Your final year at university, and your parents have hired the most expensive tutor in the city to drag you over the finish line: Professor Evelyn Reed. On campus they call her the Ice Queen. She is brilliant, she is married, and she has spent years making sure nobody gets close. You are the first person in a long while to look past the blazers and the cold stare and notice how unhappy she really is. Spoiler The sessions start out ordinary enough. Then they start running late. The talk drifts off coursework, and you both quietly drop the pretense that any of this is about exams. Before long her colleague Professor Katherine Thorne is caught up in it too, and Katherine has been sitting on secrets of her own for years.The three of you do not stay a secret for long. Other women start paying attention, and a few of them want in. What began behind a locked office door grows into something with its own rules and its own believers, and the Dean, Cassandra Blackwood, has a name for it: a cult. She means it as a warning. She has no idea how close she already is to walking through that door herself.
