Bedded by the Headmaster

Ch13: Summoned

Susie

The side of Susie's palm was stained with dark blue ink, her quill tip blotting the parchment as she hastily re-dipped it.

She didn't care about the stains. She was too immersed in her analysis of the romantic drama Professor Marmala had been teaching them. Susie took to Literature like a duck to water, and she wrote frantically, her hand aching as she tried to put into words the ideas bursting from her mind.

Julianna initially doubts the integrity of Matthew, she wrote, and the unfolding events lead to a crisis that requires personal growth and change for their love to endure.

The quill scratched the page, a dance between passion and precision.

The play delves into themes of trust, self-worth, and the transformative nature of l—

She paused, her skin prickling with a strange, unsettling tingle as the words sunk into her like talons. A feeling of dread began to build inside her as she reread what she'd written. The light-hearted play, which had always brought her comfort, suddenly caused her stomach to turn uncomfortably. The tip of her quill hovered, poised to attack as she considered crossing out the sentence.

"Fifteen minutes," Professor Marmala called, giving the class an encouraging smile. "Do your best to complete your essays. At ten o'clock, we will be moving on to a discussion of Magor's Fairy Tales."

Susie chewed the end of her quill as she refocused on her essay, her momentary discomfort forgotten as she tried to recapture her train of thought.

The transformative nature of...?

She exhaled through her nose.

Love, she finished, then stopped to stare at the word, her brow furrowed as she the words bled into the page. Her quill tip rested on the end of the sentence, the full stop growing larger by the second as fat beads of ink slid down.

She was stuck on how to proceed.

What came after love?

Disappointment?

Betrayal?

Both, she thought, but she was no longer thinking of the comedy, which had turned out alright in the end, a happily ever after without a loose end in sight.

Love was a funny thing, which Susie had limited experience with, and had first been introduced to by her rule-abiding parents. They'd been eager to send her to Volmasque Academy when she turned eighteen. Unlike some of the other shifter parents, Susie's parents had made no attempt to hide her away at her grandparents' farm or a great aunt's country dwelling like some of the other shifter parents had with their children. No, her parents had considered the academy a natural progression in Susie's life, and a part of stepping into adulthood. They'd never actually attended Volmasque themselves since the academy had only been formed after Henrikk came into power. Still, they were convinced beyond a doubt that it was a good idea.

Her grandmother, were she still alive, would never have let her attend the academy. Over my dead body, she'd once yelled over the dining table at her son, Susie's father. For a time, it seemed like her parents might actually listen. But after her grandmother passed away, there was no one left to shield Susie from her fate, no one willing to fight when pretending all was well was so much simpler.

Assimilation was a trait that Susie's parents had in spades, and they were confident she would inherit that quality from them in due time. Susie wasn't so sure.

"You must attend the academy!" her mother had cried aghast every evening at the dinner table. "Those are the rules."

"And it's the law," her father would add.