SWNOVELS Enter The Black Oak: Chapter 28
ROOM 66.
Stepping into the room, I make straight for the shower cubicle, rip the robe and mask off and yank the band out of my hair. The ends of my hair tickle the skin on my back and I pull my T-shirt and panties off and hang them on a hook on the frosted glass door before scrubbing my hair and body in a furious effort to get the tenebrous murk of those rooms out of me.
I step out of the shower and wrap myself in a towel, grab my clothes and return to the changing room where I sit staring at the floor, trying to catch my breath. I barely notice Cameron in the doorway as I play the scene in that last room over and over in my mind, imagining my husband there, bending a stranger—or Alex—over a table and fucking her hard as he did me a couple of nights ago.
“I’m sorry you had to see that,” Cameron says.
I don’t make eye contact. “It’s not your fault. I wanted to see it. I just didn’t think it would be so… raw.”
“We need to get out of here,” he responds. “We can talk about this later. You need to get dressed. I’ll be back in two minutes.”
Cameron draws the curtain closed and I tug my clothes onto my damp skin and gather up my things. I’m ready to leave within minutes.
Making our way back to the car, we pass through another set of doors and past more intimidating security personnel before sitting in strained silence as Cameron drives up the twisting turns of the parking garage and out onto Manhattan streets where innocent people wander, oblivious to the city’s darkest secrets.
As we drive uptown in the direction of Upper Manhattan, I spot Cameron glancing repeatedly in the rear-view mirror.
“Fuck,” he mutters under his breath as we head into the Garment District.
“What’s wrong?”
“I think we’re being followed.”
“What?! By who?”
“Don’t worry. They’re just sending us a warning message. They must know what happened back there.”
“Are you saying the Society is having us followed?”
“They’re in that black SUV, a couple of cars behind. It pulled up behind us as we left the parking garage.”
He hits the brake and makes a sudden right turn onto 8th Avenue. Turning to look behind us, I spot a large SUV with tinted windows take the same congested route as us, bogged down as we are by late Saturday evening traffic.
“Cameron!” I exclaim as the car continues to tail us.
“Yes. They’re following us,” he confirms calmly.
“What do they want?”
“They want us to know that we need to keep our mouths shut.”
Despite being stalked by God knows who, Cameron dominates the car with the same masterful ease with which he seems to handle every physical task—like some god that was put on Earth to make us mere mortals feel inadequate. He weaves in and out of cars deftly, trying to put some distance between us and our pursuers who make every turn that we do until they are just three cars behind us.
“They’re still there!” I shout, glancing at my stern-faced friend whose eyes are transfixed on the rear-view mirror.
The lights in front of us suddenly turn amber and he punches the gas hard. I look back and see the SUV stuck on the other side of the intersection as Cameron speeds away, turning swiftly onto West 54th and then left onto Sixth Avenue in the direction of Central Park.
“I think we’ve lost them.” He sounds freakishly collected despite the taciturn outrage in his eyes.
“I can’t believe they would follow us like that! What kind of people are they?”
“I told you—they’ll do whatever it takes to protect their privacy. And so far it’s worked. People do not cross them.”
“Have you ever had them follow you before?”
“No. First time. It will also be my last. I’m never setting foot in that place again. I want to dump the car for a while,” he says. “Hold on.”
He makes a sharp right turn onto West 58th street, one block from Central Park and pulls up in front of a luxury hotel where we both get out.
“Good evening, Mr. O’Neill,” says the valet as Cam hands him the car keys.
“I don’t have a room. I need you to park the car underground until I get back,” says Cameron, placing what looks like a folded hundred-dollar bill into his hand.
“Absolutely, sir.”
“I’m not here. Neither is my friend. Is that clear?” says Cameron.
“Of course, sir,” responds the valet as he gets into the car and drives it out of sight.
I don’t wait for Cameron, but cross the street and head into Central Park where I hope I can find a place to sit and breathe. I break into a run as I pass the Pond, barely noticing the soft teal hues of this ethereal water sanctuary that has enchanted me so many times in the past during carefree afternoons spent here with friends—and with Jack. The sky above us is now black as soot with moonlight hiding behind a sheet of low haze and only the ghostly light emitted from antique streetlamps illuminating the crunchy gravel under our feet. I veer off the path and onto a dimly lit grassy area where I stop and stand still as the late evening breeze cools my warm cheeks, blowing my hair all over the place.
I sense Cameron’s presence behind me before he even opens his mouth.
“Talk to me, Jessynia,” he says softly. “I can help you.”
It’s not his fault. None of it is. I know that. I begged to go there. My stupid ass begged him to open this can of worms, but right now I have so much uncontrollable rage inside me that I have no idea how to even begin working through it.
“Help me?” I spin round to face him. “How exactly can you help me?”
He shoves both hands into the pockets of his pants and studies my face calmly as if trying to soothe me with his eyes. Unfortunately, the confident, self-composed stance of his is just making me feel like even more of an unstable wreck.
“Oh, I know, can we go back in time and erase the images of what I’ve just seen in that place? Can you erase the image of my husband fucking those pieces of meat?! Do you know how many times he must have gone to that place and then come back home to me? Got in bed with me? Made love to me?” My now-hoarse voice is attracting the stares of a handful of passers-by on the path nearby. “Can you imagine your wife going to that place and then coming back home and getting into bed with you? Do you have any idea how that would feel?”
Pain casts a shadow over Cameron’s face as he watches over my descent into riotous madness with the type of still, quiet equanimity that I seriously need to master and pronto.
But that’ll clearly have to be for another day. “He had no right! No justification! None! I’m not one of those frigid wives who refuse to have sex with their husbands and then get a shock when they find out they’re cheating. There was no reason!”
“Jess—”
“And you! How could you go to that place? Why the fuck?! You can have any woman you want. Any woman in Manhattan. The whole tri-state area. The whole damn country for that matter! Most women would sell their first-born child to have a night in the sack with you. Is that not enough?! Were you seriously so hard up that you had to go to that place? How could you go in there? And keep going there?!”
He doesn’t answer which only ignites my jealous wrath even more.
“Well?!”
He shifts his stance, running his fingers through thick locks that look as black as coal in the low light. “I was seventeen the first time I went there,” he responds, his voice broken. “I was taken there by an older woman who’d been… after me since I was about fourteen years old.” He finally holds my gaze through fearful eyes. “There are things I want to tell you. Things I’ve wanted to tell you for so long. I’m just… afraid. I’m not afraid of many things in life, but I’m afraid of this.”
“Afraid of what?”
“Of what you’ll think of me. Afraid you’ll never look at me the same way again. Or never be able to feel close to me again.”
“Can it get any worse than what I’ve just seen? I already know you used to go to that place.”
He stills, studying the ground below his feet, dark secrets hanging from his lips.
“You’re scaring me,” I say quietly.
“I’m scaring myself. I need you to listen. Don’t speak. Don’t interrupt. I need you to just be quiet. Can you do that?”
I nod, my heart thundering in my chest. How much deeper can this rabbit hole go for Christ’s sake?
“There’s a woman I’ve known since I was a boy. An older woman. She became friends with my parents after she married her husband. When I reached my teens, she made it clear what she wanted from me. I managed to avoid her as much as possible until… the day of my sixteenth birthday. She got my mother to send me round to help with some job she needed doing. My mother liked us to help people out for our personal development, as you know. I was young. Weak. I didn’t know how to stop it. She was the first woman I ever slept with.”
“Cam—”
“She educated me,” he continues. “Taught me what to do with a woman. Did things that girls of that age aren’t supposed to know about.”
“Who was it?” I ask, wrapping my arms around my waist to try to quiet the angst making my body shiver.
His anguished eyes scald me, but he doesn’t speak. My quivering stomach hits the floor. Somewhere deep inside me, I know. I just don’t want to believe it could be true.
“You know who it is, Jessynia.”
I take a step back. “No,” I whisper, shaking my head, pleading silently with his solemn features.
“I’m sorry.”
“Alex?”
“Yes.”
Nausea seeps into my body at the thought of Alex in bed with both Jack and now Cameron, and rage—inexplicable, violent, claw-at-your-skin rage—fills my every cell, with only the sight of the torment visibly etched on Cameron’s face taking the edge off the fury.
“What… what about her husband?” I ask faintly, the walls of my mouth so dry you’d think I hadn’t touched water for a week. “Didn’t he notice anything?”
“He didn’t give a fuck what she did. As long as she let him do what he wanted, he wouldn’t have cared if she was screwed by the whole island. I felt bad about him at first, until I saw how little he cared.”
“I don’t understand how—”
“Alex is powerful, aggressive. She knows what she wants and she takes it. She’s not the type of woman it’s easy to say no to, especially when you’re that age. When I look back now, I have no idea how I could have been with someone like her. It would never happen today, but young men, our brains are not fully wired in. I’ve spent years trying to get the feel of her off my skin.”
“You were sixteen. She was a grown woman. It wasn’t your fault. She had no right to do that!”
“When you’re pulled into her world at that age, it’s not as easy as it seems to pull yourself out. She took me to the Society when I turned seventeen—her and Markov. It was supposed to be a birthday present.”
“Seventeen?” I shake my head. “How could they take someone so young to a place like that?”
“I guess I didn’t look like other seventeen-year-olds. Both Jack and I were tall and strong around that age. Alex and Markov took drugs recreationally and started giving them to me around the same time. I took my first line of cocaine at the Society—snorted it off one of her friends.”
He studies my eyes as I fight the urge to go find Alexandra Frost and rip her face off.
“There were other drugs—Ketamine, acid, speed. No needles. No heroin. No opioids. No meth. But it was a lot. Markov would give them to me, or Alex.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“I wasn’t complaining at the time. It took me years to realize how sordid the whole thing was. In my early twenties, I went to Q.N. a lot—with her, with other women, sometimes alone. It wasn’t quite as elaborate as it is now. It was when I turned twenty-three that I started having issues.”
“You were still having them when we met, weren’t you?”
“Yes. I would spend my days feeling… numb and… empty. Disconnected. For the first time in my life, I started to have insomnia, depression, anxiety, nightmares. It took a long time to realize how bad being around those people and that place was for me. Being in that place can change your relationship to people. To sex. To love. To yourself. It can make your tastes somewhat… singular. It can affect you in ways that you don’t realize at first.”
“Is that why you stopped going?”
“There were many reasons. There was one incident that finally put an end to it. I saw this lawyer that had put my father and uncle though hell—baseless lawsuits relating to the business. A shakedown, basically. She walked into a restaurant I was eating in. I watched as she took her jacket off, and I saw it—the gold pin—on the inside lining of her jacket. She could have been one of the women I fucked in there. You know, for some people that go there, unknowingly screwing people you hate is part of the thrill, but this woman had tried to destroy my father’s life. She had made him ill. When I got home, I threw up.”
“Cameron,” I say softly, taking a step towards him.
“My first year at Brown, before I met you, I was falling apart,” he continues. “I was barely sleeping. I’d close my eyes and see things—things I’d seen in that place. I could smell the people, see the body parts. I thought I was losing my mind. I’d started to find out how dangerous the place was. Some of the people that go there are paid—prostitutes, male and female. They’re paid to keep the more extreme patrons coming back. I’d heard rumors about a couple of them disappearing.”
“What?”
“Yes. There were rumors about a member who’d been indiscreet about the Society. Apparently, he believed he was being followed. He ended up having an accidental overdose shortly afterwards. He had no history of drug use. The coroner said there were enough drugs in his system to kill a horse.”
“Oh my God,” I gasp.
“The very last time I went there, I had some kind of panic attack, just like you did tonight.” His eyes burn into mine, shining like spheres of polished amber. “When I got out of there, I drove back to college and broke down. I remember leaving my room and walking through the campus in a storm in the middle of the night. I lay down under this huge tree in the pouring rain, just lay there for hours. When I woke up the next morning, it was over for me. I called Alex and told her I never wanted to hear from her again.”
“What did she say?”
“Alexandra Frost is not the kind of woman that takes rejection well, and unfortunately I think she had feelings for me that go beyond what she usually feels for the men she fucks. I was weaker back then, younger. I didn’t know how to handle someone like her. I learned the hard way what happens to warm, caring people—people like you—when faced with people like Alex. Or Markov. Or Jack.”
“What did she do?”
“She had me followed. My place was broken into. A buddy of mine was beaten up one night, left in a bad way.”
“Jesus.”
I barely notice the people strolling fifty feet away, or the sirens blaring on nearby New York streets, or the rustle of leaves in the trees around us. As his words seep out, I catch a glimpse of that look in his eyes that I haven’t seen since the first few months I knew him at college—some veil of loneliness and of shame; the look of a man who is utterly alone; a man who sees the world through some murky filter.
“One night I woke up totally out of it,” he continues, “as if I’d been given a tranquilizer or something. I hadn’t touched a drug in months by then. Nor have I since. When I got up, there was a syringe with some brown liquid in it and a needle on my desk. Heroin. It was still full. They hadn’t injected me with it. They had drugged me somehow, maybe put something into some food or something in the fridge, and then planted the syringe in my room while I slept.”
I gasp.
“Alex wanted me to know she could have me killed.”
“Oh my God, Cameron. I’m so sorry!” I clasp my hands to my face. “Please just ignore what I said. It’s not your fault! At all. I’m just a mess right now. I had no right to be such a judgmental asshole.” I take a few steps forward and put my arms around him, hugging him tightly. “I’m so sorry. None of this is your fault—none of it!”
“It’s okay, Jess.”
“I’m sorry, Cam. I would never have asked you to take me there if I’d known—”
“I know that.”
“Did your mom know about any of this?” I ask, finally pulling away from him.
“She knew I wasn’t myself, but I had tried to hide how I felt as much as possible. In any case, there wasn’t much I felt safe talking about. When I started my second year at Brown and met you, I was still a fucking mess.” His face softens. “I never really told you what impact you had on my life—the way you were with me, the way you looked after me, our friendship… You saved my life, Jess.”
“Stop. That’s not true. You’re strong, Cam. You didn’t need saving.”
He shakes his head. “I’m strong now, but I wasn’t back then. I’ll never forget the way you looked after me. The way you’d stay with me when you sensed I was low, the weird articles you used to leave under my door to make me laugh, the hikes you would drag me on, the creepy drawings, the petitions you would force me to work on, the disgusting health food you would force down me. You brought me back to life, made me believe in people again. You saved my life, Jessynia, whether you like it or not. You were the first person who made me believe I could be a good man again.”
“Well, you deserve to know that, because you are a good man. You’re one of the best men I’ve ever known.”
He pulls a wavy lock of hair out of his eyes. “Do you want to know everything, however hard? About Jack?”
“Yes. I want to know.”
“I don’t know how much you know about the years Jack and I spent together.”
“Not enough,” I reply. “Jack was never very forthcoming about his childhood.”
“When Jack and I were about nine, he and his family came to live in the Fifth Avenue building we owned—the one we lived in at the time. My dad had hired his father Don to run security for our family. When Jack’s mom got sick, our families ended up getting close. Jack was different then. He was a great kid—funny and smart, soft almost. We’d play together for hours after school. We got in trouble more often than not, but we were… like brothers. I loved him. He loved me. I believe so, anyway. After his mom died, my parents decided they wanted to help Don and the boys, so they paid for Jack and his brothers to go to the same school as my sisters and I, just because they loved them so much.”
“Cam, I need to sit,” I interrupt, feeling weak on my feet. My stomach growls as my knees hit the earth. “Keep going.”
Cameron joins me and sits on the grass opposite me in the moonlight, caressing cool blades of grass with his strong fingers.
“When we hit puberty, we both suddenly got tall, strong. He was about thirteen when Alex and the other vultures started seriously circling him. He became one of her lovers by the age of fifteen, maybe before.”
Hearing Cameron repeat that makes my stomach lurch.
“He was no virgin when he slept with her but I could see in his eyes that he was totally captivated by her. She introduced him to a whole new world—women, power, money, connections. She believed in him, helped him. She and Markov and Sebastian Gravier taught him a lot of things about a lot of people, powerful people. Things that those people wouldn’t want others knowing about. Markov taught him how to blackmail them, put pressure on them to get what he wanted. It was Alex and Steven that got Jack his first banking job, though I doubt even she could have imagined him becoming VP within three years… or how ruthless and powerful he’d become.”
“Did Jack know you were sleeping with Alex too?”
“We both knew what was happening. We didn’t talk about it. By the time I realized there was something seriously wrong with that whole world, Jack was in deep. I tried many times to make him see how dangerous and dysfunctional the whole thing was, but he didn’t see things like I did. He liked their world. There was this bond between them, especially Jack and Alex. They understood each other in a way that me and her didn’t. As I started to pull away from her, things between Jack and I got difficult.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that he had to choose between me and them. He was torn for a long time. He tried to get me to start speaking to Alex again many times, but I couldn’t. At some point, he was put under a lot of pressure and he made his choice. He chose her. From that point on, things started to get ugly. Markov had some dirt on someone in my father’s family from many years ago. Jack used it to blackmail him.”
“Blackmail your father?”
“Yes.”
I feel hollowed out from disbelief at the thought that Jack was capable of doing such a thing to the man who had loved him so dearly and who had given his family so much.
“My father ended up paying him off. He gave him a lot of money. Jack used the money to pay for college, do whatever he had to to get ahead. I don’t know if you heard some of the rumors about him seducing teachers, blackmailing them, paying people to do his work, all the women he had? He left a trail of devastation in his wake.”
I shift uncomfortably as I try to reconcile the monster Cameron is describing with the loving and protective man that I have spent the last three years of my life with.
“Jack gave some of the money to his family. I don’t think they did much good with it,” he says.
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t have proof, but people on my payroll, security people, believe that Jack and his family are involved in organized crime—drugs, rackets, money launder—”
“What?! That’s ridiculous!”
“They’re spread all over the North East. They operate out of Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx.”
“His family, maybe, but…”
“No, not just his family.”
“That’s impossible. Why would he do that? He’s VP at an up-and-coming investment bank. He makes more money than he knows how to spend. He wouldn’t need to do that.”
“There’s a lot of stuff that Jack does that isn’t based on need. The reality is that he feels most at home with bikers in seedy bars and underground fight clubs.”
“But he’s so busy with his job already. He wouldn’t have time—”
“We don’t think Jack runs the show. Other members of his family do that. But he is involved.”
“I’ve never seen him do anything that—”
“Like I said, I don’t have proof.”
I shake my head, touching my palms to the earth, trying to expel the nervous energy flooding my body.
“What he did to your father was so wrong,” I say softly. “I don’t blame you for hating him.”
“That isn’t the only reason I hated him. After I cut contact with Alex, she tried to get to me through my family. I’m pretty sure it was her and Vallen that pressured Jack into blackmailing my father. I highly doubt he would have ever done that on his own. Apparently, it wasn’t enough for her. I heard from a reliable source that Alex had tried to get Vallen to seduce Evelyn.”
“Your sister?”
“She knew about Vallen’s reputation. She wouldn’t touch that psychopath with a barge pole. So Alex called Jack in to do the job.”
“Jack… seduce Evie?” I gasp as a gust of wind whips my skin.
He nods, his face hard.
“When?”
“The year before you first met him. When I found out that he’d been spending time with Evie, I tried to warn her. I told her about all the women he’d had and discarded. I even told her about the blackmail. By the time I told her, it was too late. Jack had gotten into her head. She didn’t want to hear it. She was besotted by him, to say the least. It wasn’t hard for him to convince her I had it in for him. Jack’s a lot smoother than Vallen. He knows the effect he has on women. When I realized I couldn’t get through to her, I confronted Jack, told him I knew that Alex had put him up to it and to stay away from Evie. He denied it having anything to do with Alex, said that he cared about Evie. I almost believed it. One day, after they’d been dating in secret for three months, he just disappeared from her life. She was frantic. She called him, emailed him, went to his place—nothing. After a few days, she caught him leaving his apartment with another woman and confronted him. He told her to go fuck herself.” The words burst out in a hail of sharp bitterness. “She cried herself to sleep for months. It was the end of our friendsh—”
“Cameron, stop! I’m sorry. I can’t hear anymore!”