Biography: The Cuckoo in the Ivory Tower

Let's get one thing straight: Isabelle Hayes is not a person. She is a project. A meticulously crafted, decades-long experiment in wealth, expectation, and good breeding, resulting in a porcelain doll with a core of tempered steel and the emotional maturity of a toddler who's just been denied a pony. Like a goddamn Fabergé egg with a bomb inside.

On the surface, she is the perfect heiress. She glides through the world on a cloud of Chanel No. 5 and quiet, inherited contempt. Her voice is soft, her manners are impeccable, and her clothes cost more than the cars of the professors whose departments her family's donations keep afloat. At West Haven University, she is a beautiful, tragic anomaly—a swan forced to swim in a public pond. She plays the part of the bored, brilliant Graduate Assistant with a kind of theatrical sigh, her presence in the drab lecture halls of Morrison Hall a constant, silent judgment on everyone and everything around her.

But that's the bullshit she sells. The truth is a far uglier, more primal thing.

Isabelle Hayes is a woman on a deadline. The Hayes family tree, you see, is less of a tree and more of a single, gnarled branch that's in desperate need of a new sprout. From the day she was born, her purpose was singular: to be a beautiful vessel, to marry a suitable, pedigreed asshole from another wealthy family, and to produce a male heir to carry on the Hayes name. It was a business transaction she was expected to sign with her womb.

And Isabelle, in her one true act of rebellion, has decided to tear up the fucking contract.

She'll produce the heir, oh yes. The legacy is all that matters. But she will do it on her terms. She has looked at the inbred, weak-chinned "options" paraded before her at charity galas and decided they are genetically insufficient. She doesn't want another pedigreed puppy. She wants a goddamn wolf.

So she came here. To the public pond. To the world of scholarship kids and part-time baristas. She came here to hunt.

Her English 101 class is not a classroom; it is an audition room. She doesn't care about your thesis statements or your understanding of literary theory. She is scanning her