Chapter 30: Stick to The Devil You Know

Blair’s fight-or-flight response instantly chose flight.

She grabbed the strap of her bag, leaping out of her seat. "I am so sorry," she babbled, keeping her eyes firmly glued to the floorboards. "My mistake. Completely wrong room. I’ll just be going—"

"Take a seat, Miss Willows," Jack’s voice cut through the air, smooth, cold, and echoing with authority.

Blair froze, her hand hovering over the doorknob.

"But I’m a freshman," Blair stammered, her face burning. "And this is... Level 3."

"I am aware of what class I teach," Jack drawled, tapping a piece of chalk against the blackboard. "However, a thirst for knowledge should never be restricted by scheduling. If you are so eager to learn that you wander into my upper-level electives, who am I to deny you? Front row. Now."

Blair wanted to cry. She slowly turned around.

The tiered seating was packed entirely with senior beastwomen. There wasn’t a single male student in the room. It suddenly clicked in Blair’s brain: this was an elective. These girls didn’t care about biology. They were here because this was the closest they would ever get to hearing the handsome Professor Feron talk about sex.

And right now, twenty incredibly stylish, heavily perfumed, apex-predator seniors were glaring daggers at the frumpy human freshman who was stealing all of his attention.

Blair swallowed hard. She shuffled down the aisle, feeling the murderous intent radiating from the beastwomen, and sank into a desk in the very front row, right in front of Jack’s podium.

"Let us begin," Jack announced.

What followed was the longest, most excruciating forty-five minutes of Blair’s entire life.

Jack paced the front of the room in his tailored charcoal suit, looking like a dark, unbothered prince as he delivered an incredibly detailed lecture on the reproductive anatomy of predator classes. He even turned on an overhead projector, clicking through slides of biological diagrams that made Blair want to evaporate into thin air.

She refused to look at the screen. She stared fixedly at the wood grain of her desk, her face glowing like a radioactive tomato.

How could she look at him? Every time she glanced up, all she could see was the image of him lying exposed in her tiny bed. She had seen all of him. She had literally pulled his boxers down, with her own hands.

She is a pervert.

"Miss Willows," Jack’s voice snapped her out of her thoughts.

Blair jumped, her knee slamming into the underside of her desk. "Yes, Professor?"

"Since you are joining us today, let’s test your baseline," Jack said, stopping right in front of her desk. He leaned against the podium, crossing his arms. "What is the evolutionary advantage of the dual reproductive organs—the hemipenes—found in serpent beastmen?"

Blair’s jaw dropped. A collective, irritated groan rippled through the senior girls behind her, furious that he was talking to the human again.

"I... I don’t know," Blair squeaked, her mind flashing unexpectedly to Crown Prince Killian. "Redundancy?"

Jack raised a dark eyebrow. "A crude way to phrase it, but essentially correct. It ensures successful fertilization even if one organ is damaged during territorial combat."

Blair wiped a bead of sweat from her forehead. Why is he asking me this? she thought frantically. How does knowing that snakes have two penises help me become a politician?

"Moving on to the avian class," Jack continued, clicking to the next slide. "Specifically, the corvid family. Crows and ravens. Unlike serpents, avian beastmen rely heavily on psychological dominance during the mating process. They are incredibly possessive. They are known to isolate, corner, and psychologically torment their mates—or their prey—before claiming them."

Blair stopped breathing.

"They also," Jack added, his voice dropping a fraction of an octave as his blood-red eyes locked directly onto Blair’s, "hold deep, violent grudges against anyone who attempts to exploit them."

Blair’s heart flatlined.

He knows, her brain shrieked in blinding panic.

She spiraled into intense paranoia. He wasn’t just giving a lecture. He was threatening her. He had to know what happened last night. He knew that she and Daemus had taken compromising photos of him. He knew she was planning to trade pictures of his naked body to nobles in exchange for favors and information!

He’s going to kill me, Blair thought, her hands trembling as she gripped the edges of her desk.

She spent the last twenty minutes of the class in a state of terror, analyzing every single syllable Jack spoke, utterly convinced that every biological fact was a coded threat about her impending doom.

RIIIIING.

The loud, electronic chime of the campus bell finally echoed through the room.

Blair moved with the speed of light. She swept her notebook into her bag, zipped it up, and threw it over her shoulder in a single motion. She was out of her seat before the bell had even finished ringing.

"Miss Willows."

Blair froze.

"A word, if you please," Jack demanded smoothly, organizing the papers on his podium.

Blair groaned inwardly. She was dead. It was over. Her brief, terrifying life at Apex Academy was coming to an end.

She stared longingly at the open doorway. Freedom was right there. She seriously debated making a run for it. She was pretty fast when she was terrified.

But as she looked out into the hallway, her heart sank.

Lingering right outside the door was a group of the senior beastwomen from the class. A tall Fox beastwoman was casually buffing her nails, while a muscular Leopard beastwoman was cracking her knuckles, her golden eyes fixed directly on Blair with a look of pure jealousy and malice. They were waiting for the "teacher’s pet" to step outside.

Blair swallowed hard.

If she went out there, she would be torn to shreds by a mob of thirsty, angry fangirls before she even reached the stairs.

Letting out a defeated sigh, Blair turned her back on the hallway. She walked slowly to the front of the classroom, deciding that dealing with the devil she knew was slightly safer than dealing with a hallway full of angry she-devils.

"Yes, Professor?" Blair asked softly, stopping in front of his desk and bracing herself for the end.