Please Harder, Professor

Chapter 107

Sophie’s POV

I can't stop digging.

The folder on my laptop grows thicker with each passing day—screenshots, saved articles, court documents pulled from public records that should have been harder to find.

Every spare moment becomes an opportunity to search, to cross-reference, to piece together the fragments of a life Adrian has worked so hard to bury.

He is gone again, always returning home with exhaustion carved into his features and nothing to show for his absence.

Bellamy shadows me with increasing concern. I feel his eyes on me when I'm hunched over my laptop, watching for tells I'm trying not to give.

He notices things—the way I close my browser the moment he enters the room, the distracted look in my eyes when he asks if I need anything, the tension in my shoulders that wasn't there a week ago.

"Working on that essay again?" He leans against the doorframe, coffee in hand, expression carefully neutral.

"Always more to do."

"Must be some essay. You've been at it for days."

I force a smile. "Post-colonial theory is complicated."

He doesn't push. Maybe he doesn't want to know what I'm actually doing. Maybe he suspects and has decided it's not his place to interfere. Or maybe, and this thought curls unpleasantly in my stomach, he knows exactly what I'll find and is waiting to see how I handle it.

Either way, he leaves me alone, and I keep digging.

The court documents come first. Cases that were mysteriously dropped, defendants who walked free despite mountains of evidence, prosecutors who suddenly lost interest in pursuing charges.

The warehouse district investigation I found earlier was just the tip of something much larger—a network of protection and corruption that stretched across years.

Then I find the second photograph.

This one is clearer than the first, taken closer, the faces sharply visible. Adrian, older now—late twenties, I'd guess—standing with Bellamy outside what looks like a shipping container. Both men are hard-faced, dangerous, their postures radiating the kind of threat that doesn't need words.

I barely recognize them.

The Adrian in this photograph has none of the polished professor's veneer. His eyes are cold, calculating, empty of the warmth I've seen when he looks at me.

And Bellamy—the man who brings me ice cream and talks about his son with that rare softness in his voice—looks like someone who could break bones without losing sleep.

These are not the men they pretend to be now. I save the photograph, keep searching. The obituary surfaces on day three.

Marcus Lewis, aged sixty-seven, passed away eight years ago. Cause of death listed as heart attack. Survived by his wife Eleanor, his son Adrian, and numerous extended family members. A private service was held.

The comments section is disabled.

But related articles paint a different picture. References to "ongoing investigations" that were closed shortly after Marcus's death. Speculation about timing that seemed too convenient. A criminal empire that quietly dissolved when its patriarch stopped breathing.

Heart attack. How convenient.

Day four brings the witness list.

A case that never went to trial—a man named Enzo Ferrante, charged with trafficking. Human trafficking, the documents specify, though the details have been heavily redacted. The case was dismissed when key witnesses refused to testify.

Adrian's name is on that list. He was supposed to testify—he didn't. The case collapsed, everyone walked free.

I stare at the screen until my eyes burn.

The picture forms slowly, horrifyingly. Adrian didn't just brush against darkness after Lolita left him. He was inside it. Part of it. Complicit in things I can't even fully comprehend.

And Bellamy was there too—the debt between them suddenly making terrible sense.

What does one man owe another who helped him escape a world like that? I needed to find out.

When Adrian comes home that evening, I'm waiting in the living room.

The laptop is open on the coffee table. The photograph displayed—him and Bellamy, young and dangerous, strangers wearing the faces of men I thought I knew.

Adrian stops in the doorway. His eyes find the screen, and I watch his expression shutter closed.

"Where did you get that?"

No greeting, no explanation—just cold, clipped demand.

"Does it matter?" I stand, arms crossed, refusing to be intimidated. "It's real, isn't it? That's you. That's Bellamy. That's…" I gesture at the screen, at the shipping container, at everything the image implies. "What the hell is this, Adrian?"

He moves into the room slowly, setting down his briefcase with deliberate care. When he turns back to me, his face is blank. Unreadable. A mask I've never seen him wear with me before.

"You've been digging into my past."

"You wouldn't tell me anything. What choice did I have?"

"You could have trusted me."

"Trusted you?" The laugh that escapes is bitter, ugly. "You've been lying to me since we met. Hiding things, deflecting questions, treating me like I'm too fragile to handle the truth. I'm carrying your child, Adrian. I think I've earned the right to know who you actually are."

A muscle ticks in his jaw. "Who told you where to look?"

"That's your question? Not 'let me explain' or 'it's not what it looks like'—your first concern is who gave me information?"

"Sophie."

"Who were you?" I step closer, jabbing my finger at the screen. "That man in the photograph—that's not the professor I met. That's not the man who lectures about literature and wears expensive suits and quotes poetry in bed. Who the hell is that?"

The silence stretches between us, thick and suffocating.

Adrian's gaze drops to the photograph. Something flickers across his face—pain, maybe, or shame—before the mask slides back into place.

"Yes." The word comes out flat, exhausted. "I was involved. My father's world. After Lolita left, I... fell into it. Did things I'm not proud of, things I can never undo."

"What things?"

"Does it matter?"

"It matters to me."

He runs a hand through his hair, the first crack in his composure. "I got out, Sophie. That's what matters. I saw what I was becoming, and I clawed my way free. Bellamy helped me. We both left. We both rebuilt."

"And the witness list?" I pull up the document, turning the screen toward him. "Enzo Ferrante. Trafficking charges. You were supposed to testify."

Adrian's jaw tightens.

"But you didn't. The case was dismissed. He walked free."

"You don't understand."

"Then help me understand!" My voice cracks, frustration and fear bleeding through. "Stop feeding me fragments. Stop protecting me from truths you think I can't handle. I'm not a child, Adrian. I'm the mother of your baby. I deserve to know what kind of man I've chosen."

For just a moment I see him waver. The mask slips, revealing something raw underneath—pain, regret, the weight of a past that never stops pressing down.

Then the wall goes back up.

"Some doors should stay closed." His voice is quiet now, controlled. "What I did, who I was—knowing the details won't help you. It will only hurt you. I'm protecting you by not—"

"I don't need your protection. I need your honesty."

"They're the same thing."

"No." I shake my head, tears burning behind my eyes. "They're not. And the fact that you can't see the difference... that's the problem, Adrian. That's always been the problem."

He doesn't respond.

The silence stretches between us—a chasm neither of us knows how to cross. I want to reach for him, want to bridge the gap with touch the way we always have.

But something has broken tonight. Some fragile thread of trust that was already frayed, now snapped entirely.

"I'm tired." I close the laptop, unable to look at that photograph anymore. "I'm going to bed."

Adrian doesn't move to stop me.

At the doorway, I pause. "Whatever you're hiding, whatever you think is too dark for me to know, I'll find out eventually. You can tell me yourself, or I can keep digging. Your choice."

I leave him standing in the living room, alone with the ghosts of his past.

The chasm between us grows wider with every step.