Chapter 66: There’s Only One Cure for Nightmares Starring Pomeranians with Sensitive Digestive Systems

Octavia’s body fell back to the bed as her mouth released a breathless sigh.

The last of a series of tremors coursed through her body, leaving her limbs and torso weak, but her whole self thoroughly satiated.

“That was good,” she said between her panting.

Raemon’s head emerged from between her legs. He kissed his way up from her middle to her neck, covering spots on her goosebumped flesh with his lips.

“All better?” he murmured with his lips against her neck.

“I’m mostly better,” Octavia said. She gave him a bright but mischievous smile. “One more time will completely cure my sadness.”

Raemon smirked as he settled himself beside her. “That’s what you said the last time.”

“Did I? I don’t remember that.”

“How convenient.” Raemon snaked an arm under Octavia and pulled her body close to him. She rested her head on his shoulder and let her fingers trail over the tight, hard muscles of his chest.

“Now that we don’t have to go to these charity things, that doesn’t mean you’ll stop making up for it, does it?” she asked.

“Are you still in need my services?”

“I’m still haunted by the lunch thing. When I close my eyes, I see myself getting eaten alive by gluten-sensitive Pomeranians. It’s going to take a lot of work on your part to keep the nightmares away.”

She propped herself up on one elbow to look down at Raemon’s face.

Raemon didn’t lose his smirk. “Don’t worry. I’m sure I’ll be able to keep your mind off the Pomeranians.” He wound his fingers through the wild, curly locks of her hair.

“At least something good comes out of listening to what’s-her-name gush over Rodolfo.” Octavia sighed. “And I guess sometimes the lovely Miss Scott can be good for something.”

A sharp change came over Raemon’s face. “You met Lila?”

Octavia nodded. “We…talked a little,” she said. “Don’t worry, no beverages were thrown in anyone’s face. By either of us.”

“I suspected she might be there,” Raemon said grimly. “Her father is on the board for the foundation that hosted the event.”

Octavia frowned. “You could have warned me.”

“I meant to. But you were supposed to stay with me at all times.”

“A girl has to go to the bathroom at some point. And anyway, I’m pretty sure I could kick her ass if she decided to attack me or something. I would have the advantage; she was in heels.”

“But the odds would have been less in your favor if she’d brought Lucas again.”

“I bet I could kick his ass too.”

“Ambitious of you, but between the two of us, it won’t be you kicking his ass.”

Octavia noted the hard edge that had seeped into Raemon’s voice. She once again rested her head on his shoulder.

She lay beside him, watching his chest rise and fall with his breath while pondering whether she should ask the burning question on her mind. Eventually, she went for it.

“What happened between you and Lucas?” Octavia asked.

Raemon’s only response was a tightening of his grip around her body and stony silence.

“Come on,” Octavia urged, “all I have is Lucas’s side of the story, which I know is wrong. Can’t you at least give me some small detail?”

Seconds ticked by with her watching his breathing. She wondered what expression his face bore, how furious it was.

“We were friends,” Raemon suddenly said, “like brothers. He was always over at my apartment, or I was at his. We did everything together.”

“Was it true you lived in the same building? And went to the same high school?”

“We did,” Raemon replied. “We both got scholarships to a prestigious private high school. We worked hard to get admitted.

“It was the kind of school that if you went there, an Ivy League university would definitely accept you. Of course, being that kind of school, it was mostly populated by a certain kind of people.”

“Upper-class people,” Octavia said.

“Yes. And to them, the two scholarship students who got bused in from the ghetto each morning just didn’t belong. They would have made our lives a living hell.”

“Would have?”

“It was because of Lucas. He’s always been a smooth talker. He knew how to get people to like him.

“As much as the other boys wanted to hate him, he was the one who came through with the keg of beer for all their parties, the one who could supply weed.

“He was suave, and he seemed self-assured. People came to sort of worship him. By being his friend, I got by unscathed. And the two of us looked out for each other.

“He made sure the rest of the students saw us in a good light, I would do some of his assignments, if he didn’t have the time to finish them.”

“Kinda sounds like you got played.”

Octavia felt his chest tighten underneath her cheek.

“That was only the beginning.” Raemon’s voice took on a distinct bitterness. “We graduated high school and went to separate colleges. When we graduated college, we started a business together.

“It was just us two guys in a cheap rented room. But we had all these plans; we were going to do so many great things. But Lucas had changed.

“I guess he had been changing even before he went to Harvard. He’d always been a good talker, but back when we were kids, he at least had some innovative ability.

“When we started our business, it became clear that he was more of a salesman than a creator. So, he did just that. I created our products, and he went out to convince someone to buy it. And he did.”

Octavia was silent and still, waiting for Raemon to continue.

“He was different. He wanted more. All through the years, he’d gotten sick of being the ‘disadvantaged’ kid.

“He got tired of catering to the needs of wealthy, upper-class families—of being their token ghetto friend who could and would supply them with whatever they needed to get stoned or blackout drunk.

“And in college, being surrounded by all those people from wealthy families—it didn’t help his envy.

“He confided in me how unfair it was that he and I had to work twice as hard for just a little of what his classmates got for free, whether they deserved it or not.

“The business became so important to him. We had to succeed. It was the only way we could be anything. The only way he could be anything in the eyes of all those people.”

“What about you?”

“I knew how he felt. But I thought it was useless to rail against reality. I just wanted to create things. To build systems and solutions.

“I wanted to find a way to make money doing it, to support my mother and me.”

“But then…?”

“But then…he met this girl. And according to him, he fell for her. She was from a wealthy family, and from what I could tell, just having whatever fun she could with some desperate, lower-class guy.

“We were about to go through with a huge project. We had a key design that we would be selling to a tech company for eighty million dollars.

“And then we were negotiating a contract to continue to supply them with our other designs in the future for even more profit. It was supposed to be the start of it all.

“That was the moment we were supposed to make our mark.”

Again, Raemon’s body tightened against her.

“Lucas had arranged the deal…but I was the one who created the products. He knew that. I knew that. And eventually…she found out.”

During his pause, Octavia asked, “What was her name?”

“I don’t know…Annabelle…Alisa, or something,” Raemon said dismissively. “Lucas foolishly told her about the upcoming sale, probably just to impress her.

“But she was smart enough to know that he was only the salesperson. She could tell we were going places, and she decided she wanted to trade up the salesman of the company for the creator.

“She went behind Lucas’s back and tried to come on to me. But I wouldn’t have it. I’d never do that to a friend. And besides, I wasn’t even remotely attracted to her.

“I don’t really like blondes…especially wealthy, spoiled ones.”

The thought of a certain someone came up, but Octavia decided to keep the comment to herself.

“I don’t know what she told Lucas, but he seemed to think that it was me who was hitting on her. We had the worst fight ever, and he stormed out of our office.”

Raemon paused. Octavia felt that he was steeling himself to relive the most painful part of the Lucas story.

“I didn’t hear from him for days. Then he emailed me, apologizing. He said he realized I was telling the truth, and that he’d broken up with her.

“With the sale coming up, Lucas told me to fly out to the city for the weekend. He was already at the location where we were supposed to meet with the buyers and sign the final contracts.

“But when I flew out to meet him…”

Raemon’s voice trailed off, and the silence of the room swallowed the last of his words. Finally, he spoke again.

“He wasn’t there. And when I came back, all of our things were gone. Our office, our workspace, the computers where all the designs and proposals were saved…everything.”

Something tore at Octavia’s soul at the thought of walking into an empty room, a room that had once been filled with all your ideas and hard work.

The results of one’s intellectual labor and sweat. All of that—just gone.

“He took everything,” Raemon continued. His voice was no longer bitter but empty and flat. Emotionless.

“He finished up the sale as the sole owner of our product. None of the buyers had ever even seen me, so of course they had no problem signing off an eighty-million-dollar check to him.

“He got everything, including all the other concepts and designs I had been working on. He sold them all. He got all that money. And I got nothing.”

“Couldn’t you take legal action?” Octavia asked.

“Oh, I tried. But Lucas, however incompetent he might be, was able to cover his tracks. It would have taken twice as much money to build a case against him than I would have won from a lawsuit.

“And I was in no position to hire an expensive lawyer. I had been supporting myself and my mother from the business, and now all that money was gone. Lucas had all the contacts.

“When they wanted my expertise, they went to him. No one knew who I was. Even when I tried to create something for other buyers, I couldn’t.

“He spread rumors about me, making people think I was some kind of fraud. He was one of them by then, so of course they believed him.”

Raemon’s hands went numb against Octavia’s body. The emptiness in his voice seemed to swallow his next words.

“I would have hated him, but I was so desperate then to keep a roof over my mother’s head that I went to him and begged him for a job.” He gave a short, mirthless laugh.

“I’ll never forget the look on his face. It was the exact same way the kids at our school looked at us.”

A strange feeling overcame Octavia. She was thinking back to all of their previous interactions. So much of it made sense. The encounters were still as dark and messed up as ever, but she could see it now.

She could see the line stretching through time that had led the Raemon Kentworth of back then to the Raemon Kentworth of the present.

“I should be grateful to him,” Raemon continued. The bitterness had returned.

“If he hadn’t turned everyone against me, if he hadn’t stabbed me in the back like that, I might still be making things for which he’d get the credit.

“But his actions only forced me to work harder than ever. I created tech ten times as good as what I’d done before. And since no one in this country would buy my products, I looked overseas.

“I found alternative ways to get buyers—and then investors. When the market crashed here and many of the companies went down with it, Icarus thrived.

“Lucas could only survive on the profit of my intellect for so long. I saw it coming—him selling our company. I hired someone to pose as a buyer and bought it from him.

“And I made sure he knew that I had taken back what was rightfully mine.”

“So he ran off to real estate, huh?”

“He goes wherever his smooth talking can get him in. He’s always seemed and sounded a lot more important than he is. At the end of the day, it’s all just talk.”

After a few minutes of silence, Octavia felt the need to change the subject.

“So, why did you name your company ‘Icarus’?”

“I’ve always been intrigued Greek mythology. In those stories, no matter how simple it was for a person to achieve their goal, they’d always do the one thing that would bring their plans crashing down.

“I was obsessed by the story of Icarus.

“A brilliant inventor and his son are locked up in a tower overlooking the sea, imprisoned by a barbaric king who was once his patron but now held him captive for his innovative abilities.

“The inventor builds two pairs of wings using feathers from blankets and wax from candles—the only things he was allowed to have in his prison.

“With these, he and his son are able to escape the tower by flying over the sea. They would have made it to the distant shore and been free as long as they didn’t fly too close to the sun.

“The heat would melt the wax holding the wings together.”

“And that’s exactly what happened, isn’t it?”

“Icarus got too cocky. He flew higher and higher…and ended up falling into the sea below. In the end, the weight of the water-soaked wings pulled him down. He drowned.

“When I was younger, I worshipped the character of Icarus’s father—a brilliant inventor whose genius allowed him to escape from his captors.

“We…Lucas and I…named our company after him, Daedalus.” He paused.

“After everything that happened, I decided to name my company Icarus as a reminder. No matter how smart and innovative you are, the people around you will betray you, as the king betrayed Daedalus.

“And one wrong move can swiftly bring about your demise.”

Again, Octavia propped herself on one shoulder and looked down at Raemon. The face she observed now was very different.

This was the same granite expression she’d seen him wear before, and the emptiness that had been in his voice now filled his eyes.

“I’m sorry that happened to you, Raemon,” Octavia said.

Raemon said nothing to this. He brought his hand to her neck, stroking the skin down to her collarbone, with a distant look in his eyes.

“Promise me you won’t see that man again,” Raemon said. Only then did he focus his gaze on Octavia. His eyes locked with hers, and he held them there with the intense urgency of his command.

Octavia nodded. “I don’t want to see him ever again. Asshole.”

Raemon gave her a weak, mirthless smile, then drew her face down to his. He kissed her long and hard. She lay her head down against his chest and felt the sure grip of his arms circling her body.

Raemon said, “You’re mine, Octavia. I won’t let him hurt you.” His words were fierce.

“He won’t,” Octavia said softly.

But as she lay there against his bare chest, it wasn’t the thought of herself being hurt that left an uneasy feeling in the pit of her stomach.