Her mother inhaled, darting toward us. “Um, actually, Charles, we’ll wait with Winter in the library.” She came up and grabbed Winter, pulling her away from me. “If you could send Erika there when she arrives…”
“Of course.”
Margot, Arion, and Winter filtered into the corridor, and my head started swimming with all the possibilities now laying in front of me. I wasn’t sure if she thought about me or what she thought about me, but I knew she wouldn’t forget me. She would never be able to forget.
The door closed behind them, and I saw Griffin Ashby, our city mayor, start to follow, but then he stopped as he reached me.
I stared at his profile, his dark gray suit and blue tie perfectly pressed as he focused ahead, refusing to spare me any eye contact.
“Someday you’ll be in a cage,” he said. “And hopefully sooner rather than later, so you can’t do any more damage. Mr. Kincaid will fill you in on the do’s and don’ts while my youngest is in attendance at this school.” And then he finally turned his head to look at me with disdain “Mark my words, if you fail to behave, I will end you, and it’ll be for good.”
Turning away, he left the office, and my lips twitched with a smile. Six years ago, his little girl and I changed each other, and while I couldn’t change her back, I could certainly give her some new memories of me.
Now that… I could do.
It was settled, then.
I heard Mr. Kincaid clear his throat as he held his office door open for me. “Mr. Torrance, if you please?”
Damon
Present
“Ten moves and you have me,” Mr. Garin told me. “Do you see it?”
I stared at the board between us, calculating the moves I needed to make for checkmate while trying to anticipate his counter moves.
Yeah, I see it. But what fun would that be?
I reached for my pawn at E2.
“Don’t,” he scolded.
And he shot me the same look I’d seen since I was a kid.
But I couldn’t resist. Unable to hold in my small smile, I ignored him and moved it to E4.
He let out a sigh and shook his head, exasperated with the lack of control and strategy he failed at drilling into me all those long afternoons after school, years ago, when he worked for my father.
Or he thought he failed at drilling it into me, anyway. People assumed I behaved strictly on impulse, when actually, it required quite a bit of strategy being this fucked up.
House music pounded downstairs, the club already packed with college girls, young professionals, and anyone else in the twenty-something set able to spring for the three-hundred-dollar bottle of vodka or champagne just to be able to sit at a damn table.
I’d spent plenty of time down there in the crowd and noise in high school with my friends. Now I just kept a private room upstairs on reserve to catch up with Kostya Garin, one of my father’s old bodyguards who now organized security for this club. Fifty-nine years old, gray goatee, and the same black suits he always wore when he worked for my father, he still had more muscles than me, and he was one of the few people I had, at least, some regard for.
I would do business with him.
I would trust anything he had to say.
I would attend his funeral.
There weren’t many people I’d sit through a whole service for.
But we weren’t friends, and we never discussed anything personal. He taught me things, but he never complicated it with trying to be my father. He was one of the perks I came here for.
The other…
“I want to leave,” a girl spoke up from the other side of the room as if on cue.