To be called into Professor DeVille's office was a mixed blessing.

Sophia Miller tried to appreciate the way his pressed white shirt tugged against the muscles of his arms. In particular, she noticed how prominent his biceps were thanks to the way he balanced his elbows on his desktop. Her eyes followed up his forearms and then lingered upon his long fingers. He interlaced them together, placing them beneath his elegant nose as he leaned in to face her. She then dared to glance up at his dark, rusty red eyes. They glinted beneath the shadow of his perfectly manicured brow. His gaze, hot with intensity, left her shivering.

Or perhaps she was trembling with fear and anticipation over the words lingering upon his guarded lips. It was hard to tell with a man like Professor DeVille.

"Ms. Miller, we need to talk about your grades."

Sophia sat on the edge of a knife, uncertain which direction she should fall. In his voice, she heard the intoxicating gruffness that resonated deep inside his thick chest. Yet it also dripped with disappointment and frustration. If she couldn't settle on where to focus her attention, she worried she might fall directly on the blade, splitting herself in two.

"Y-yes, professor. I know I have been falling behind."

Falling behind was putting it lightly. Dr. Archer DeVille was the shining jewel in the opulent crown of Grimaldi University's political science department. The university was renowned for its success in turning out graduates that became powerful politicians and relentless lawyers; and everyone knew it was DeVille who could make or break students seeking that career path. The few courses he taught were the hardest Grimaldi's political science program offered.

His course on Advanced Political Theory that Sophia was taking was no exception.

"You've failed every quiz to date and your paper on the electoral college was mediocre at best."

He unlaced his fingers and straightened his back, granting her a view of his full lips. She watched the way each meticulous word altered the shape of the dark facial hair encircling his mouth and tracing his jawline.

Sophia's own lips pinched at his words, and her fingers curled around the hem of her skirt, creating tight fists atop her lap. Bowing her head away from the prestigious professor, she considered her options.

I over-packed my course load. This isn't because I'm a failure. I just took on too much at once in hopes of a spring graduation. I just need to accept I'm not finishing in four years. I'm not a failure. I'm not.

She felt tears welling in her eyes and she cursed beneath her breath. She knew a man like DeVille, with all his confidence and swagger, would see her tears as weakness. Emotions weren't a gift in her field, even though it was her empathy that drove her towards political science. The structures put in place to elevate elitists like DeVille, crushed the people she knew and loved. She hadn't clawed her way towards a full scholarship at Grimaldi's for nothing. She simply could not allow herself to be cast into DeVille's ever growing graveyard of formerly ambitious students.

"Ms. Miller, I can sense the panic and hostility you are feeling right now, and I want you to know it is unwarranted. Despite my reputation, I am not out to destroy students' careers. I called you to my office because if you keep up this trajectory you will fail my class. However, we haven't reached midterms yet. You can still recover from your rough start this semester."

Sophia's breath caught, and she whipped her head up to catch the way DeVille shifted in his seat. He leaned his weight upon one armrest, with his hip pressed against the opposing one. His shirt pulled, the buttons barely able to contain the muscular chest within. She swallowed down a thick knot in her throat, which had grown tight thanks to his unexpected kindness and delectable virility.

So entrapped in his smoldering gaze and warm appraisal that the surrounding room darkened, diminishing her periphery until she could only see the handsome man before her.

"Thank you, professor," she mumbled, her eyes unable to leave his own, which seemed to flicker with flames despite the room lacking a light source to cause such a reflection.

"You are a scholarship student," he replied in an even, alluring tone. "You clearly have talent and drive."

He held his eyes upon Sophia, his face unmoving save for the graceful contortions of his luscious lips as they spoke each word with the purr of an approaching tiger. The rest of his body, though, shifted and shuffled just outside of Sophia's vision. Everything tunneled around her, drawing her in to his seductive gaze. Even the whites of his eyes turned black, so they looked like obsidian licked with fire.

"Yes."

It was the only word she could manage, and she wasn't even sure she had done that. Professor DeVille didn't seem to care, though. Instead, his eyes burned with pleasure.

"I know you want to succeed. I know you need to succeed. You have big dreams, don't you, Sophia Miller? You want to be a lawyer for non-profits; an advocate for the less fortunate; a warrior against an unjust system. How noble of you."

She didn't recall ever telling him about her career aspirations. Had he looked into her application and read her essay? Was she so special that he took the time to review her history?

"You are very special, Sophia."

It felt like he was reading her mind, but she couldn't form any concerns, not while lost in the deep abyss of his eyes. They engulfed her and she felt herself slipping beneath the dark waters.

I must survive, she thought. It was the only thing to ring out clear and certain within the fog of her mind.

"It will take sacrifice to recover from these grades, my dear Sophia. But you aren't afraid of sacrifice, are you? What is the worth of your soul, after all, when compared to those you could save as a prosperous lawyer for society's forgotten and abused?"

"My soul?"

Did she say the words or think them? Either way, she somehow knew he heard her.

"I can give you your dreams, Sophia. I can put you on a path that you shall never stumble from. All you need to do is give me your soul in return."

"My...my soul?"

The haze surrounding her flickered and burned. Her breath grew short as a thick heat filled the air.

"Just give me your hand. You can promise me your soul with a single drop of your blood. Say the words 'My soul I give you for prosperity, you promise me.' That's all that's needed for you to be the savior your heart so desires."

My hand?

Sophia tried to find her palm, but she couldn't feel her arms or anything other than the pounding heart in her disembodied chest. Her breath quickened and panic widened her gaze.

She could not anchor herself in her chair or any plane of reality. She felt caught in a dream where space and time existed as a distant and frivolous notion. The only thing with substance was the figure of Archer DeVille, glowing red in the light of flashes and flames. His features were no longer handsome, but sharp and menacing. His dark hair fluttered without wind, the strands parting to make way for two pitch black horns defined by a purple sheen.

"Give me your hand."

He reached out a palm with skin cracked and glowing like cooling magma. In the other hand, he wielded a vicious blade carved from glassy obsidian and adorned with a hilt of fine leather.

"No."

Despite the fog, flames, and fervent beat of her heart, her declination rang clear and true in her throat.

Her word echoed in the endless chamber, shattering the darkness so that it fell away like sand. Air pummeled her lungs, and she gasped at the sudden pressure in her chest. The force of the blow left her blinking and flailing. After a moment of composure, her vision adjusted, and she focused in on the dusty tiling of Professor DeVille's office floor.

"Ms. Miller, are you okay?"

She took in heaving breaths, a painful process considering how her heart sat somewhere in her throat. Her shaking hands gripped the armrests of her chair while her knees squeezed together.

"What?" She lifted her head, her tongue licking her chapped lips. "What the actual fuck was that?"

The handsome professor watched her with wide, concerned eyes—eyes that had returned to their usual burnt brown color.

"I think perhaps you had a seizure or some sort of stress induced psychosis. I don't know, I'm a political science teacher, not a medical doctor. We were talking about how there's still time to recover your grades and then you slipped away for a moment."

His words felt safe and reasonable to her ears, and Sophia's breathing settled to a panicked pace instead of desperate gulps. She groaned, her skull thrumming with pain. Her hand reached up to wipe the sweat from her brow.

"I've never had..." She shook her head, the words tripping over her tongue. She couldn't finish her thought as her voice trailed into embarrassment. Sophia looked away and her fingers touched her quaking lips. After a few more breaths, she glanced back at him and found his hands busying themselves with a dagger.

"What the hell are you doing with that?" She stood up, pushing her chair back and knocking it into a bookcase behind her. "You... you had that and told me to... to give you my blood."

"Slow down, Ms. Miller," he said, rising from his own chair. "This is just a letter opener. I don't even think it could draw blood even if I wanted to. I just fiddle with it when I get nervous. Maybe we should get you to the student health center..."

"I'm not crazy!"

"You are under a lot of stress."

"Not that much stress."

Sophia stood her ground, her hands clenched into fists and her lips pinched in a determined pucker. For a moment, the two stood with his desk providing a barricade between them. Sophia didn't know exactly what happened, but she knew hallucinations like that didn't appear out of the blue.

She stared at the older man, waiting to see if he had a new excuse to explain her very vivid vision of some sort of hellscape.

"Ms. Miller, take it easy."

He placed the letter opener on his desk and held his hands palm-side down in front of him before stepping out from behind his desk. Sophia's eyes darted towards the door of his small office and noted the obstacle her chair created between her and her escape.

"I did not mean to scare you with the truth of your grades. My goal was to figure out a plan together to ensure your passing of my class."

He took slow, methodical steps forward while Sophia pressed into the bookcase lining his back wall.

"Don't come any closer."

Her words were low, and her breath labored. Despite her conviction, something about his tall stature, wide frame, and musky smell intoxicated her. She urged herself to run, but her body slackened in his presence so that when he placed one of his large hands beside her head, she had become pliable to his advances.

"You're going to forget about this whole meeting," he said in a deep timbre, as his free hand brushed over her eyes before dragging his fingertips over her loose lips. "You are going to go back to your dorm and study for the midterms because the only thing that happened at this meeting was our agreement that you need to spend more time concentrating on class."

His hand dropped and Sophia's brows knitted together as she tumbled his words inside of her head.

"You think you're a Jedi now?" She asked with a snarl. "Just because you are handsome doesn't mean you can just mind trick me into forgetting this obvious violation of student/teacher relations. I will talk to the dean about this."

"What?" He drew back and, for the first time, Sophia thought she saw sincerity within the confusion contorting his typically impassive face.

"I'm also going to go to health services and see if you drugged me somehow!" She glanced around the office, trying to figure out what could have possibly been used to cause a hallucination like that.

"I, uh, this isn't..."

"Enough, professor." She knocked the chair out of her way and grabbed her bag from the floor without ever turning her back on him. "It's people like you that provoked me into chasing this career in the first place. So expect that I will fight this with the same determination I plan to use for my clients."

She whipped the door open, making sure the handle cracked against the wall before she stormed out with a huff.