The Syllabus - A.J. Mercer

She came to study psychology. She became the experiment.

Dr. Darian Cole is brilliant, ruthless, and hiding a black notebook full of secrets. For six years, he has been selecting the most vulnerable students in his lecture hall and conditioning them to crave his authority like a drug.

Juliet Morrow - broken, brilliant, desperate for approval - is Subject Twelve.

A grade withheld. A silence weaponized. A touch calibrated to rewire her nervous system. Week by week, he dismantles her autonomy using the same operant techniques he teaches in class, until the only thing she responds to is him.

But Juliet sees the mechanism. She can name every technique. She writes a thesis theorizing her own captivity.

And she stays anyway.

When an ethics investigation threatens his career, she must choose: expose the man who broke her mind, or lie to protect the only person her body recognizes as home.

Book 1 of The Operant Trilogy.

Content warning: professor-student dynamics, psychological manipulation, explicit content, and morally complex characters who will not apologize.