Dark Lord Seduction System: Taming Wives, Daughters, Aunts, and CEOs - Chapter 561

Chapter 561: Lea’s Art of Hostile Affection
The hallway went still like someone hit the school-wide pause button, and I was the only one with admin privileges.

“You look at her again,” I said, voice quiet enough to make God lean in, “and I won’t stop at your wrist next time.”

The air peeled back. People formed a ring around us like they were auditioning for a cult.

Jack’s face drained from smug to “I-just-opened-Twitter-and-found-my-name-trending.””Carter, I was just—”

“You were just leaving,” I corrected, releasing him. “And if I catch you haunting my airspace again, or hear you even mentally drafting a thought about her, we’re going to revisit the Lincoln Club situation. Except this time, no one’s dragging me off before I rearrange your bone settings.”

His entourage reversed like Roombas hitting a wall.

Jack tried rebooting his dignity, tugging at his abused shirt. “This isn’t over—”

“Morrison,” Lea’s voice sliced in from behind us, smooth and lethal, like she’d materialized out of a textbook-induced coma. “For someone whose parents are hosting their divorce like a live-streamed cage match, you’d think you’d be better at recognizing when you’re already losing.”

Heads turned. Of course they did. Lea stood fifteen feet away, backpack dangling, eyes sharp enough to qualify as concealed weapons.

Jack’s face purpled. “Martinez, this doesn’t—”

“Oh, it does,” she said, strolling closer with the casual menace of someone about to cancel your entire existence. “I’m forced to watch an evolutionary group project failure harass people so far out of his league they might as well be in a different academic district—that’s you, Morrison, in case your single brain cell was confused—harass people who are objectively out of his league in every measurable category. Intelligence, looks, basic decency, financial stability. It’s giving chihuahua-yaps-at-wolf energy. Completely humiliating. For all of us.”

One of Jack’s crew snorted. Coughed immediately. Coward.

Jack spun on her. “Stay out of this—”

“And deprive the world of the PSA it desperately needs? Someone needs to inform you that your little performance here is pathetic” Lea’s gaze sharpened. “You’re a walking cautionary tale, Morrison. Everyone remembers Carter folded you like a collapsing influencer apology video.”

Her smile didn’t reach her eyes. “Everyone knows your mom is strip-mining your dad’s assets. Everyone knows you’re broke, angry, and clinging to relevance like a toddler to an iPad. Why are you even here? Don’t you have a therapy session to miss? Or a trust fund livestream to cry on?”

The crowd doubled. Triple XP for drama.

Madison drifted to my side, looping her fingers around my arm. “Everything okay here, baby?”

Lea’s eyes locked onto the contact, and her jaw twitched so fast it was almost subliminal.”Everything’s fantastic,” she deadpanned. “Just reminding Carter that money and symmetrical genetics don’t automatically come bundled with reasoning skills.”Her gaze shifted to Madison.

“But you know that already, Torres. You’ve had enough time to observe the… deficiency.”

Madison’s smile glowed with nuclear potential. “Careful, Lea.”

“Careful of what? Facts?” Lea shot back, pivoting to me with surgical precision. “And you. Carter. Your game plan is to exist and look pretty while Morrison chatters like a malfunctioning toaster? That’s the move? Wait for someone else to fight your battles?”

“I don’t need—”

“Apparently you do.” Her voice was a blade dipped in honey. “Since you were having a whole fireside chat with him instead of ejecting him from your personal bubble. But I get it. Looks and backbone rarely spawn in the same character build. You won the beauty lottery. Nature nerfed your stats elsewhere.”

The crowd let out a collective “ooooh,” the sacred teenage chorus of public humiliation.

Lea turned to Jack, who was still processing paragraph one.”Morrison, gather your budget bodyguards and begone. The adults are finished playing with you.”

Jack staggered off, dignity leaking behind him like a broken Slurpee.

Sofia slipped to my side. “Thank you,” she whispered.

“Don’t thank me,” I said, eyes tracking Lea. “Thank her.”

But she was already gone, evaporated into student traffic like a ghost with straight A’s.

“She’s angry,” Sofia murmured.

“Not at Jack,” I said.

Emma and Sarah appeared, both looking like they’d just witnessed the season finale twist of their favorite show.”Did Lea just defend you by roasting you?” Emma breathed.Ashley added, “That girl needs therapy. Like, premium subscription therapy.”

I didn’t answer. Because I knew exactly what Lea was doing.

She hated Morrison looking at Sofia.She hated me not going nuclear immediately.She hated Madison touching me.She hated all of it.

And she’d rather be buried alive than admit any of it.

So she came in.Obliterated Jack.Obliterated me.Made sure the crowd knew she cared approximately zero.

Then walked away before gratitude could load.

Peak tsundere behavior.

Utterly maddening.

And it haunted me for the rest of the day like an unsent text I wasn’t supposed to care about—but did.

****

The parking lot was thinning out, the late-afternoon sun hitting everything with that cinematic “your life is about to get weird” glow. I headed toward my car, half-ready to collapse into the driver’s seat and mentally uninstall the entire day, when I saw it:

A single sheet of high-density graph paper tucked under my windshield wiper. Folded with the kind of crisp perfection usually reserved for military flags or overpriced origami workshops.

I slid it free and unfolded it.

An entire optimization algorithm stretched across the page, hand-drawn with the kind of precision that could shame a drafting robot. Every variable, every operation, every annotation placed exactly where it needed to be. The one Lea caught deliberately me fumbling with in class to trap her and I have.

My version had been usable. Barely. Hers? Hers looked like something MIT would hang in a hallway to intimidate freshmen.

“You’re welcome.”

Her voice came from fifteen feet away. Of course it did.

Lea leaned against her Civic like she was the cover model for Academic Fury Monthly. Backpack slung over one shoulder. Expression set to “unbothered goddess descending to roast a mortal.”

“For what?” I asked.

“For fixing your garbage,” she said, strolling closer with the bored swagger of someone about to deliver fatal truths. “That train wreck you were scribbling in Harrison’s class? The one where you clearly had no idea what dimension you were in? I fixed it.”

“I didn’t ask—”

“Obviously,” she snapped. “You’re too stupid to realize you needed help. That algorithm took me three hours to rebuild because your entire approach was fundamentally, conceptually, spiritually flawed. But now, when Harrison calls on you, you won’t completely humiliate yourself. Just… you know, medium-level humiliation.”

I held up the paper. “Why do you care if I humiliate myself?”

“I don’t.” The answer fired out instantly. Sharply. Too fast. “But I sit close to next to you. And watching you drag your brain through basic calculus like it’s a foreign language is physically painful. For me. Your incompetence bleeds into my academic environment.”

“So you spent three hours—”

“Fixing your mistakes so I don’t have to watch a rerun.” Her eyes narrowed. “This isn’t about you, Carter. This is me protecting my sanity in an already mind-numbing class you insist on making worse.”

I tapped a corner of the page. “Why are there problem sets in the appendix? This wasn’t part of Harrison’s assignment.”

The tiniest tension flickered in her shoulders. A seismic event, if you know her.

“Because unlike you,” she said, lifting her chin just a little too high, “I actually care about understanding material beyond the bare minimum. But you wouldn’t understand that. You’ve been coasting on the genetic lottery since spring break.”

“My family doesn’t have money. We never did.”

That hit her like a glitch in her programming.

She blinked once. Twice. Then recovered with a weak counterpunch.

“Well, then whoever funded your glow-up should file a complaint. All they paid for was better packaging for the same bargain-bin personality.”

She moved to get into her car.

I walked over and crouched so we were eye-level just as she grabbed the door.

“Thank you,” I said quietly. “For the three hours. For caring enough to fix any part of it.”

Her face, which had been set in ice mode, instantly ignited tomato-red.

“I—don’t—” she tried, the sounds falling out of her mouth like corrupted audio files. “I don’t care. Are you deaf and stupid?”

“You spent three hours on my homework.”

“To help myself—”

“You wrote extra problem sets.”

“For my own understanding—”

“You gave me your notes.”

“So you’d stop asking idiotic questions—” Her voice went up an octave, her hands flew up, and she shoved my shoulder. Not with force. More like a startled cat pawing something too close. “Stop looking at me like that!”

“Like what?” I asked.

“Like you… know something!” Another shove. Still feather-soft. Still panicked. “You don’t know anything, Carter. You’re just a pretty face with a swollen ego who assumes every woman who doesn’t actively despise him must be obsessed with him. Newsflash: some of us have standards.”

I stepped back, giving her space to retreat into whatever fort she needed to rebuild.

She slammed the door. Started the engine. Rolled the window halfway down. Her gaze stayed locked on the steering wheel like she was trying to hypnotize it.

“The algorithm works,” she said, voice thin and tight. “But knowing you, you’ll still butcher the explanation. Maybe read the annotations before you embarrass yourself.”

“Lea—”

“We’re not friends, Carter,” she hissed, jerking her eyes up at me. “We’re not anything. I’m just the person who refuses to let you tank the class curve. Don’t confuse my self-preservation with affection. That’s pathetic. Even for you.”

She peeled out of the parking lot like she was escaping a crime scene, tires shrieking their own dramatic exit.

I stood there, the algorithm trembling slightly in my hand, watching her taillights shrink into the horizon.

Every word she’d thrown at me was a flimsy shield.

Every action she’d taken was a confession wearing false armor.

Three hours of her life spent fixing a problem for her “mediocre” rival.Extra sets. Notes. Anonymity. A hand-delivered solution tucked under my windshield like a secret offering.

For someone who worshipped intellect above all else, that wasn’t homework.It was a love letter disguised as a calculus improvement initiative.

She didn’t need to admit it.

Her actions had already screamed it loud enough to rattle the entire parking lot.