Chapter 7
Friday arrived with a hard, clean chill in the Boston air.
I stood in the private terminal at Logan Airport wearing the exact navy trench coat Cyrus had ordered me to wear, my heart pounding so hard it felt painful.
When the sliding doors opened, a group of men in tailored suits walked in.
But I saw only one of them.
Cyrus Quinn was breathtaking.
The photos online hadn’t even come close.
He was tall and broad-shouldered, with severe, aristocratic features and dark eyes that scanned the room once before locking on me.
The air seemed to tighten around him.
Lewis walked at his side and gave me a small, polite nod.
Cyrus stopped right in front of me.
He was close enough for me to catch the scent of his cologne—expensive, clean, cedar and winter air.
His gaze traveled over my coat, my posture, my face.
“You look exhausted,” he said.
It wasn’t an insult.
Just an observation.
“I stayed up late,” I said, tipping my chin up to meet his gaze, “summarizing nineteenth-century literature.”
A slow smile touched his mouth.
Then he reached out and cupped the side of my neck, his thumb brushing lightly along my jaw.
The gesture was coolly possessive.
“Good,” he murmured. “Let’s go home. You still have an essay to finish.”
The drive back to the penthouse was quiet, but the tension inside the Maybach was almost unbearable.
Cyrus didn’t sit across from me in the spacious back seat.
He sat right beside me.
His thigh brushed mine as he took my iPad and silently reviewed my essay drafts, making sharp corrections with a stylus.
I watched his profile and felt something shift inside me.
My dependence on him wasn’t just about the money anymore.
Or the tutors.
Or even Harvard.
I wanted his approval.
I wanted to impress him.
Over the next month, Cyrus stayed with me in the penthouse.
And if I had thought he was controlling from a distance, that was nothing compared to having him in the same room.
He dictated my meals.
My sleep.
My posture.
When I studied in the living room, he worked across from me on his laptop. If my shoulders slumped, he wouldn’t even look up before saying, “Sit up straight, Clare.”
And somehow, it never felt cruel.
It felt intimate.
Intentional.
Tailored exactly to me.
When I fell asleep at my desk, I woke up tucked into bed.
When my fingers cramped from writing, he would take my hands without a word and massage the stiffness out of them with firm, practiced pressure.
The floating text disappeared completely during that time.
Either the invisible audience had gone into shock, or the system had finally given up on forcing the original plot.
Then the SAT arrived.
Cyrus drove me to the testing center himself.
He didn’t say something generic like good luck.
Instead, just as I reached for the door handle, he caught my chin and turned my face toward him.
“You know the material,” he said, his eyes fixed on mine. “You are sharper than anyone in that building. Destroy this test, Clare. Bring me a perfect score, and I’ll give you whatever you want.”
“Anything?” I whispered.
“Anything.”
I walked into that testing center feeling armed.
Not nervous.
Not afraid.
Armed.
I didn’t just take the test.
I crushed it.
And when I handed in my paper, I already knew.