The Boy Who Bet On her

POV: Wren

The corrections piece had twenty-six minutes left before anyone showed up to ruin it.

That was the only math that mattered at 7:04 in the morning.

I was three paragraphs from done when the door opened.

Wrong doors got pulled on this floor all the time, someone looking for the registrar or the printing room, they'd see the frosted glass and leave. I had learned to wait for the click of it closing again before I looked up.

The click didn't come.

Footsteps instead.

I looked up.

He was standing just past the doorway holding a folder under one arm.

He was looking directly at me.

"Wren Aldae," he said.

Both names. My coffee was halfway to my mouth. I put it back on the desk without drinking it.

At Harlow I was W. Aldae on bylines and Wren to four people. My last name was not connected to any system.

So the fact that he stood there and said both parts was crazy.

"Wrong office," I said.

He almost smiled. "No it isn't."

He walked in the rest of the way and pulled out the chair across from my desk, and he sat down and put the folder on the table between.

"I read your cafeteria contract piece," he said. "October. And the March corrections piece. Everything in between."

I looked at the folder. Then at him. "That's a list, not an introduction."

"I know." He said.

"Callum Voss," I said.

He nodded like that was expected.

"I know who you are," I said.

"Then you know I don't usually do things without a reason."

"I know what public record says about you. That's different."

He shifted forward slightly. "Then let me give you something that isn't public record."

He opened the folder. Turned it toward me.

What the hell.

It was my article. Not a recent one. The one from Crestfield, three years ago, my full name on the byline, my words, the piece I had spent four hours scrubbing from every searchable record connected to my name before orientation week.

It was sitting on the desk in front of me.

I pressed both hands flat on the desk and kept them there.

"Where did you get that," I said.

"Does it matter right now?"

"Yes."

"Through someone who kept a copy," he said. "Someone who knew what happened to it."

"Who."

"I'll tell you after you hear the rest."

I stood up and walked to the window."Someone followed you here," I said.

A pause behind me. Just under a second too long.

"What makes you say that," he said.

"Grey sedan at the entrance. Engine still running." I turned around. "Is that yours or theirs?"

Something closed behind his eyes. "Theirs."

"Whose theirs."

He looked at the folder instead of at me.

"Callum." I said his name flat. "Whose car."

"My father's," he said quietly.

His father. Edmund Voss. The name on the science building, attached to the endowment figures, the man who co-signed this university's financial future from a distance.

"You brought your father's people to my office," I said.

"They followed me. There's a difference."

"Not from where I'm standing there isn't."

He put both arms on the desk and leaned forward and I stayed exactly where I was.

"Your article was buried on purpose," he said. "By someone with money. That someone is connected to this campus. I came to you because you already got close enough to see it once and they made sure you couldn't prove it." He paused. "I need your help. And I can give you something worth having in return."

Outside, the grey sedan hadn't moved.

"Say what do you actually want," I said.

"A fake girlfriend," he said. "Three months."

My phone lit up on the desk between us. Unknown number. One text.

We know he's in there. Clock started the second he sat down.