BLACK CRESCENT

CHAPTER FIVE

P R E S E N T

CAMILA

That bastard was gunning for me, I could feel it. This was only the sixth class, and she had already given us a pop quiz. The moment she said the words, her eyes flickered over me. It was as though she meant to challenge me right then and there. Plus, with her Darwinian style of teaching, if we all failed, she'd kick us out without a second thought. I had heard a rumor that all Professor Jauregui needed was a total of twelve students to be in her class, and at the moment, there were twenty of us. And on the first day, there had been over fifty.

Everyone she kicked out would go to the other law professors, in the hopes of sitting in on their classes. It was said that only the top twelve students got offered a position within her firm after graduation. This group of students were known as the twelve disciples, and come hell or high water, I was determined to be a part of the twelve.

I had spent the last week reading everything I could find on Lauren Jauregui. To students, she was El Lilith, but in Law circles, she was called The Cleaner. The reason for this was that she hadn't lost a single case since she had opened up her own firm, and she was known for being the one who cleaned up everyone's messes, legally speaking.

Lauren M&J Associates was one of the leading law firms in the country. The name partner, Lauren Jauregui, graduated Harvard Law School at twenty-three, the same damn age that I was just starting out on. After graduating, she received a job offer at Spencer and Hill, where she worked for five years, before leaving to start her own practice with a college friend. However, two years later, and after a nasty divorce, she left the company and started her own firm at the age of thirty.

Now here she was, six years later and on top of the world, and all I could do was wonder; who in the hell was this person? Time magazine quoted her as saying she wanted to "shape the next generation of young minds". She was a natural born genius with a hunger for winning at all costs. She could have studied anything but chose law. They all made her seem like she was the goliath of lawyers.

No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't make this version of her match up with the Lauren I knew. She wasn't a savage workaholic lawyer but a savage who devoured my body; she played the guitar at a club, she sang with me in the shower, she ate cold pizza in his underwear, and laughed at all of my bad jokes. I knew that people sometimes put up façade when they first meet people, but even at two o'clock in the morning, she was still just as kind as the first moment I met her.

"Ms. Cabello, shouldn't you be more focused on your quiz than on the light fixture?"

I jumped as she startled me out of my daydream.

Be one of the twelve.

"Yes, of course, but I've already finished, and wasn't sure if I was allowed to leave early," I said as I handed her my write up.

She looked at the clock. "It took you twenty-one minutes?"

"Sorry it took so long," I replied dramatically.

She read it over it, and placed it back down in front of me. I couldn't stop myself from shivering when her hand accidentally grazed against mine. And to make matters worse, she noticed.

"Everyone," she called out to the class, "thanks to Ms. Cabello, you now have five minutes left to complete the assignment."

A few people turned to glare at me, but I was too focused on trying to stop my hand from shaking to pay them any heed.

Was that too cocky? Fuck no, this is Lauren Jauregui. And I was going to be one of the disciples.

For some odd reason, I had a sneaking suspicion that she was the one who had started calling her selected students the twelve disciples, just so that she could praise herself, the asshole.

"Time's up," she snapped.

As we passed our papers down to her, a few people opted to save themselves the embarrassment and simply stood up and left. I counted.

Sixteen. At the rate she was going would there even be twelve of us left?

"The four students who just left, never speak to them again," she stated as she took the quizzes and dropped them into the trash. "This quiz wasn't meant to test your analytical abilities, it was meant to test your mental strength. Can you work under pressure? If you can't, then you don't deserve to be a lawyer. However," she boomed, "that is just my opinion. There is a loophole for ninety-nine percent of everything, and after a week here, the four students who left—I no longer care to remember their names—did not grasp the lesson that Ms. Cabello understood on the first day; you have the right and the ability to present your case and therefore defend your right to remain in the class."

Was she praising me? No. She couldn't be.

"Even if you don't have the strength now, you fake it. You fake it as if your life depended on it. You research the hell out of it, and even if you're dumb enough to get the date wrong, or finish a quiz early without properly quoting the text, or me, then you still fake it. Because if you can believe your lie, you can sell doubt to others. To win a case, all you have to do is instill doubt in the thing opposing you."