I Belong To My Three Forbidden Masters

Chapter 56: Chapter 56

Lysander’s pov

The morning sun offered me no warmth as it broke over campus.

My clothes were stiff, drying into a crusty, uncomfortable mess against my skin. I hadn’t slept a second. I had spent the dark hours curled on a bench in the Fine Arts courtyard, shivering, my mind spinning in endless, terrifying loops. My throat felt raw, filled with broken glass, but the desperation inside me burned far hotter than any fever.

When the clock struck eight, Drake appeared at the archway of the building.

He looked immaculate as always, charcoal wool coat, leather briefcase in hand, his dark hair combed back without a single strand out of place.

I scrambled off the stone bench, my stiff joints popping, my head throbbing as I stumbled toward him. "Drake—please!" My voice was a raspy, pathetic shadow of itself. "Professor Drake, stop! Just listen to me for five minutes!"

Drake didn’t miss a beat. His long, measured stride kept a rhythmic pace against the cobblestones. He walked past me as if I were a gust of wind, his dark eyes locked straight ahead.

"Please!" I stumbled alongside him, my dirty sneakers squeaking against the damp stone. "You don’t understand—I can’t go back there! Darius has cameras everywhere! He knows about everything!"

Around us, the quad was coming alive with early-morning students. Heads turned. Whispers erupted like a flock of startled birds.

"Is that him?"

"The guy from the stream video?"

"Look at him... he looks completely unhinged."

"Why is he chasing Professor Balthazar?"

Snickers rippled through the crowd. Phones were pulled out from coat pockets, bright screens angled toward me, recording my public breakdown. The humiliation burned through me, but I didn’t care anymore. The scandal, the video, the stares, none of it mattered compared to the horrifying void opening beneath my feet.

"Drake, please!" I choked out, grabbing at his sleeve.

The moment my fingers brushed the wool of his coat, Drake didn’t flinch or shove me away; he simply adjusted his posture, stepping fluidly out of my reach without breaking his stride. He pushed open the heavy glass doors of the lecture hall building, stepping inside.

I followed him in, my hoarse pleas echoing off the tall, tiled corridors.

During his two-hour art history seminar, I sat in the very back row, trembling, my eyes locked on him. Every time he turned to the blackboard, I stood up, my voice cracking as I called out his name from the dark corner of the room. The students gasping and whispering around me meant nothing. Drake simply raised his voice by half a decibel, continuing his lecture as if my desperate interruptions were nothing more than static on a radio.

When the lecture ended, he walked out. I followed.

At noon, he met with the department faculty in the glass-walled courtyard cafe. I stood outside the glass, my hands pressed against the cold pane, my voice raw and broken as I shouted through the barrier.

"Drake! Please look at me! He said you knew what I was!"

Faculty members looked over their shoulders in disgust, pointing at the crazy, disheveled student pounding on the window. Drake calmly took a sip from his porcelain espresso cup, nodding along to a colleague’s point about tenure reviews, his face an unreadable, icy shield.

He was erasing me right in front of the entire university, he was proving that I meant absolutely nothing to him.

By five in the afternoon, the sun began to dip behind the gothic spires of the campus, casting long, bloody shadows across the concrete. The rain started up again, a light, freezing drizzle that soaked back through my stiff jacket.

My legs were shaking so hard I could barely keep my balance. My throat was completely gone; no sound came out when I opened my mouth, just a dry, agonized rattle. My head spun with blinding light as I trailed his dark silhouette into the faculty parking garage.

The garage was cold, smelling of damp concrete and exhaust fumes. Drake walked toward a sleek, dark sedan parked in the furthest corner, beneath a flickering fluorescent bulb.

I stumbled after him, my vision swimming. My knees finally gave out three feet from his driver’s side door.

I collapsed onto the cold, oil-stained concrete, my shoulder slamming against the driver’s side tire. I slid down, my back resting against the dark metal of his car, my chest heaving in ragged, silent gasps. I couldn’t move or stand. I was completely, utterly spent, bleeding out my dignity on the floor of a parking garage.

Footsteps stopped right beside my head.

The driver’s door didn’t open. The heavy silence of the garage pressed down on us, broken only by the steady drip-drip-drip of water leaking from an overhead pipe.

Slowly, carefully, I forced my chin up.

Drake was standing over me. His leather briefcase hung at his side. The flickering overhead light caught the sharp angles of his cheekbones, throwing his face into deep, terrifying shadow.

He didn’t look annoyed. He didn’t look flustered. He looked down at me the way an immortal god might look at a dying insect squirming on a sidewalk.

"You are remarkably persistent, Lysander," Drake said, his voice dropping into a low, resonant register that vibrated through the concrete beneath me.

I opened my mouth, desperate to beg one last time, but only a dry, wheezing gasp escaped my lips. Tears of pure exhaustion and terror spilled over my lashes, cutting clean tracks through the dirt on my cheeks.

Drake leaned down slightly, stepping into the dim glow of the flickering light bulb.

The air in the garage suddenly grew impossibly cold, so cold my breath bloomed in thick white clouds between us. The shadows around his tall frame seemed to stretch and twist, heavy with an ancient, suffocating power that made my heart stutter in my chest.

When Drake’s eyes locked onto mine, the dark, familiar color was entirely gone.

In their place were two burning, crimson embers, luminous, predatory, and brutally blood-red.

They glowed in the dim light of the garage, reflecting the absolute terror frozen on my face. There was no professor left in those eyes and no human warmth. Just the ancient, unspeakable hunger of a monster looking down at its trapped, defenseless prey.

"Is this what you wanted?" Drake whispered, his voice echoing with a terrifying, layered resonance that vibrated in the back of my skull. "You chased me all day, begging for the truth. You threw away your dignity in front of the entire world... just to reach the monster in the dark."

I froze against the rubber of his tire, my breath catching in my throat, my entire body locked in primal terror.

He crouched down, his red eyes burning mere inches from my face. He extended one long, pale finger, tilting my chin up so I had no choice but to stare directly into his crimson gaze.

"Now that you have my attention, Lysander," Drake purred, a dark, lethal edge cutting through his voice, "tell me... what makes you think I am any safer than the men you ran from?"

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