He chose her for her mind. Then he made it his.Aria Collins is a PhD candidate at Aldridge University — brilliant, broke, and drowning in imposter syndrome. When the infamous Professor Alistair Vance selects her as his sole advisee, she thinks she's been given the opportunity of a lifetime.She's wrong. She's been given a cage.Vance doesn't use force. He uses red ink. He uses silence. He uses the devastating weapon of his approval — given so rarely that when it comes, it rewires her brain like a drug. One word from him — brilliant — and she'd burn the world down to hear it again.He isolates her from her friends. Destroys her boyfriend's career. Eliminates every colleague who tries to intervene. And Aria — who can diagram the exact mechanism of her own captivity using the theoretical frameworks he taught her — chooses to stay.Because nobody else has ever made her this sharp.This seen.This alive.Syllabus of Sins is a scorching, psychologically devastating dark academia romance about the line between mentorship and obsession, between brilliance and destruction, between the cage and the cathedral.Content warning: This novel contains explicit sexual content, extreme age-gap power dynamics (professor/student), psychological manipulation, coercive control, praise kink, degradation, and a dark HEA that will make you question everything you thought you knew about consent.Book One of The Aldridge Doctrine.For fans of Haunting Adeline, Twisted Love, and If You Dare.