il mio professore

Chapter 12~~✨

The letter had no return address.

It arrived three days later, dropped in the Dean's private mailbox at the University of Bologna.

Sealed in a plain white envelope. No fingerprints. No camera caught the hand that delivered it.

Inside: a photograph.

One still frame.

One moment.

Livia's face turned upward, her eyes full of something too tender to be mistaken as academic interest. Augustus's hand cupping her jaw. Their shadows kissing the wall behind them like a secret they hadn't realized was being watched.

There was no caption. No demand.

Just enough.

Enough to fracture the surface.

Enough to start the bleeding.

Livia didn't know yet.

She was in the surgical training center, standing over a mock cadaver, her gloves stained crimson with synthetic blood, her mind somewhere else entirely.

Everything was starting to slip.

She was losing her precision — dropping instruments, forgetting her notes, flinching at the snap of latex gloves or the harsh fluorescent hum above the lab.

Even her peers had begun to notice.

"You okay, Acacius?" asked Elise, the girl who always kept her braids tight and her eyes tighter.

Livia blinked, the scalpel trembling slightly in her fingers. "Fine."

"You don't look fine."

"I said I'm fine."

But she wasn't.

And Elise knew better than to push.

Augustus was called into the dean's office just after sunset.

It was a quiet summons — an email, no subject line, just a time and place.

He arrived in a pressed black suit, shoulders squared, jaw tight. The man who walked through that door wasn't the same one who had held Livia in his bed three nights ago. This man was built of armor. Precision. Control.

Dean Karras didn't speak right away.

He simply passed the photograph across the desk.

It slid across the polished mahogany like a blade on ice.

Augustus stared at it. Said nothing. Didn't touch it.

Karras folded his hands. "Do you deny this?"

"No."

A single word. Clean. Final.

"You understand the gravity of this situation?"

Augustus nodded once. "Yes."

Karras leaned back in his chair. He wasn't a cruel man, but he was a political one. Calculated. Surgical in his decisions.

"She's your student."

"She's also legally my wife."

"That doesn't make this easier."

"I'm aware."

There was a long silence.

Then: "There are whispers already," Karras said. "Rumors. A few faculty have raised concerns."

"Let them."

"If this goes public—"

"It won't."

"You don't know that."