“Shit,” Tybo muttered, slumping back in his seat.

“Ildaria’s video was from a different angle,” Mortimer continued. “And hers was captioned, Special project for Film class. Awesome job peeps! Looks so good even I almost believed it was real.”

When Tybo and Valerian both blinked in surprise and then turned to her, Ildaria shrugged irritably. She’d been rather enjoying their chagrin and anger, but the jig was up. “I thought I should do some damage control.”

They were all silent for a minute, and then Valerian frowned and asked, “This will not affect the arrest of the bastard who tried to take the woman, will it?”

“We read his mind,” Tybo put in with concern. “She wasn’t his first victim. The bastard’s a serial rapist. If the police think it was just a film class stunt—”

“No,” Lucian interrupted firmly. “I will see to it that he is brought to justice.”

The two men nodded, and then glanced from Ildaria to Lucian, looking like they wanted to say something. Whether it was to stand up for her, or thank her for what she’d done with the video, she didn’t know, and never would since Lucian turned to her then and said, “You have been naughty, Angelina.”

Ildaria noted the startled expressions on the other men’s faces at his use of her first name, but ignored them and said quickly, “I only did what Tybo and Valerian did on that tape. I just wasn’t lucky enough to have someone with me to do damage control. I promise I wasn’t playing the vigilante like in Montana. I wasn’t wearing my leathers and didn’t go looking for bad guys to beat up. I was just walking along minding my own business when . . .” She shrugged rather than say, “the shit hit the fan.” Which was what had happened each of the three times she’d stopped to save a fellow student. The first time it had been a girl getting mugged. Ildaria had chased down the culprit, got the girl’s purse back and returned it to her before walking them both to the campus police office so the man could be charged.

The second time it had been a drunken asshole beating up his less inebriated girlfriend. She’d taken them both to the campus police as well, having to control the girl to make her admit what had happened. Something Ildaria still had trouble fathoming. The minute she’d got involved, the girlfriend had sided with her boyfriend as if Ildaria was the bad guy.

The last incident had been a man who had attacked a student out for an evening jog and pulled her off the path into the woods intending to rape her. She suspected that was the one that had been videoed and got her in trouble. It was the only one where she’d been “tossing around” someone twice her size as Valerian had put it earlier.