Chapter 3Framed As My Brother's Mistress

The hallway outside the third-floor conference room was packed shoulder-to-shoulder with students eager to witness the fallout.

" - Heard the coffee girl got caught red-handed."

" - Assaulting the main chick after getting caught? Wild."

Mr. Warren slammed the office door shut, blocking out the noise. The atmosphere inside was suffocating.

"A violent altercation on the main field during orientation week," Warren began, his voice rigid with disgust. "Followed by allegations of financial extortion. This is a disgrace to the entire department."

He turned his glare directly toward me. "I saw the forum thread, Bridget. Do you have anything to say for yourself?"

My stomach dropped.

I hadn't expected him to be on my side, but I had at least expected an educator to gather facts.

"Mr. Warren, none of what she posted is true."

"None of it? You didn't lay hands on her? You didn't take money?"

He pointed an accusing finger at Morgan’s reddened cheek. "Are those bruises fabricated? Are the fifty students who watched you assault her blind?"

I clamped my hands into fists, trying desperately to keep my voice steady. "Gabriel Langford is my brother. My blood relative. The students on that field watched Morgan pour two large coffees over my head before I ever laid a finger on her!"

Warren let out a dry, condescending chuckle.

"Bridget Ross, I have your permanent file on my desktop. There is no record of any siblings."

He adjusted his wire-rimmed glasses, looking at me like an insect. "Gabriel Langford graduated top of his class from this university. His father, Charles Langford, sits on the regional board of trustees and single-handedly funded our new STEM annex. His mother is Marianne Ross, the celebrated stage director."

"Since when did Gabriel Langford acquire a sister named Ross?"

"You take money from prominent alumni, you start brawls on school grounds, and now you sit in my office spinning childish fabrications?"

A cold bead of sweat trickled down the back of my neck.

When I was seven years old, our family had survived an attempted kidnapping targeting my father's firm. Ever since, my parents had deliberately scrubbed my public linkages from basic institutional directories. My identity wasn't broadcast on alumni rosters; my enrollment files listed minimal emergency contacts to protect my privacy.

My eyes landed on the framed family portrait sitting on Warren's desk.

"I have our family portrait," I said, my thumb flying over my cracked screen. "From my high school graduation in June. My mother kept her maiden name, Ross! I carry her surname!"

I thrust the phone forward. "Look at it!"

Warren glanced at the screen, then told me to send the file to his email.

I thought he was going to examine the metadata. Instead, he dropped the image into a web-based AI authentication scanner.

Five seconds later, a red progress bar popped up on his monitor: "37% Probability of Digital Manipulation / Synthetic Generation."

Morgan’s eyes flared with malicious triumph. She gasped loudly. "Mr. Warren! She’s sick in the head—she actually generated a deepfake with my boyfriend to cover her tracks!"

Warren closed the browser window with a violent click of his mouse and leveled a disgusted glare at me.

"I have wasted enough time listening to your perjury, Bridget."

"You will apologize to Morgan right now. You will return every cent of the funds you extracted, and you will submit a formal three-thousand-word statement of contrition by tomorrow morning."

"Mr. Warren, that’s insane, I—"

Before I could finish, he snatched a disciplinary notice from a drawer and slammed it onto the laminate desk.

"One more word out of you, and I am submitting this directly to the Dean of Student Affairs for formal suspension! You tarnish this university’s standing again, and you are expelled. Do you understand me?"

Every sentence was an execution. No inquiry. No review of the field cameras. Just brute institutional weight crushing me down.

Beside him, Morgan offered me a slow, predatory smirk, her lips silently mouthing: "Bitch."

Out in the hallway, someone whooped through the glass.

" - Get her! Expel the trash!"

Yet, near the water cooler, a few quieter voices drifted through the door.

" - Wait, I just googled Marianne Ross. She really is Gabriel’s mom."

" - Honestly... the girl kind of looks like him around the eyes."

I drew in a long, ragged breath, looking straight into Morgan’s smug eyes.

"I don't apologize for things I didn't do."

"Morgan. If you’re really my brother’s girlfriend, call him right now. Put him on speaker. Let him tell Mr. Warren who I am."

All eyes shifted to Morgan.

A momentary tremor passed through her shoulders, but trapped by her own narrative, she pulled out her phone. Warren motioned toward the desk, signaling her to switch to speaker.

The line rang twice. Then it connected.

"Hey, babe," Morgan said, her voice dropping into a soft, breathy coo. "I found a girl going through your secondary phone—she's claiming she’s your biological sister. Tell everyone the truth, honey. Do you have a sister?"

A man's voice came through the speaker, crisp and clear:

"A sister? I don't have a sister. I'm an only son."

The entire office fell into stunned silence, followed by an explosion of murmurs outside the door.

Warren’s expression hardened into iron. "Bridget Ross. What do you have to say now?"

A cold, sharp smile pulled at the corners of my mouth.

"Plenty," I whispered.

Because the man on the other end of that phone wasn't Gabriel.