The Professor's Captive Wife

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I went to my husband's office to ask for a divorce.

He crossed the room, put a hand on the back of my head, and pushed me down under his desk.

Then one of his students walked in and started offering him things in exchange for a passing grade.

The whole time, in the dark under that desk, his fingers stayed curled in my hair.

My husband is a law professor. The kind everyone wants and no one gets.

No one except me. The wife he married out of obligation, while the person he actually wanted lived somewhere I'd never reached.

That was the part everyone knew. Me most of all.

Chapter 1

The second I walked into Dorian Cross's office to tell him I wanted a divorce, he stood, crossed the room, put a hand on the back of my head, and pushed me down under his desk.

I didn't get a single word out.

The door opened. Someone stepped in.

Divorcing him wasn't a whim. I'd thought it through. Our marriage had been a joke from the start, and the woman he actually wanted had never been me.

From under the desk I could see nothing. Just the dark underside of the wood, and the press of his hand against my hair. Too real. Too warm.

A girl's voice. One of his students, soft and careful, asking whether he could pass her on the final.

Normal enough. Until she dropped her voice to almost nothing.

"Professor Cross. If you pass me, I'll do anything. Anything you want."

A quiet office. Two people in it, as far as anyone could see. And me, crouched under his desk like the world's most confused third party, his hand still flat against my head.

"Anything?" he asked. Mild. Unhurried. The way he asked everything.

The girl made a small, shaking sound. Yes.

"Then."

He let it sit there.

My heart climbed into my throat. Hers must have too.

"Can you actually study for the retake?"

Silence.

There's a reason his students call him the Hanging Judge. Even from under the desk, I heard her start to cry.

When she was gone, I crawled out.

"Why did you shove me under your desk?" I demanded.

He leaned back in his chair, smiling. Dorian smiles a lot. Most of them are fake. His temper, under all that politeness, is not a good one.

"Nora." He tapped the desk once. "Say what you said when you walked in. Again."

"Why did you shove me under your desk?"

"The line before that."

"I want a divorce, Dorian."

His knuckle went still against the wood. He looked at me, serious now.

"Not a chance."

I don't understand him. He doesn't want me. So why won't he let me go?

I pulled the divorce papers out of my bag, already printed, and spread them across his desk.

"Look. Two properties. You take one, I take the other. The car's yours, you paid for it. No kids, so there's nothing to fight over there. A few personal assets, and"

His long fingers lifted the papers off the desk and fed them, smoothly, into the shredder beside his chair.

I watched my way out turn into confetti.

"You" The curse was halfway up my throat before I swallowed it whole. Because I remembered, all at once, exactly how he'd broken me of cursing back when he tutored me. Not gently.

"Badly written," he said, settling back. "Do it again."

"You think I'm turning in an essay? I stopped being your student years ago, Dorian."

"Mm. Now you're my wife."

He wasn't listening. He gathered his lecture notes, stood, and on the way past leaned down and kissed the corner of my mouth like it was his to kiss.

"I have a meeting tonight. If you don't feel like waiting up, go home."

"We'll talk about the divorce when I get back."

And he walked out like the matter was closed. Like I hadn't just asked to leave him. Like the shredder still humming at my hip wasn't chewing through the only way out I'd planned.

Chapter 2

Of course I didn't wait up for Dorian.

His seminars ran for hours. God knew what they found to say to each other for that long.

Around nine, ten at night, my phone lit up with a message from him. Two words.

Checking up on you.

I stared at it.

Checking up?

The man barely touches a phone. He'll go a whole holiday without answering one. The last time we'd actually messaged each other was six months back, when he turned up at my new office and I sent him my location.

So I was instantly, completely certain his account had been hacked.

Some scam ring was wearing his face now, warming me up, and any second the fake Dorian would pivot to my bank details.

I smirked, typed in my best impression of a man's voice, and hit send.

Sorry. She's asleep.

Then I dropped the phone face-down and forgot about it.

I almost called to warn him his account was compromised. Then I remembered I was divorcing him, and decided he could find out on his own.

I pulled the blanket over my head and went to sleep.

I woke to a key turning in the lock.

Then light. Too much of it. Dorian had switched on every lamp in the apartment.

He was going through the place. Drawers, the closet, the cushions, methodical, looking for something.

"You're back early," I yawned, shoving hair out of my face. "What are you doing?"

He stopped in front of me, eyes narrowed, and the smile on his face was thick with something I didn't like.

"Where is he?"

I had never seen him smile quite like that.

"Where's who?"

He drew a slow breath and spelled it out for me, one word at a time.

"The man." A beat. "The one who answered me from your phone. That man."

"Dorian. You're serious? You'd actually get worked up over"

He started unbuttoning his shirt.

"Worked up? I'm not worked up." He pulled his tie loose and dropped it on the bed. "I just think it's a waste."

His voice didn't rise. That was the part that lifted the hair on my arms.

"Two of them. Now that might have been worth coming home for."

What.

"Okay Dorian, don't"

His knuckle grazed the side of my waist and stopped. He didn't say anything. He didn't need to. My whole body pulled in on itself, a flinch I'd never managed to train out.

There it was again. The version of him from the years he used to tutor me, the one who could drop the temperature of a room without ever raising his voice.

I gave up and dragged a pillow between us like a sandbag.

"You smell like something," I said. "Go shower."

He raised an eyebrow. "Do I?"

He didn't. He doesn't smoke, doesn't drink, and tonight he'd done nothing but sit in a meeting. But I turned my face away and held the line.

"Just go wash it off."

I finally herded him into the bathroom and sagged back against the door.

In. Out. Breathe.

I was still shaking, and not all of it was anger.

How does the fear of a man get this deep into your bones? When all he ever did back then was

I rapped my knuckles against the door and shouted through it. "Dorian! I want a divorce!"

The water was running hard. He couldn't hear me. And even if he could, there was no way he'd come storming out of a shower to deal with me.

It had been years. And I had still, somehow, underestimated Dorian Cross.

Chapter 3

The bathroom door opened before I was ready for it.

Steam rolled out, thick enough that I lost a second to it. Then his hand closed around my wrist and pulled me in against him.

I was still in my slippers. At the last second I kicked them off, stubborn, so they wouldn't end up soaked on the wet tile.

Then he had a hand at the back of my head and his mouth on mine.

The mist was everywhere. My bare feet on the warm floor. He kissed me without hurry, then lifted me onto the edge of the vanity, one hand braced beside my hip.

"Ms. Hayes." His voice was low. "Would you like to take back everything you said this afternoon?"

Dorian's gentleness is bone-deep. What that really means is that he's so gentle he's lost the ability to show anger like a normal person. It does not mean he doesn't get angry.

It means he gets even. In ways that are worse than angry.

So I caved.

I leaned back, except behind me was the dip of the sink and my balance went. His hand came out and caught me before I tipped.

"What are you hiding from?" An eyebrow.

"Dorian, the divorce is still up for discussion, just don't"

My palm flattened against his chest. My own pulse was loud enough to burn.

He gave me two words. No mercy in either.

"Too late."

He looks at me sometimes the way a thing that enjoys its food looks at the food. And that look always drags up something I'd rather keep buried.

Then a hard buzz cut between us.

His phone, on the vanity where he'd dropped it, lighting up. We'd been anything but careful a minute ago, and somehow it hadn't gone flying.

A string of numbers on the screen. No name saved.

Any other time, he'd have killed the call and gone back to what he was doing.

This time he glanced at it. And answered.

I was still close enough to hear, even though I wasn't trying to. A woman. Crying.

Something in him changed. The heat went out of him, and whatever replaced it was heavier, further away. He lowered his voice, soft in a way that wasn't for me, and looked at me once before he eased his grip loose.

He mouthed it. I have to go out.

I sat on the couch and squeezed the stupid bear we'd won together out of a claw machine, working it into one shape, then another.

Then I stood up fast and changed my clothes.

The longer I sat with it, the angrier I got.

I was going to find out tonight. The woman who kept calling him. Who she was.

Yes. I thought he was cheating. Lately he'd been coming home late, and I let it go. Being with me was never what he wanted in the first place.

So why be this good to me? Good enough that some stupid part of me had started to believe he actually loved me.

And then a woman calls once, and he's out the door like the building's on fire.

He knows I he knows how I feel about him.

He's always known.

Chapter 4

By the time I got downstairs, his car was already pulling out of the garage.

He drove fast. I'd half resigned myself to losing him before I'd even started.

Then a taxi swung up from behind me on the left, like it had been waiting.

The second I said I was tailing my husband to catch him cheating, the driver floored it with a technique that made me wonder if he'd raced for a living before he retired into this.

I don't know if I'd have made a decent cheater-catcher. I do know he nearly had me throwing up on the curb when I climbed out.

Here's the one thing that actually helped. In college I'd run with the campus detective club. We spent most of our time finding the security guard's lost cat or slipping scraps to the school paper, but the tailing stuck. So even with all his turns, I didn't lose him.

His destination was the hospital.

This late, only the ER was lit. I didn't know why I was creeping after my own husband like a thief. He moved fast, no hesitation, and I trailed him corner after corner until we came out at

the pediatric night clinic.

Loudest corner of the whole hospital. One in the morning and still blazing with light. Kids crying. Parents' fast footsteps.

I tucked myself behind a pillar and watched him. He's tall. Hands in his pockets, he pulls eyes just standing there.

He stopped in the middle of the row of waiting-room chairs.

Then, through the crowd, a small boy's voice.

"Daddy."

I knew it was him before I looked, because the kid was already sprinting over, already swinging up into his arms.

I didn't scream. I didn't storm across the room. I'd always assumed that if it ever came to this, I'd be the kind of woman who did.

I wasn't.

My mind just went white, for a long, long time. Of all the things he could have been hiding, this was the one I never landed on.

He had a child. He'd never told me.

We were married, and he had a kid out in the world.

What was I supposed to do with that.

A woman came up behind him. He bent his head and said something to her, low. I had never seen her before in my life.

She crouched, smoothed the boy's hair, then took his hand and stood.

Dorian kept his hands in his pockets. Under that flat white hospital light, eyes down, he said something to her.

Whatever it was, partway through, she started to cry.

And then she stepped in and threw her arms around him.

His whole body went stiff. His hand started to lift, like he meant to pat her back. Then it didn't. It stayed down.

I couldn't watch anymore. I left on my own, quietly.

The only place in this city that's busy at any hour is the front of a hospital. Red and green light smeared across the wet street. The 24-hour place still open, five dollars for a coffee and a sandwich.

I sat in there and gave it everything I had not to think.

The boy. Sprinting over. Calling him Daddy.

He looked five, maybe six.

I'd been married to Dorian for three years. And before tonight, I had never once heard this woman's name.

Chapter 5

I'd been in love with Dorian for a long time.

He was my mother's prize student. Back in high school, he was the one she found to tutor me.

The tutor before him had been brutal. Ten copies of a passage for one wrong line, and sometimes worse than copies. My mother couldn't stand it, so she replaced him.

Dorian was still in college then. The first time he saw me, he smiled, and I actually thought, finally, a kind teacher.

He was kind, walking me through a problem. Clear, methodical, never piling it on. Most of the time I could keep his pace.

But the second I couldn't, he'd say something quietly horrifying in that same gentle voice.

One day I was sick, head splitting. The fever had broken, and it was the last stretch before the big exams, so my mother sent me to him anyway. I remember it exactly. I got a whole column wrong.

I looked up and told him I couldn't do any more.

He said, sure. Don't.

I started to hallucinate a little. A halo over his head. A pair of angel wings folded at his back.

Then he told me anything I left for next time, I'd do double.

The halo became horns. The wings went leathery.

I finished the set that night, crying through every problem. He watched me cry with his chin propped on one hand, patient as a man waiting out bad weather.

That was when I learned the truth about Dorian. He only looks like he's good to everyone. His heart runs cold. He'll smile at anyone, and he'll put a knife in anyone, too.

I knocked back the rest of my coffee. Hiccuped.

My phone hadn't stopped ringing.

Dorian had probably gone home and found me gone. He probably had no idea what I'd seen.

It kept buzzing. I sighed and finally picked up.

"Where are you?"

His voice. Patient, warm, the way it always is.

I took a breath and gave it to him one word at a time.

"I'm. In another man's. Bed."

A long silence on the line.

Then his voice again, still gentle, almost coaxing. "Which man?"

I couldn't stand it. Couldn't stand him talking like that, like none of it touched him. The second he goes soft, I want to cry.

"What do you mean, which man!" I shouted. "I want a divorce, Dorian!"

The cashier flinched, then put his eyes back on the register.

Outside, car horns rang through the whole city, and the soft, lost light closed around me where I sat.

Why did it still hurt, even now.

Dorian's kindness was never mine alone. Hadn't I known that from the start?

When I got home and slid the key in, the door opened on its own.

The first thing I saw was Dorian's eyes, a little frantic. Honestly, I'd never seen that look on him before.

He was dressed, put together, and the second he saw me he pulled me hard into his chest.

"Nora. What happened?" He still carried the faint antiseptic smell of the hospital.

That woman, earlier. Was that how she'd held him?

I shoved him off.

"I saw all of it." I looked dead into his eyes and said it one word at a time. "You went to that hospital for that woman. And her kid. Didn't you."

Chapter 6

I searched his eyes for something. Yes. I was still, pathetically, hoping.

What I caught was a flash of panic, the first I'd ever seen in him. Then it smoothed over into that gentle calm.

"Nora. You've got the wrong idea."

Explain it to me. Or own it, throw it in my face, anything. But why lie? Why pick the one lie I could see straight through?

Something crossed his face before the denial landed. There and gone. The look of a man choosing to be hated rather than say one true word. I was too busy breaking to read it.

"Dorian." I shook my head, backing away. "How many times have you lied to me?"

Or was any of it real?

When I actually sat with it: he had never once said he loved me. Not out loud. Not ever.

I still remember the day Dorian proposed.

The summer before my last year of college, my mother was dying.

I caught the last train home. The white hospital room felt like one long, drifting dream.

My mother was a public-school teacher. A lifetime at the front of a classroom, and still she worried herself sick over me, always trying to give me the best of everything.

When I was small and she made almost nothing, I pointed at some ridiculous, overpriced hair clip and said I wanted it. She bought it without blinking. I learned later she'd charged it to the card she ate lunch on, and went weeks without a real meal.

She told everyone what a good girl her daughter was. I wasn't. I was a brat, I fought with her, I ran away once and slept at a friend's place, and she spent the whole night out in the dark looking for me.

I always thought she'd never get old. That she'd be there forever, smiling at me.

Then one day she couldn't stand up anymore. The backs of her hands went to pinholes. Later, with the port taped in, she'd tell me how much everything hurt.

Dorian and me, together. She's the one who set it up, more or less.

How much did Dorian actually want me? I didn't know. But he respected my mother. She was the one who'd scraped his tuition together, back when he had nothing.

I loved him. He was the boy who flooded my whole adolescence, the first ache of being young.

And around me, Dorian always wore the same expression. Completely at ease. Never reaching.

Gentle, controlled. Except in bed. Some of what he did when his composure cracked should have told me, long before I let myself understand it, that gentle was not what he was underneath.

That day I stood outside the operating room. The hospital had handed down the notice that she might not make it.

Dorian came back from somewhere with a carton of soup, still hot, and held it out to me. He'd just clawed his way into a teaching-assistant post, busy as anything, and he still never forgot to remind me to eat.

"I can't."

I looked at him, and for no reason at all my throat closed.

He pulled me into his arms. I always loved the way he smelled. He didn't smoke, always clean.

Back then I used to feel smug about getting to keep him to myself.

I thought I had a few more years to talk him into it.

Until he took my hand and slid a ring onto my finger.

My mind went blank. He spoke low against my ear.

"Your mom wants to see us married. Let's not wait."

I went back to my mother's old house. I had nowhere else to be anyway, and packing was simple.

Dorian watched me pack. I could never get much out of him, but I could feel it, faint and certain.

He was going to protect that woman to the very end.

Chapter 7

My mother's been gone a while now. We did get married in front of her, that part's true.

She always said a man like Dorian was hard to find. I'm no longer inclined to agree.

He won't sign off on the divorce, so I'm getting ready to take him to court. Before that, I need proof he's cheating. And I need to know exactly who the woman is.

That night at the hospital was too far off. I'd only gotten a blurry sense of her face. But if it was something serious enough to drag him there, it wouldn't be a one-time visit.

So I staked out the pediatric clinic. I figured I'd give it a day or two and then, if I had to, hire a real investigator. I caught them the first day.

The boy must have been sick. Sniffling, teary, his hand in his mother's. They went into the specialist's office, then back to the desk for a prescription.

Those old tailing skills came in handy. Even when she wound through the streets, I didn't lose her.

What I never saw coming was where she lived.

My complex. My building.

I'd spent this long chasing a woman who turned out to be a few doors down. How many times had Dorian let himself into that apartment, exactly.

I stopped her on the stairs.

The second she saw me, she was the one who flinched. Her face went bloodless and she started backing up. She wanted nothing to do with me. That much was plain.

She had a clean, quiet sort of face. Not a stunner. I'd assumed the woman who could keep Dorian would at least have brighter eyes than that.

"Don't don't come near me." She kept shaking her head, which surprised me. By the boy's age, she'd have known Dorian longer than I had. And yet, facing me, she looked like the one without a leg to stand on.

"I only want to ask you a few things." I breathed through it, trying to keep the anger down.

She just kept shaking her head, until I'd backed her to the edge of the stairwell.

Then, loud: "Come any closer and I'll I'll call Dorian."

Ah. So that was where her nerve lived.

I raised an eyebrow. Fine by me. I wanted this said with everyone present anyway.

So I called him.

He picked up almost before it rang. "Nora"

Still soft. Still close.

I laughed, cold, and asked him, "Do you know who I'm standing in front of right now?"

A man as sharp as Dorian would have caught my meaning at once. The line went quiet for a long moment.

I didn't wait for him. "That mother and kid you slipped off to see at the hospital. Want to guess what I'm about to do to them?"

I'd run his answer a hundred times in my head. He'd never once been angry with me, so of course I assumed he'd banter, brush me off.

Instead, his voice dropped cold.

"Nora. I'm warning you."

Chapter 8