Page 35 of Give In to Me
My finger presses flat against my laptop trackpad. No circle. Just pressure.
I read the email one more time. The last line snags on something, a thorn I almost missed:
I trust you understand the importance of maintaining the standards that earned you your place here. It’d be a shame for any... external distractions to compromise what I’m sure is a very promising future.
External distractions.
I close the laptop. My coffee has gone cold. The barista who isn’t a barista is watching me from behind the counter, and for the first time since I started spotting Luciano’s men around campus, their presence doesn’t feel like warmth.
It feels like proof.
Proof that someone else noticed too.
Chapter 4
“YOUR FRAMEWORK IStoo narrow.”
I sit up straighter at his words, my fingers tightening around the edges of my thesis proposal, and it’s late afternoon, the office warm and amber, and I’m trying, I’m genuinely trying, to care more about his academic criticism than about the way this hour makes him look like something painted by a Renaissance master who believed in suffering.
“It’s not too narrow,” I say. “It’s focused.”
“It’s limited.”
“There’s a difference.”
His eyebrow lifts. One fraction of an inch. I’ve never seen him do that before, and the novelty of it is so startling that I almost forget we’re arguing in his office at golden hour while the building empties around us, the hallway sounds thinning to scattered footsteps and the click of distant doors. I shouldn’t be here. Agnes Cuthbert’s email is sitting in my inbox like a lit match, and the smart thing, the safe thing, would be to keep my head down and my circles to myself and stop showing up in this man’s office with my heart doing things my brain hasn’t approved.
And yet.
“My thesis is about building affordable inventory management systems for small farms.” I lean forward. My proposal is covered in his handwriting, sharp red annotations that I’ve been staringat for twenty minutes, and some of them are wrong. I know they’re wrong. He’s brilliant about networks and encryption and the architecture of systems that protect against breach, but he doesn’t know anything about farming, and I do. “The whole point is that it’s narrow. Small farms don’t need enterprise-level solutions. They need something they can run on a ten-year-old laptop while they’re tracking seed stock and counting heads of cattle.”
“And your security model for that system is nonexistent.”
“Because the security model comes later. You can’t secure a system that doesn’t work yet, and right now the system doesn’t work because every existing platform assumes a budget that—”
“Miss Lively.”
“—a budget that small operations don’t have, which is why I’m proposing a modular approach that scales with the user’s actual inventory needs rather than imposing a top-down architecture that—”
“Miss Lively.”
“—requires infrastructure that doesn’t exist in rural Nebraska, and I know that because my parents’ farm still uses a paper ledger and a spreadsheet my father built in 1998, and it took me three summers to convince him that a laptop wouldn’t make the corn grow sideways, so when you tell me my framework is too narrow, Professor, with all due respect—”
I stop.
Because he’s looking at me, and the expression on his face is one I’ve never seen before.
It’s not the granite. It’s not the classroom mask or the composed blankness he wore in his office the day I told him about the alley. Something unguarded, caught between two things, and I realize with a flush that starts at my collarbone and climbs that I just delivered a passionate monologue about corn and cattle inventory to a man who ran a crime family and built a cybersecurity empire, and I didn’t pause for air once, and I called my father’s spreadsheet as evidence, and at some point during that speech I forgot to be intimidated by him.
I forgot he was Professor Salvatore. I was just Elsa, arguing about farms and laptops, and he was just the person on the other side of the desk who was wrong.
“I’m sorry,” I say quickly. “That was—”
“Don’t apologize.”
Two words. Quiet. The afternoon has deepened while we’ve been talking, and his hands are flat on the desk, long fingers spread, and I watch one of them curl inward. Just one.
“Your proposal has structural merit.” His voice has changed. Lower than lecture-voice, lower than the clipped academic tone he’s been using for twenty minutes. This is the voice from the office, from the door, fromyou’re wrong.“The modular approach is sound. The scalability argument is correct. I was testing whether you could defend it.”
