I don’t respect you enough to see you as an authority figure.”

Nix’s mouth kept spouting things before she could rein herself in. There was just so much fire in her today, now being fueled by the idea of “self-defense” being an off-limits topic to the group of students who most needed the knowledge.

“Are you actively trying to piss me off?” he asked her.

His gray eyes were wide open; the specks of silver shone in the dim lighting. The beautiful gleam reminded Nix of a mosaic of shards of hematite, galena, and arsenopyrite.

What Thierry did not know was what a little geode freak Nix was. When deemed the Ugly Duckling, Nix lost friends and gained little hobbies in her past. The study of rock formations and different crystals and minerals had fascinated Nix.

Before her stood a man who could shift into the same kind of rock-like material that Nix had always pet and stroked when she was nervous or feeling particularly lonely.

She still kept a small piece of smoother hematite by her bedside at the academy after a young adulthood of using it as a safety blanket and anxiety minimizer.

“What are you going to do?” she taunted the handsome professor. “Punish me?”

Professor Thierry’s eyes darkened to a storm cloud gray color as he leaned forward. His forehead nearly touched hers as he hovered his face above her. The tall man had to slouch to accomplish such a close stance to her.

How did he manage to bend over a foot lower and still maintain perfect posture? It made no sense.

“Punish you?” he repeated. The words came out gravelly and rough, like his mouth had gone dry.

“Are you going to write me up and send me to the dean’s office?” Nix asked.

Professor Thierry’s jaw clenched as he replied, “Maybe I should bend you over one of the study tables and slap your impulsive, curved, luscious ass until you realize who you are speaking to.”

The threat hung in the air, seeming to echo in the space between the bookshelves even though it was spoken in a low, masculine whisper.

A warmth began twisting low in Nix’s abdomen, but she ignored it. “You’d hit a woman?” Nix shot back breathlessly.

“Only one who likes it.”

Nix sputtered as her cheeks heated. “You think I’d like being spanked?”

“I think you need an outlet for these pent-up emotions,” the professor told her. “I think you would like the feeling of being put in your place. The impact triggers the release of endorphins, which can cause feelings of euphoria.”

“I don’t think you slapping my butt would cause euphoria.” Her thighs clamped together as she said it.

A hot, annoying pulsing began between her legs at the dark intensity in the professor’s expression. Soon, he would scent her pesky arousal.

“Why not? It is an area of the body that contains numerous nerve endings,” he told her. “Physical stimulation has been proven to be sexually arousing for some.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yes.”

Surely, the professor was bluffing. “I thought you weren’t interested in being seduced by a student.”

“I’ve never known someone like you.”

“Would you let me borrow your glasses, so I can try to pick the lock with them?”

“Stop trying to break academy rules in front of me,” Thierry warned her.

“Damn it.” Nix glared at the locked gate and slammed her foot against the lock as if that would break it.

She ended up on the floor, clutching her foot in pain.

Thierry knelt and snapped at her, “Impulsive woman.”

“Impulsive?” Nix shook her head. If she were a male alpha shifter, would she be called impulsive or just quick-thinking ? “I need to learn what those restricted books can teach me. I don’t have time to waste.”

“No? What is a waste of time exactly?” he asked, always wanting to be in the know. Big-brained professor Thierry.

Nix gritted her teeth, dusted herself off, and limped back into a standing position. She wiggled her foot, trying to lessen the painful throbbing. “I’ll tell you what appears to be a big waste of my time: pointing out injustice to alpha shifters, apparently.”

“You cannot change the world in a day.”

“No,” Nix said. “But you can burn it down in one.”

Thierry blinked at her, appearing so dumbfounded yet intrigued that she smirked. “Where is all of this coming from?” he asked. “A cygnus shifter like you, the adopted daughter of Council President Oadess. What have you experienced to make you talk of this so freely and…”

“Did you know that sixty percent of the books in the school library are not accessible to female students?” Nix asked him. “Did you know that?”

Thierry gaped as if he didn’t know.

“What knowledge do you think they are gatekeeping from us?” she asked him. “I guess it’s not a concern of yours, why would you need to know—it does not affect you.”

“ Everyone deserves the right to learn and know things,” he shot back. “I’m sure it is due to some kind of mistake. The academy would never purposefully restrict a gender from learning the same material that the other gender—”

“And you think you are soooo smart.” Nix rolled her eyes.

“I am a student at an academy that expects me to marry someone at graduation. An academy that only wants to teach me how to be a wife, who does not think for herself and caters to her alpha. An academy that knows how dangerous it is to be a female prey shifter in a world with paranormally powerful alpha shifters. Yet, the school keeps us prey shifters from learning the basics of self-defense.”

Thierry’s furrowed eyebrows and concerned expression did nothing to calm Nix down.

“If you’re not going to help me break this lock and get the knowledge I need to protect myself from my future, then I am going to go to the dining hall and sneak out a knife or two so I can feel safer at night.”

Nix strode away from Thierry but turned her head over her shoulder to tell him, “I don’t need you to apply for the role of my protector. I don’t want anyone’s help if it comes with strings.”