Bode's eyes searched Scarlett's face. He looked for the desperate, obsessive girl who used to follow him around the campus, whose cloying perfume he could smell from a hallway away.

He found nothing. Her eyes were clear, cold, and calculating. She looked at him the way a buyer inspects a cheap piece of merchandise.

"Physical contact required," the system urged in her head. "Task progress failing."

The corner of Scarlett's mouth twitched upward in a mocking smirk. She raised her right hand.

Bode's pupils dilated. His jaw clenched. His muscles locked tight, expecting her to strike him just as she had struck Tanya.

Scarlett's hand did not form a fist. Her fingers lightly brushed against the collar of his uniform jacket. She flicked a small, dry leaf off his shoulder.

As she moved, a scent drifted up from her skin. It was a sharp, clean smell of cedar wood mixed with crushed mint.

The scent hit Bode's nose. His lungs seized.

The smell violently dragged him back to a memory he had buried. The bottom of a swimming pool. Water filling his lungs. The fading light. And the girl who had pulled him out, her face a blur but her scent-that sharp, clean, life-saving scent-burned into his memory. It was the scent of the real Scarlett, the one from before.

Bode's rigid control shattered.

He dropped the clipboard. His large hand shot out and clamped around Scarlett's wrist. His grip was bruising.

He spun her around. He shoved her hard against the marble monument behind them.

The crowd of students gasped. They stumbled backward, terrified by the sudden violence from the usually composed Head of Discipline.

Bode leaned his forearm against the marble, trapping her. His chest heaved. He gritted his teeth, his face inches from hers.

"Stop playing these sick psychological games with me," Bode growled. His breath was hot against her skin. "Who are you? What have you done with her?"

Scarlett's back throbbed from the impact against the hard stone. She did not flinch. She did not show a single ounce of pain.

She leaned forward slightly. Her lips almost brushed the shell of his ear.

"You look ugly when you lose control, Bode," she whispered.

Bode jerked back as if he had been burned. He released her wrist. He took two rapid steps backward. His face was pale, his breathing ragged.

"Task complete," the system chimed. "Target emotional fluctuation critical. Affection level decreased."

Bode bent down and snatched his clipboard off the ground. He did not look at her again.

"Ten credits deducted," he said, his voice tight. He turned around and walked away fast. It looked like a retreat.

Scarlett adjusted the collar of her suit. She ignored the staring crowd and walked straight toward the academic building.

She pushed open the heavy wooden door of Class Z. The loud chatter inside the room died instantly.

Dwayne Boggs, a massive guy who played linebacker for the school team, stood up from his desk in the back row. He was Tanya's current obsession.

Dwayne stepped into the narrow aisle. He crossed his thick arms, blocking Scarlett's path to her seat.

"You think you can touch Tanya and get away with it?" Dwayne sneered. "I'm going to make your life in this class a living hell."

Scarlett stopped. She looked down at Dwayne's desk. A heavy, custom-made iridium fountain pen lay on top of his notebook.

Her hand moved in a blur. She grabbed the pen and ripped the cap off.

Before Dwayne could blink, Scarlett drove the pen downward.

The sharp iridium nib pierced the paper right between Dwayne's resting fingers. It buried itself deep into the solid wood of the desk with a loud thunk.

The metal barrel vibrated. The nib was less than a millimeter from Dwayne's skin.

Dwayne's face drained of all color. His knees gave out. He collapsed backward into his chair, his chest heaving with panic.

Scarlett leaned over the desk. She pulled a tissue from her pocket and wiped her fingers.

"Move," she said.

The entire class sucked in a collective breath. Scarlett walked past Dwayne's trembling body and sat down in the empty seat by the window.

The shrill bell rang. Professor Thaddeus Wainwright marched into the lecture hall.

He stood at the podium and scanned the room. His eyes stopped on Scarlett for a fraction of a second. His upper lip curled in obvious disgust.

He turned and switched on the projector. A massive spreadsheet appeared on the screen. It detailed the recent cross-border acquisition data for the Vance Consortium.

"Pop quiz," Wainwright announced. "You have forty minutes to complete a full risk assessment report on this merger. Begin."

Groans echoed through the room. This was a Harvard Business School level case study. For high school students, it was a slaughter.

Students frantically flipped open their textbooks. They started plugging numbers into basic financial models, sweating under the pressure.

Scarlett did not move. She leaned back in her chair. Her eyes scanned the dense rows of numbers on the glowing screen.

In her past life, she had been groomed to take over the Sinclair empire. For three years, locked in her own mind, she had done nothing but analyze, deconstruct, and rebuild every business case she had ever studied. This was not a test; it was a reflex. Her brain processed the data like a supercomputer.

Five minutes passed. Scarlett pulled a sheet of loose-leaf paper from her binder. She reached over, pulled the fountain pen out of Dwayne's desk, and began to write.

Wainwright paced the aisles. He walked toward the back of the room, heading straight for Scarlett. He wanted to catch her cheating or staring at a blank page.

He stopped beside her desk. He looked down at her paper.

The mocking smirk vanished from Wainwright's face.

Scarlett was not using the standard P/E ratio models. She was writing out a complex formula that bypassed the surface numbers entirely. She was digging straight into the target company's hidden offshore debt.

Wainwright pushed his reading glasses up his nose. He leaned closer. His breathing grew shallow and fast.

Scarlett's pen did not stop. She wrote down a highly obscure SEC antitrust exemption clause.

Wainwright's brain raced. He tried to find a flaw in her logic. He calculated the numbers in his head.

She was right. She was perfectly, flawlessly right.

Twenty minutes into the test, Scarlett drew a sharp period at the end of the page.

She stood up. The chair scraped loudly against the floor. Every student turned to look at her.

She held the paper out to Wainwright.

"If the Vance family signs this deal under the current terms," Scarlett said, her voice carrying through the silent room, "the Department of Justice will hit them with an antitrust investigation in exactly three weeks."

Wainwright's hands shook as he took the paper. He held it like it was a live bomb.

He didn't say a word to her. He didn't dismiss the class. He turned around, clutched the paper to his chest, and sprinted out of the lecture hall.

Wainwright ran down the marble corridor of the administration wing. He ignored the other professors calling his name.

He knew exactly what this report meant. It was enough to cause a minor earthquake on Wall Street.

He burst into his private office and slammed the door shut. He locked the deadbolt.

He grabbed the phone on his desk and dialed the direct internal line to the Student Council President.

The line clicked open.

"Speak," Dontae Vance's voice came through the speaker. It was deep, cold, and heavy with authority.

"Mr. Vance," Wainwright stammered, wiping sweat from his forehead. "Someone... someone found a fatal flaw in your family's acquisition plan."

Dontae let out a low, dark chuckle. "Which rival firm is trying to scare us now, Professor?"

"It's not a firm," Wainwright said. He read the final two lines of the deductive reasoning out loud.

The line went dead silent.

Thirty seconds passed. The silence felt suffocating.

"Bring the person who wrote that to my office," Dontae's voice dropped to a dangerous, lethal whisper. "Now."

Wainwright pushed open the heavy double mahogany doors of the Student Council President's office. He was out of breath.

Dontae Vance sat behind a massive leather desk. His dark eyes were locked onto the scrolling stock data on his Bloomberg terminal.

Wainwright walked forward and placed the handwritten loose-leaf paper carefully on the desk.

Dontae shifted his gaze. His eyes swept over the sharp, aggressive handwriting. He read the formulas.

His jaw tightened. The muscles in his neck corded. His fingers gripped the edge of the desk so hard his knuckles turned stark white.

Dontae snapped his head up. "Which Wall Street analyst gave you this?"

Wainwright swallowed hard. A bead of sweat rolled down his neck. "It wasn't an analyst, sir. It was... Scarlett Sinclair."

Dontae froze. He stared at Wainwright. His eyes darkened with sudden, violent anger. He thought the professor was playing a very stupid joke on him.

Helen Mercer, the council assistant standing by the wall, quickly tapped her tablet. She pulled up the security footage from Class Z. She mirrored it to the large screen on the wall.

The video showed Scarlett sitting at her desk. Her face was completely blank. Her hand moved rapidly across the paper, writing the exact formulas Dontae was holding.

Dontae stared at the screen. He watched the woman he had always considered a pathetic, brainless stalker tear apart his family's billion-dollar deal with a fountain pen.

His worldview cracked.

"Get out," Dontae said to Wainwright. He didn't look away from the screen.

Down in the academy's Michelin-star cafeteria, Scarlett carried her tray to a quiet corner table by the floor-to-ceiling windows.

She sat down. She picked up her silver knife and fork and cleanly sliced into her beef Wellington.

The chair across from her was pulled out with a loud scrape.

Harlow Montoya dropped into the seat. He was the heir to the Montoya Consortium, known for his endless string of scandals.

A heavy wave of expensive cologne hit Scarlett's nose. Beneath it was the sickeningly sweet smell of cheap women's perfume.

Harlow leaned his elbows on the table. He gave her a lazy, mocking smile.

"Playing hard to get today, Scarlett?" Harlow drawled. "It's a new look. But I haven't forgotten you standing in the rain for three hours just to hand me an umbrella."

The students at the surrounding tables stopped eating. They watched, waiting for Scarlett to beg for his attention.

Scarlett set her knife and fork down. She picked up a white napkin and dabbed the corner of her mouth.

She looked up. Her eyes swept over Harlow like he was a piece of rotting garbage on the sidewalk.

"There is a smudge of cheap red lipstick on your collar," Scarlett said, her voice devoid of any inflection. "And the dark circles under your eyes suggest severe sleep deprivation. Combined with your pallor and slight hand tremors, I'd say your kidneys are failing."

Harlow's smirk vanished. A heavy, suffocating pressure settled over the table.

Scarlett leaned forward slightly. "You are filthy."

She looked straight into his eyes. "Before you sit at my table again, I suggest you go through a chemical decontamination chamber."

Harlow's face turned dark red. He slammed his hands on the table and stood up violently. His knee hit the table leg. His water glass tipped over, spilling ice water all over his expensive pants.

His pride was bleeding out on the floor. He pointed a shaking finger at her face, opening his mouth to scream at her.

Scarlett didn't even look at him. She picked up her knife and fork and cut another piece of steak. She treated him like empty air.

Harlow's fists clenched. He looked around at the staring crowd. He turned and stormed out of the cafeteria, his wet pants clinging to his legs.

"Cognitive restructuring detected in surrounding male subjects," the system pinged weakly in her head.