Page 85 of Saint Céline
My lungs felt too small.
The room had become unbearably bright despite the storm outside. Every surface looked sharp, overexposed, too clean. The glass wall behind me showed the lab beyond his office, empty benches, organized equipment, the sterile world where contamination could be identified and discarded before it spread.
That was what I would become. Contamination. Removed quickly. Quietly. Efficiently.
“You’d ruin me,” I said.
“No,” Vincent replied. “You did that when you submitted Katherine Montgomery’s work under your own name.”
The sound of her full name between us made something in me recoil.
“Don’t say her name.”
“You still feel entitled to protect her from me?”
“I saiddon’t.”
“You stole her work, Selena.”
I stepped forward and slapped him.
The sound cracked through the office.
For one suspended second, neither of us breathed, and my palm stung.
Vincent’s face had turned slightly with the force of it. A flush rose slowly along his cheek where my hand had landed.
He turned back to me slowly.
His eyes were darker now. Not angry in the way I expected, but rather pleased.
My stomach dropped.
“If you ever say that again,” I whispered, “I’ll make you regret it.”
He touched the corner of his mouth with his thumb, then looked at it as if checking for blood. There was none.
“You really should stop threatening me with things I want to see.”
My pulse beat violently in my throat. I hated him. I hated how my body answered him even now, even with Katherine’s handwriting in my hand and my future sitting riskily on his desk. Heat pooled low and unwanted between my legs, a traitorous ache that had no business being there.
“You don’t get to decide who I date,” I said.
“No. But I do get to decide whether Bellamont learns its grieving golden girl built her academic life on a dead girl’s mind.”
Dead girl.
I closed my eyes for half a second.
That was a mistake.
Because Katherine appeared immediately. Not as she had been at the funeral, polished into stillness by flowers and soft lighting. Katherine alive, hunched over her desk, hair falling into her face while she rewrote a sentence for the fifth time because she said good science deserved clean language.
My throat tightened so hard I almost couldn’t breathe.
When I opened my eyes, Vincent was watching me too closely.
“I won’t be owned by you,” I said.
