Total pages in book: 103
Estimated words: 95627 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 478(@200wpm)___ 383(@250wpm)___ 319(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 95627 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 478(@200wpm)___ 383(@250wpm)___ 319(@300wpm)
"…after class." Artem's comment shattered my panic attack.
"What?" I stammered as he entered the bedroom and settled on the bed, prepared to watch me dress.
"I have meetings and errands today, but I'll drop you at school. We'll have dinner tonight."
"I can't tonight," I lied, scrambling for excuses.
"It wasn't a question," he replied, eyebrow arched. "Your last class ends at five. I'll finish by eight. Don't keep me waiting, princess."
He pressed his lips to mine and abandoned me, stunned and struggling for breath in his bedroom.
He knew my schedule.
He'd stocked clothes in my size.
The cage door slammed shut.
I would never escape him.
CHAPTER 20
VIKTORIA
"Ms. Zat-a-sevo," the professor shouted, still butchering my last name.
His face reddened and twisted.
Several people around me looked away with hands slapped across their mouths to conceal their laughter.
Everyone else either gawked at me with open mouths or disdain in their eyes.
"I'm sorry professor, what was the question?" I asked, heat and humiliation burning my cheeks as I fell into his trap.
I knew better.
This professor hated everybody, but he seemed to loathe me the most, using every opportunity to publicly humiliate and isolate me.
From day one, I had been determined to prove him wrong, done so much to prove myself to him. Prove that I deserved to be in that class, to be learning, and that his prejudice had no basis in fact.
Worked harder than anyone else in this class and still was ridiculed for being a woman, Russian, a transfer student, someone with a community college education, and any other quality he could find lacking in me.
And now, instead of making it harder for him to single me out, I had just handed him a reason.
Everything with Artem had my mind so preoccupied that instead of focusing on whatever the professor was lecturing about, I was lost in my own little world, trying to think of ways to escape Artem's attention.
I had been going over possibilities in my mind, playing them out.
Everything from refusing to shave my legs or shower regularly to becoming such a nuisance, he'd want nothing to do with me.
I had even considered doing the opposite of what every single piece of modern advice on how to make a man fall for you told you to do, and thinking of ways to love-bomb him until he got sick of me.
"Ms. Zatasevo, I was asking you to expand on the UNIDROIT Principles," the professor said as he stood in the walkway halfway across the lecture hall.
I hated how he always insisted on walking up and down the stairs while lecturing, like getting his steps in was far more important than the ability for all the students in the class to hear him.
"The UNIDROIT Principles?" I asked.
I had no idea what that was.
"Yes, it was part of last night's required reading. You did the required reading, didn't you?"
For the first time since I started this class, I hadn't done the required reading.
This was actually the first time he had ever brought up the required reading in class.
It just had to be the one time I didn't do it.
Between getting kicked out of my study group, finding out that I had been moved, going to confront Artem about the gilded cage with the cameras and then getting fucked to within an inch of my life, I had forgotten to do my stupid fucking coursework.
Maybe this was the real trap.
It wasn't the domestic bliss he had given me a preview of last night and this morning; it wasn't the passionate arguments, or the gilded trappings of the life he was trying to force me into.
The real danger was that I was going to be so distracted by all of that, I forgot to do my goddamn coursework.
I couldn't even blame Artem for this.
I had just accused him of giving me an opportunity and then setting me up for failure, but I was the one who forgot to do the reading.
It wasn't even like I didn't have the time.
I could've done the reading before I confronted him.
I could've done it this morning while he was reading the newspaper on his tablet.
A vision of me reading textbooks while sipping coffee across the table from Artem reading the newspaper flashed in my head. My heart fluttered.
I pushed the thought aside.
That was something that I was going to have to work out in therapy later.
At that moment, I needed to smooth this over with my professor, so I didn't get thrown out of this class.
The professor walked up through the dreary lecture hall, his hands held behind his back as he took his time sauntering down one aisle until he got to mine and stopped directly in front of me.
Note to self: stop sitting at the end of the aisle.
"Ms. Zatasevo,” he said, glaring down at me. "I expect your full attention while you are in my class."