Chapter Text
The job was simple. Take the class, sell the tests. The method was tried and true, and Kaz had a line of buyers all the way outside the door (metaphorically) and looping around the campus. Any class he couldn’t take, he had his lackeys take and pass on the tests to him for a cut. Aside from the tests, he also has his distressingly accurate quizlet sets locked behind a paywall. Not to mention he controls the Adderall supply and helps student-athletes pass their drug tests after. He's even rigged student elections for a cost.
All of this to say that the whole school would be floundering if it weren't for Kaz Brekker. How anyone passed any classes on this shithole of a campus before Kaz swept in here looking to make a buck is a complete and utter mystery to him.
This is how Kaz ended up breaking into the College of Political Science & Economics building at 2:23am, and more specifically, how he managed to find himself picking the lock to Professor Morozova's office even after very firmly informing everyone on his team that he would not be doing this again.
He wouldn't be doing this again, he said, until it was announced that due to a possible leak reported by his overbearing graduate student TA (he'll see you in hell, Nikolai Lantsov), the test had been completely rewritten from past years and the study guides that had been handed out were null and void.
Kaz had said that never was anything great achieved without danger. Everyone else said that they weren't after achieving anything great, they were after rent money. Everyone else was too afraid to handle the break-in, everyone else said no amount of money was worth facing the possible retribution of the most terrifying professor on campus and potential expulsion, everyone else said it wouldn't hurt to cut and run just once.
Kaz isn't everyone else. Kaz honors his bargains, and he made deals with several students that would tank his reputation were they to be broken. Kaz's business is built on reliability. How was he supposed to bounce back from charging for test answers from outdated tests? That's how the least stealthy member of the Crow Club ended up being the one to handle sneaking in after hours. Everyone else is unreliable, and Inej is studying abroad.
He wouldn't be doing this again, he promised himself as he opened the door to Professor Morozova's office. He wouldn't be doing this again, he promised himself as he combed through every single paper in the entire goddamn office looking for the only thing here he needed. He wouldn't be doing this again, he said, sitting in Morozova's desk chair trying to figure out where else in this goddamn bitch of an office he could possibly be keeping the test questions.
Unless…unless…
Fine. Fine. He would be doing this one more time.
If there’s anyone on earth who could successfully break into a professor's house to steal a test it would be Kaz Brekker, even if that professor is known for being such a hard-ass that people take his class just to prove that they can. Well, Kaz is going to take it one step further than anyone else. He's going to break into Professor Aleksander Morozova's house just to prove that he can.
Yes, he'll admit it, it's more than just the test at his point.
He successfully makes it through the first-floor window– very stupid to leave a first-floor window unlocked, but a nice house in the suburbs like this one can probably afford to have fewer safety measures than the kind of neighborhood Kaz grew up in (bars on the windows, guns in the floorboards, much harder to infiltrate).
The job would have been harder, certainly, had Kaz not spotted a brochure for a bookshelf door tucked in the desk drawer of his office, complete with a receipt tucked inside. Of course, someone like him would be the kind of person to spend ridiculous amounts of money on a ‘safety measure’ as elaborate and absurd as a fake door, like someone who knows what they're doing wouldn't be able to spot something like that in a heartbeat.
Especially someone like Kaz, who pulled up former listings of the house online to find blueprints and pictures off of zelle kindly taken by whoever put the house up for sale before Professor Morozova bought it and knew definitively as soon as he stepped inside that the house appeared from the inside to be smaller than the blueprints said. It was incredibly obvious that the 10x10 study that was featured in the blueprints had to be behind the bookshelf that lined up to where the door was supposed to be, even if it were ‘expertly’ disguised with near identical bookshelves across the wall beside it.
Kaz could take the time to painstakingly pull every book in the shelf, but having the brochure meant he was able to scour the website for information about how the shelves actually worked. He knew exactly which spot the chosen book was supposed to appear in, and lo and behold, it's behind the very book on Aristotle's Politics written and researched by Aleksander Morozova himself. An arrogant move, and none too surprising for him.
(Why anyone needs to write a 700-page book just to talk about a book totaling only 184 pages is beyond him, but who is he to expect someone who dedicated their lives to political science academia to be reasonable).
He's inside the man's secret office in less than four minutes. Sure enough, he sees a nice pile of tests on the desk and a few more in the printer. He can take one and be out the window he came in in less than six minutes. A record for him, and the integrity of his growing criminal empire will remain–
“May I help you?” A deep, cold voice stops him in his tracks.
Fuck.
There are two paths available to him. He could try to run and hope he wouldn't be recognized from the back (despite both having a physical disadvantage and being the only student in the class using a cane, and despite being trapped inside a secret study with only one door…so not an option) or he could turn around and come up with some possible reason he might be here other than criminal academic dishonesty. Not that there's any reason he could possibly come up with to excuse him being here, considering breaking and entering is a crime in and of itself.
Kaz is no amateur when it comes to talking his way out of illegal situations. He was in and out of juvie as a kid, yeah, as an amateur, but all of that has been wiped from his record for years. Still, if he were to get caught again for this? As an actual legal adult, the system might not be quite so kind to him.
He was so fucking close. He was so close that it's almost physically painful– or no, that might be the pain in his leg from climbing through the fucking bushes at 4:09am because he goes to school with cowards.
“Ah. Kaz Brekker. I shouldn't be too surprised.”
…Kaz isn't usually worried about a professor knowing his name, except that this isn’t one of the professor's discussion-based advanced honors courses. This is an intro class. It's a five-hundred seat lecture hall, and he knows Kaz's name as soon as he sees his face?
There may be a slight possibility that Nikolai Lantsov, and by extension the Professor, knew a little more than he let on to the class. It's one thing to know there's a leak, but Lantsov has also had his fingers in a few pieces of criminal pie when he was in undergrad. That fact, plus the fact that half the girls enrolled are in love with him and his name is on half the buildings, means there's a non-zero chance that someone gave him reason to cast their suspicious gaze in Kaz Brekker's direction.
Not that they'd have any proof. Not that either of them would ever have anything more than a suspicion…until Kaz broke into his house, of course.
He must have been seething trying to figure out how to handle Kaz's little cheating ring without any actual evidence. And now Kaz has delivered himself on a silver platter instead of just taking the loss for once.
“Aleksander,” he says. He's already in so deep he might as well go all-out. Some people give up when they hit rock bottom. Kaz finds a drill and keeps going.
“You're not the first silly schoolgirl with a crush to show up on my doorstep.”
“I'm not–”
“But you are the first to find his way into my study.”
Kaz is poised to argue again when he recognizes the opportunity being presented to him for what it is. People should either be caressed or crushed.
“I wouldn't call it a crush. I sit in the back row and you still know my name. Why is that, Professor? ”
“I can appreciate a pretty face when I see one. And you, Kaz, are pretty. A pretty face and a pretty mind with perfect grades.”
“Does it seem ethical to you, to call one of your students pretty?”
“Are you going to argue ethics with me while standing in the house you broke into?”
And here's the thing…as it stands, in the best case, Kaz leaves here empty-handed. He walks out even if he does manage to talk Morozova into just letting him go. But he will always have the threat of expulsion hanging over his head knowing he was caught red-handed.
But this? This absolute gift that Morozova is giving him in the form of an extremely fireable conflict of interest?
The university already has a policy forbidding any inappropriate relations between a student and a professor who even has a reasonable chance of ever being in a supervisory role over their student, but if his professor were to be caught having an affair with one of his actual students? Well, his career would be dead in the water. No chance of resuscitation (not that Kaz would ever try and resuscitate him, despite his professor currently looking at him like he's hoping for mouth-to-mouth at the very least).
“I'm not saying breaking into your house to proposition you is ethical, I'm just saying that as it stands neither of us are paragons of virtue… sir. ”
Kaz has checked the laws, they live in a one-party recording state. He hits the button on the recorder in his pocket he keeps for moments just like this. He's gotten out of a sticky situation on more than one occasion thanks to his quick thinking in regards to providing blackmail material.
“You have the highest grades in my class. Most students who show up here or in my office have something they want to improve on. What is it you want from me?”
He's used to people here trading one D for another, evidently. The way he says most students like this is something he's done before makes Kaz feel a bit sick, but he's equally as thrilled that he got something like that in the recording. He's not here for nothing.
“I don't care about my grade,” he says. He's starting to get into the role now, trying on the part like it's any other of his latest cons. “In fact, I was hoping you could screw me so hard I would forget about it altogether.”
And while he's screwing Kaz, Kaz will screw him. Or something like that.
“Get on the desk.”
“Wait–” Kaz interrupts, feeling the need to set some rules to protect himself here before this spins too far out of his control. “I feel like we should set some ground rules here.”
“You're going to make demands now, little thief?”
Kaz pales at having this suspicion that of course Professor Morozova knew what he was doing here confirmed, and at the fear this situation is already beginning to spin out of his hands. The loss of blood in his face might have corresponded to the rush of blood somewhere else.
Oh. This is new.
He squirms, not out of fear, but the sudden discomfort he's feeling existing in his own body under Morozova's intense, hungry gaze.
“Fine,” the man gives in, “What's off the table?”
“I don't like being kissed.”
“Like a proper whore.”
Why is that doing something to him? It is, though, it's doing something to him. And his professor spotted it.
“What else?” He asks, smirking at Kaz.
“I don't like being touched. I don't like skin.”
Professor Morozova looks a bit skeptical now, but with the eyes Kaz is giving him spread out over his desk, how can he resist the delicious mutually assured destruction Kaz is going to give him?
“No kissing, no touching, what else is on the table then?”
“Everything,” Kaz says. He finds, almost distressingly, that he means it. “Everything else is on the table.”