Chapter Seventeen
Damon .
It’s been a day of... “tears.”
I was forced to host group grief counseling sessions all day.
At first, it was the football team and the Sigma Delta Chi frat brothers talking about what a great quarterback he was, hosting the sickest parties, how he could drink and never puke, and remember that one time that he snorted a fat rail off a strippers ass at Inferno?
When I asked about Inferno, having seen the red neon sign with the Syndicate logo burned into the brick wall above it whilst walking around town the other evening before my little bird offed the Quarterback, I was all too happy they were answering my questions about how lit this place was and how I could get a membership without having to be part of the…
That’s where they stopped talking and went back to sharing memories about Chase Motherfucking Prescott.
The remaining three group sessions was made up of all of his old conquests squabbling and crying, talking about how Chase Prescott made them feel like they were “the one.” I almost didn’t hold in the eye roll for those sessions.
I haven’t been able to visit my little bird because Jonas has been staying with her due to Riordan staying in Jonas’ dorm room. Although watching them almost fuck all over her dorm room has been fun, I know she’s holding out for me .
Which is why I’m excited for tomorrow. Raven made an online appointment to see me, alone .
Jonas made one for the hour before her.
It will be interesting, to say the least.
Tonight, I’m going to Inferno. I need a good Old Fashioned (or four) anyway, and make sure my ten-thousand-dollar-quarterly fee is money well spent.
I’m still in my tailored charcoal suit when I enter the club.
It smells of rich incense, cigars, expensive perfumes, and even more pretentious colognes.
Like a speakeasy, Inferno is romantically lit with sconces and heavy velvet curtains against the walls, the music – some type of slow and reverbed song - isn’t overtly loud so patrons can carry a conversation without having to yell across the table.
Looking about the room, I’m noticing a lot of suits and ties.
Yeah, it looks like a lot of business deals go down here.
There’s a bar in every corner of the first floor, booths along the brick walls that give it a rustic feel, and in the center are oversized red couches with low black tables centered between them all to place your drinks.
All-in-all, it’s chic and sexy and I’m sure pheromones are pumped through the vents.
I make my way to the second floor that has the same layout as the first floor but there’s added cages where young co-ed dancers are doing their best to keep your attention, wearing disguises and most, if not all of them wear masks. This floor has more of a burlesque feel.
I immediately understand the club. It’s a way to take you back to the time when sexuality was repressed and forbidden making all of this tabooer. Sexy. I like it.
A brunette with pale blue wings a matching mask and lingerie, sets her sights on me.
While probably beautiful under the mask, the shape of her body is wrong, her ass doesn’t match her thighs, most likely cosmetically enhanced, and her lips are also wrong.
Her eyes are also blue, not brown. In other words, she’s just not the woman I want.
I send her a smirk and continue on to the bar where I spot a familiar face sitting on a barstool, amber drink in hand.
The bartender, a young ice-blonde guy with blue eyes lined with eyeliner, a silver hoop in his nose, wearing a bowlers hat, and a black waistcoat over his white button-up is drying a glass tumbler, eyeing me. “You’re new here.”
“Only to the area,” I admit with a shrug. “I’m Aros.” I lie.
“Jamie. What’ll it be?”
“Old fashioned.”
A smile creeps along his face. “Would’ve taken you for a Tom Collins kind of man,” he flirts.
I smirk, “Once in my late teens. Turns out it’s always been whiskey for me.”
He nods once in understanding and proceeds to make me the best fucking Old Fashioned I’ve ever had. I tip him well and turn to face the dancers beside the dark-haired professor.
“Fancy seeing you here,” he says, taking a sip from his Rusty Nail.
“You ever host group therapy for women thinking one dead quarterback was the love of their lives?”
He chuckles over the rim of his glass, framed green eyes meeting my silver ones. “Can’t say I’ve ever been tortured in such a way.”
“I pray you never have to,” I grumble, taking a sip.
“What a fucking month it’s been.”
“It’s only been three days.”
Harrington shakes his head looking over at the brunette that hasn’t taken her eyes off of us. “Have you ever been so taken with someone… that even when someone with a body like that does nothing for you?”
I know what he means. She’s not Raven. “Well, given that she looks as though she’s been to a few different surgeons and parts of her face look asymmetrical and protrude in the wrong areas, I can’t see how someone that looks like that would actually do something for you.
Call me old fashioned, but I like my women to be more natural than they pay to look. ”
He chuckles again, this time in a frustrated manner. I make a motion for Jamie to make us another drink as I take the whiskey infused cherry and eat it. “You have until the last drop of my drink to get a free psych session.” I offer.
Harrington scoffs, tilting his head back, finishing off his drink as Jamie rolls new ones our way.
I hand Maverick his and take a sip from mine.
He peers down at the new drink in his hand and the clenches the muscle in his jaw.
“She irritates me. Won’t speak to me. Ignores me…
I think I broke her.” And then he tells me his biggest secret. “She’s a student.”
“Oh?”
“It’s completely inappropriate. She’s a virgin and eleven years younger than me,” he drinks. “Her boyfriend and her broke up because of me and she’s wasting away.”
I rage internally. “And you… feel guilty ?”
“If I’m honest, I don’t think I’ve ever felt guilty of anything in my life.
I graduated high school in a small Texas town at sixteen and left my aging father behind.
I never visited, never went back to that fucking hellhole, until he was in hospice due to colon cancer.
I left again when he was on the ground. I’ve had to do questionable, unethical things to track and put motherfuckers in jail and slept just fine…
but seeing her so… void of life… it makes me feel things I have no idea how to handle and with campus being closed, I haven’t seen her since last Wednesday but for a moment. ”
Raven can’t be broken. She’ll bend. She may even tear… but break? Never. Knowing Harrington feels like shit? I love it. “Have you tried… being nice to her?”
He laughs, tipping his glass back, the ice clinking together.
“I don’t do nice. I see what I want and I take it.
I will admit I fought it. I fought the urge to take her, yet I couldn’t resist her siren’s call.
I plunged us both into the abyss of the black watered ocean.
Her boyfriend heard us. Which is what caused the break-up. ”
And that’s why she and Jonas were so equivocally catching up on lost time.
Young love is beautiful. I decide to let up the farce.
We’re two grown men. There’s no reason to dance around this.
“Miss Monroe reacts better to kindness, Maverick.” His eyes snap up to mine, fury, and concern in his eyes.
I make a motion with my empty hand. “She needs discipline, but she flourishes and blossoms under praise more than degradation. Although, I believe she likes a mixture of both, if my experiments have taught me anything. She’s a woman that was starved of love and nurture as a child, compared to her stepbrother, at all times, only given attention when she was rude or misbehaved, and then she had a traumatic event that made her shut down into her own mind .
“What happened with you and Jonas... let’s just say she most likely thought since there were no orderlies to punish her, no doctors to plunge in a tranquilizer, she punished and tried to tranquilize herself.
Being out here, in the real world is not like the gilded cage I had tailor-made for my little bird. ”
His green eyes go wide.
“She was my patient, Harrington. I believe under my care, and in the real world, I will have her talking in no time. But I do need help out here.”
“You want me to help you?”
“Not me. Her . Between me, you, and Jonas? She’ll be back to her former self soon. She needs guidance, discipline, praise, all of it. If you feel for her, even a fraction of what I feel for her, you’ll help. No matter what may come. We just need to get Jonas to agree.”
“Sounds ominous.” He sips.
“I very much assure you it will be.”
“She’s a virgin. That’s a reason I’ve held back.”
I finish off my drink, lick my lips and shrug.
“Not for much longer. But make no mistake, Harrington, if you’re ever the cause for her progress to be delayed ever again, or for her prognosis to worsen, just know, I saw your little tryst on the floor of the library…
with your little confession and your prejudices against the wealthy, I doubt it would take much for me to convince the board to let you go. I’ve heard parents hate you.”
“Are you threatening my job, Doctor?”
I look at him with a smirk on my face. “’Threaten' is such a strong word, Professor. I prefer the term ‘warning.’ I’m warning you, do not fuck this up.”
Harrington grins, absurdly wickedly at me, green eyes shining like dark emeralds. “Jesus, you’re as fucked over her as I am.”
I chuckle. “Oh, friend . I am so much worse.”
I shoot a text to my little bird asking her to show up thirty minutes earlier than scheduled. I need to have the young loves caught off guard for my plan and any other plans Raven has to work.
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