Office Hours

The late afternoon sun slanted through the tall, arched windows of Castlethorne Atrium, painting long golden bars across the heavy oak tables of Seminar Room 313. It was week three of the semester, and Reina Chalverra slid into her usual seat near the front, dropping her leather satchel beside her chair with a soft thud. At twenty-two, she was still getting used to the weight of being a first-semester MA student in Criminology at one of the country’s most elite private universities. The kind of place where legacies and trust funds outnumbered people like her—daughter of Chinese immigrants who had sacrificed everything so she could sit in rooms like this.

Her vibrant purple hair was twisted into a high, messy bun, with one thick braid escaping to curl over her shoulder. Reflective aviator sunglasses sat perched on top of her head like a crown. She wore a fitted black graphic tee under an oversized blazer, paired with dark jeans and scuffed boots—professional enough for grad school, rebellious enough to feel like herself.

Twelve students filled the small seminar. Most kept their heads down, laptops open, fingers hovering nervously over keyboards. Reina simply leaned back, pen tapping a steady rhythm against her notebook. Forensic Psychology with Professor Finn Kane had been explosive since day one. She intended to make it her favourite.

The door opened at precisely 3:00 p.m.

Conversations died instantly.

Professor Finn Kane strode in, carrying nothing but a slim leather portfolio. At forty, he moved with the quiet authority of a man who had long ago stopped needing to prove anything. Tall and broad-shouldered, he wore a charcoal dress shirt with the sleeves rolled once, exposing strong forearms corded with lean muscle. His silver-white hair fell in messy waves, as though he’d run his fingers through it too many times. Black-rimmed glasses framed sharp green eyes that missed nothing. A faint shadow of stubble darkened his jaw, giving him a perpetually intense, almost predatory edge.

He terrified most students. Reina had heard the stories—how he could dismantle an argument in three sentences and leave the presenter in tears. She refused to be one of them, not because she was better, but because she didn’t want to be his example or a spot of blood on the wall in the classroom.

Kane set the portfolio down and scanned the room once, his gaze lingering a fraction longer on her than the others. Then he began without preamble.

“Criminal profiling is not magic. It is pattern recognition sharpened by experience. But like every tool in forensic psychology, it is vulnerable to cognitive biases—confirmation bias, anchoring, the overconfidence effect.” His voice was low, cultured, and cutting. “Today we examine whether those biases render profiling inadmissible in court or merely imperfect.”

For the first twenty minutes, Kane guided the discussion with surgical precision. He cited studies, real cases, and the occasional brutal anecdote from his consulting work with law enforcement. Most students nodded along, afraid to interrupt. But Kane wasn’t satisfied with silence.

“Ms. Chalverra,” he said suddenly, even though her hand wasn’t raised, she assumed that if she kept to herself, eyes down and in her books, she would be left alone. “Thoughts on the role of base-rate neglect in profiler overconfidence?”

Reina’s pen stilled. She met his eyes. “It leads to exactly the kind of confirmation bias you’re downplaying, Professor.”

She didn’t mean to respond like that. It slipped out, unfiltered, as if her thoughts had bypassed permission altogether. Reina had a habit of doing that—thinking too quickly, speaking just a second too soon.

Her face didn’t help.

It rarely held a proper poker face; whatever crossed her mind had a way of surfacing in the smallest shifts—her gaze sharpening, her lips tightening just enough to betray disagreement. She showed on the outside what she was working through on the inside, an honesty she never quite learned to conceal.

Which made the contrast almost jarring.

Dressed in sharp lines and deliberate choices—dark fabrics that caught the light, a silhouette that suggested confidence bordering on defiance—she looked like someone untouchable. Someone composed. Someone who knew exactly how to control a room.

But that control didn’t extend to her expressions.

Reina didn’t dress to be seen, not really. She dressed because she refused to shrink into something more acceptable, because her growing closet was the one place she allowed herself complete authorship. It wasn’t about attention or sociability—if anything, she avoided both. Clothes were structure, a curated form of control in a life where her thoughts moved faster than her restraint.

And beneath it, there was substance most people missed. She was a walking contradiction to herself even.

She wasn’t speaking to challenge him. She wasn’t performing. The flaw in his reasoning had simply… presented itself, and she couldn’t ignore it. Reina didn’t tolerate intellectual laziness, even when it would’ve been easier to stay quiet.

Her fingers tightened slightly around her pen, as if catching up to what she’d already said.

Too late now.

He gave the faintest tilt of his head, as if noting her defiance, then continued calling on her twice more—once on anchoring bias, once on the limitations of actuarial tools—each time pulling her into the centre of the conversation whether she wanted it or not. She was both annoyed and exhilarated. This had become their dynamic.

When he finally claimed that a skilled profiler could reliably overcome many of the field’s common biases, something in Reina stilled—and then tightened.

She hadn’t been called on. He hadn’t opened the floor again. The room remained quiet, expectant, obedient.

Reina wasn’t.

“Professor Kane,” she said, her voice cutting cleanly through the silence, steady despite the way the thought had already outrun her restraint, “that’s an oversimplification.”

A pause, it was brief, but deliberate.

“The Daubert standard would exclude most profile evidence in federal court. The error rates documented in the FBI’s own internal reviews are simply too high.” Her fingers shifted slightly against her pen. “And meta-analyses show accuracy that’s barely better than chance in a lot of categories.”

The room went still.

Kane turned toward her fully. Those green eyes sharpened behind his glasses. For a moment he simply studied her, as if recalibrating.

“Elaborate, Ms. Chalverra.”

Reina didn’t hesitate. She sat up straighter, braid sliding over her shoulder.

“In the Cottingham case, profilers insisted the offender was a white male in his thirties with a menial job. The actual perpetrator was a Black male executive. Multiple studies, including those published in Law and Human Behaviour, demonstrate hit rates hovering between forty and sixty percent at best. The Daubert ruling requires scientific reliability. Most profiling fails that test.”

Kane leaned against the edge of his desk, arms crossed. A faint, dangerous smile touched his lips.

“Interesting. You cite the FBI’s own cautionary reports. Yet you ignore the successes. The Behavioural Analysis Unit has assisted in thousands of investigations. The Green River Killer. The Unabomber. Profiling provided critical direction when traditional methods stalled.”

Reina countered without pause. “Direction, yes. But direction isn’t evidence. When profilers get it right, we remember the wins. When they get it wrong, innocent people rot in cells or killers walk free. That’s not science. That’s gambling with confirmation bias.”

Back and forth they went—four, five, six rapid exchanges. Kane pressed her on methodology and real-world constraints. Reina fired back with statistics, case law, and cold logic. The rest of the class sat riveted, heads swivelling between them like spectators at a high-stakes tennis match. Sparks flew in the space between their words. Intellectual combat, raw and electric.

In the heat of one exchange, Reina gestured sharply. Her pen slipped from her fingers and clattered to the floor. Without thinking, she leaned down to retrieve it, her braid swinging forward as she bent between the desks. For a split second, Finn’s gaze dropped, following the line of her back and the way her jeans pulled tight. He caught himself almost immediately, jaw tightening. Brilliant. And far too distracting. He shook his head once, sharply, and refocused on her face as she straightened.

Finally, Kane straightened, voice smooth but laced with steel.

“Well argued, Ms. Chalverra.” He paused, letting the compliment settle. Then: “But ultimately wrong.”

Reina’s eyes flashed. She felt heat rise in her cheeks—not embarrassment, but pure, unfiltered challenge.

“I’m not wrong,” she said, chin lifting. “You’re just stubborn.”

A collective gasp rippled through the room. No one spoke to Professor Kane like that. Ever.

For a heartbeat, silence reigned.

Then Kane smiled—a slow, rare curve of his mouth that didn’t reach his eyes but somehow made them burn brighter. It was the smile of a man who had just found something far more interesting than he expected.

“See me after class, Ms. Chalverra.”

The words landed like a verdict.

The remaining twenty minutes crawled. When class finally ended, students packed up quickly, shooting Reina glances that ranged from pity to awe. As they filtered out, low murmurs followed: “They have SO much tension…” “I can’t tell if they hate each other or what…”

Reina stayed seated until the room emptied, then rose and approached his desk with measured steps.

Professor Kane was leaning back in his chair, fingers steepled, watching her approach. Up close, he looked even more imposing—forty years worn with quiet power, silver hair catching the light, green eyes unreadable behind those black frames.

“You wanted to see me?” Reina asked, arms crossed loosely over her chest. Defensive, but not cowering.

He reached for a stack of papers and slid one across the desk toward her. Her latest assignment, due tomorrow. Red ink covered the margins like blood spatter.

“Your paper needs work.”

Reina picked it up, scanning the brutal comments. Her jaw tightened.

“What’s wrong with it?”

“Surface-level analysis,” he said flatly. “You summarize the literature competently, but you don’t interrogate it. You’re capable of more than this, Ms. Chalverra. Push deeper. Rewrite it.”

Fury flared hot and bright in her chest. She had spent days on that paper.

“This is graduate-level work—”

“Then why does it read like an undergraduate?” he cut in, voice calm, almost bored. “Do better.”

Reina stared at him for a long second. The air between them felt charged, heavier than it should. She snatched the paper off the desk, braid swinging with the sharp motion.

“Fine,” she bit out. Without another word, she turned on her heel and stormed out of the seminar room, the heavy door swinging shut behind her.

Finn Kane remained seated, watching the empty doorway long after she’d gone. The sway of that purple braid, the fire in her dark eyes, the way she had refused to flinch… For the first time in years, something stirred in his chest that felt dangerously close to intrigue.

Once the building had quieted, he pulled her original paper from the stack on his desk. He read it again, slowly. The work was exceptional—sharp insights, thorough research, genuine intellectual courage. Far better than most grad students at this stage. His pen hovered over the page. He began writing harsh, demanding feedback in the margins anyway, pushing her harder than necessary. As if cruelty could somehow dull the unwelcome heat, she ignited in him.

It didn’t work.

Finn leaned back, rubbing a hand over his jaw, green eyes narrowed behind his glasses.

“What is it about her?” he murmured to the empty room.

Reina shoved open the door to her off-campus apartment forty minutes later, still vibrating with irritation.

Her roommate, Maya, looked up from the couch where she was eating cereal straight from the box. “Whoa. What happened to you? You look like you just fought a dragon and lost.”

Reina dropped her bag and tossed the marked-up paper onto the coffee table. “Professor Kane. He’s an arrogant ass.”

Maya raised an eyebrow. “The silver-fox terror of a professor from room 313?

“Mm.”

“You mean the unfairly attractive professor who terrifies the rest of the faculty for sport?”

“Yes, the same.”

Her roommate, far more laid-back than she was, just laughed at the obvious irritation written all over her face. “What’d he do this time?”

“He tore my paper apart and told me to rewrite it by tomorrow. Said it was surface level. And in class… he kept calling on me constantly, even when I didn’t raise my hand. Then I called him stubborn in front of everyone.”

Maya nearly choked on her cereal. “You what?”

“He deserved it.” Reina kicked off her boots and headed for the kitChalverra, grabbing a bottle of cold brew from the fridge. “He picks on me constantly! It’s like he can’t leave me alone.”

Maya grinned, spoon halfway to her mouth. “Because you’re into each other.” She was teasing Reina now.

“I am NOT,” Reina shot back immediately.

(Lie.)

She disappeared into her room with the paper and her laptop. “I’m rewriting this tonight. And when I hand it in tomorrow, he’s going to eat his words… Maybe I’ll write the exact same thing… Wonder how he’ll feel about reading the same thing twice!”

She stayed up until dawn.

Bourbon burned warm at the back of her throat, chased immediately by bitter coffee. A combination she’d picked up from someone her father would have absolutely disapproved of—and kept anyway.

Music pulsed low through her headphones. Her fingers flew across the keyboard as she tore her original argument apart and rebuilt it—stronger, deeper, sharper. She took his critiques where they had merit, then doubled down on everything else with colder logic and better evidence.

By 5:47 a.m., she submitted the revised paper through the portal, a small, defiant smile tugging at her mouth.

Only then did she collapse into bed, exhausted but strangely satisfied.

As sleep pulled her under, one last thought drifted through her mind:

Let’s see what you say to that… Professor Kane.