by Ryan Schow
Raven
Ryan B. Schow
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RAVEN
Copyright © 2016 Ryan Schow. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, cloned, stored in or introduced into any information storage or retrieval system, in any form, or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical without the express written permission of the author. The scanning, uploading and distribution of this eBook via the Internet or via any other means without the express written permission of the author or publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Author’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents—and their usage for storytelling purposes—are crafted for the singular purpose of fictional entertainment and no absolute truths shall be derived from the information contained within. Locales, businesses, events, government institutions and private institutions are used for atmospheric, entertainment and fictional purposes only. Furthermore, any resemblance or reference to an actual living person is used solely for atmospheric, entertainment and fictional purposes.
The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
Cover Design by Milo at Deranged Doctor Design
Visit the Author’s Website:
www.RyanSchow.com
See Note To Reader at the end of the book for information on upcoming titles as well as a sneak peek at the next book in the series.
Other Works of Fiction by This Author
From the Swann Series Novels (In Order)
VANNIE
SWANN
MONARCH
CLONE
MASOCHIST
WEAPON
RAVEN
ABOMINATION
ENIGMA
This book is dedicated to the countless survivors of the mind control programs that ran from the nineteen fifties to the nineteen seventies. TRANCE-FORMATION OF AMERICA, Cathy O’Brien’s biography of survival and the first book I read on this subject, painted an horrific story of untold abuses by the nation’s leading mind scientists. Despite the controversy surrounding this subject and the constant speculation of such a program’s existence, the very possibility that mind control and the deliberate creation of multiple personalities could exist serves as the inspiration behind critical elements of the Swann Series novels. Although these programs were officially shut down in nineteen seventy-three with irrefutable proof they did exist, experts still argue that similar programs continue today, and that there are more than two million mind controlled slaves currently living in America.
Table of Contents
The Delicious Middle
Midnight Truths and a Fragile Lie
Rich People Problems
The Raven, the Redhead and the Abomination
Sore Tits
Out of the Flames…
Unraveling
Raven, the Ruiner of Lives
Kidney Bean Bastard Child
Paris is Lovely This Time of Year
Plan B
The Astor Disaster Begins
Dreams Yet To Be Dreamt
The Weakness in Obsession
The Locked Room in the Cube
The Abigail Debacle
Fifty Shades of Never
The Poo Parade
Preggo My Ego
The Vast Nothingness
Fundamentally Loathsome
New Beginnings
Baby Bumps and Baby Dumps
Tossed Garbage
Important Note to Reader
Available Titles in This Series
Book 7 of the Swann Series Novels: ABOMINATION
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THERE’S NOTHING QUITE AS EXCITING AS GOING BACK TO THE BEGINNING…
Only the fly on the wall and your therapist know your darkest secrets. Today you get to be the fly.
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“Leonardo’s Mona Lisa is just a thousand thousand smears of paint. Michelangelo’s David is just a million hits with a hammer. We’re all of us a million bits put together the right way.”
– CHUCK PALAHNIUK, DIARY
The Delicious Middle
1
Sometimes you get plopped right down in the middle of your dreams. There is no logical beginning, and the ending is a mystery you’ll never solve. But dreams needn’t always make sense. Sometimes their slice-of-life feel and their Salvador Dali type of surrealism has you wondering, why can’t I stay here forever? Why must I wake to reality?
Where I am, in this dream, it isn’t the beginning, and it isn’t the ending, but what do I care? All I’m really craving is the delicious middle anyway.
2
I dream of a boy, of my insatiable desire for him, how it’s almost hypnotic the way my body moves restless against his. He smells fresh. OMG, his skin. The way his hair brushes heavy against my nose has me leaning into him. Needing him. Aching to know what he’s thinking, if he likes me the way I like him.
If he wants me the same way I want him.
We’re alone in a bedroom, dressed, him pressed against me. The lights are dim, my body a furnace against the slight chill in the air. In the background, lounge music sets the tone of the evening—the kind of music that works its way inside of you and has you yearning for something extraordinary.
His face shifts against mine, his stubble on my baby soft skin. I feel so very, very feline. My fingers rake his hair. I breathe him in. Dissolve. He smells like the beach, like traces of sunscreen. I melt against him with the most submissive sigh…
Our lips brush by each other. The softness of them touching for merely a moment. The connection, my ultimate surrender, it’s near. My eyes close on their own, pulled shut with the feeling that I am nothing, and I’m everything.
Then he does it.
He kisses me long and slow, his approach unrushed. The warm sugar taste of his mouth becomes the drug I won’t survive. I’m addicted. A slave to the lust of it. To him. More than anything I’ve ever experienced in my life, I’m desperate to give him everything, to renounce to him my will, my very existence.
Everything.
Right now, the dream version of me, as satiated and restless as she is, she’s wondering, what does he look like? Who is this man I’m with? This man who I am about to give myself to? Instinctively, the woman blossoming inside me wants to be dominated by him, owned by him. I want to be taken. Swept away. So really, in this moment, I don’t care who he is.
He just feels right.
So I’m pulling down my defenses, becoming vulnerable, daring. What reassures me, has me pushing forward, is the odd familiarity of him. The safety I feel in him. It’s like he’s mine. Like he was born to be mine. I want this man.
Oh my God, I need him.
Midnight T
ruths and a Fragile Lie
1
It was midnight. Outside Brayden’s hotel window, the San Francisco skyline shone like speckles of illuminated white against an ink blackened canvas of night. Netty was on her way. Then this: the phone call.
The damn detective.
“This is Detective Tyler Bateman with the Santa Monica Police Department and I would like to ask you some questions about Demetrius and Bryn Giardino. I believe you and your friend visited their home recently?”
Sitting in his hotel room on the cell phone, the last thing Brayden wanted to do was talk to the police. Moments ago, all he could think of was having sex with Netty. Now, he prayed he could keep himself and Abby out of jail.
He said nothing.
“I’m sure you’ve seen the news,” Detective Bateman continued. Over the phone, the man sounded tired, his voice bumping along with the dull rake of ambivalence. It was midnight, for Christ’s sake.
Weeks ago, he expected—no he feared—the police would contact him about Bryn and Demetrius Giardino, but the passing of time left him feeling a sense of false confidence. Like maybe he could put it all behind him. But this call was proof he couldn’t.
“Hello?” Detective Bateman said. “Mr. James?”
Brayden snapped out of it. “Yes, Detective, I heard you. I’m just…you’ll have to excuse me, I just drove into town from Las Vegas, and it’s midnight—”
“I apologize for the lateness of the hour,” he said, but Brayden didn’t believe him to be sorry for one second.
Instead, he was frantically thinking about possible trace evidence left at the scene. It could be anywhere. Everywhere! Fibers from his clothes, a stray hair, dried skin cells. A hand print, a shoe print or a freaking eyelash! For God’s sake, what did he leave behind?! There had to be something linking him to the scene, otherwise the detective wouldn’t be calling.
“To answer your question, I don’t watch the news,” Brayden replied, coolly despite the pit of vipers squirming around in his gut. “I find it to be too political, too contrived and entirely too negative for my tastes. The world’s already negative enough, don’t you agree, Detective?”
“So you don’t know about the open investigation?” he asked. There was so much weight to the question…
“This business of calling me in the middle of the night,” Brayden said, “it’s inexcusable. A misstep in etiquette. Now I’m tired. I’ve been driving all night, and I prefer we continue this conversation at a more reasonable hour, if you don’t mind.”
“I’ve already apologized—”
“That doesn’t make it right.” More than anything he wanted to hang up on the man and pretend for one last night he and Abby had gotten away clean.
“I’ve been calling all day. I figured perhaps I would try a more…unusual hour.”
Brayden’s phone never once rang, not at all that day, and not at all the day before.
“An unusual hour would be ten-thirty, or perhaps eleven. I shouldn’t have to remind you it’s midnight, Detective. That’s not unusual, that’s just plain rude.”
“If we could dispense with the false posturing, Brayden, I only need a moment or two.”
Brayden chose a different tact.
“Honestly, if you want me to dispense with…whatever, my posturing and my distaste for your absence of etiquette, that’s fine. I can do that. The truth is, I’m tired, Detective. Tired and irritated. It’s that scumbag, Demetrius Giardino. If you knew what I knew about him…”
“Which is?”
“Demetrius Giardino is not the shiny penny everyone thinks he is,” Brayden said, talking like the man was still alive even though Brayden knew he wasn’t.
“Do elaborate.”
“I shouldn’t. I mean, my friend—damn, I shouldn’t…I guess it doesn’t matter anymore. Or maybe it does, I don’t know.” He paused for effect, then said, “But it’s late and we’re already talking, so whatever. It has to be said.” Brayden drew a stabilizing breath, calmed himself, then really reached for that Golden Globe performance. “If I had information that would, say, prove a person is taking advantage of underage girls looking to break into the music industry, would you be the person to speak with?”
Pause.
A long pause.
The longest pause ever, then: “Well now this is a curious change of direction,” Detective Bateman said. And that was it. He didn’t bother to elaborate. He simply let the statement hang on the edge of the world.
In the background, Brayden heard nothing. Infinite silence. Was the detective in the precinct? Where was he calling from at this hour?
Brayden was about to continue when Detective Bateman continued. “Perhaps you’d like to expand upon the details of this so called proof.”
He swallowed so hard it hurt his throat. “Say you could run down video evidence of the rape of a minor. Would that be compelling enough to open an investigation?”
“Video evidence?” Bateman asked, his interest clearly peaking.
Brayden hoped the police found Giardino’s rape videos. If Santa Monica PD’s computer forensics team was on point, and he was certain they were, then they would have found them on the music producer’s hard drive.
“Yes.”
Bateman said, “And who was raped in this video?”
“My friend Maggie Jaynes. But don’t bother trying to contact her because she committed suicide. That’s why this almost doesn’t matter.” He was surprised at the emotion that snuck into his voice. He sounded belligerent. Then again, tucked beneath the anger was a sadness he could not contain.
“She killed herself? Why?”
“Are you even listening, Detective?” Brayden asked, his tone biting.
“Of course.”
“Then why do you think she killed herself, man? It was that flaming asshole. So please, please, PLEASE tell me you’re calling because you finally caught the bastard. I’ll testify if you need me to. I saw the video.”
The detective was silent for a moment, and then Brayden thought he heard a pocket-sized laugh on the other end of the line. “You know why I’m calling,” the detective said. Something in his voice slicked Brayden’s skin with ice. A hard chill drove itself down into his bones.
Of course he knew why the detective called: they found the pedophile and his wife dead. Shot to death. And the fact that he was now speaking to said detective meant they had evidence on him, evidence he was there. They wouldn’t reach out otherwise.
“Ten bucks and a bag of chips says that douchebag filed a complaint. I knew he would, that clump of shit. What is it? What’s he saying about us?” Brayden was now sweating, and pacing, really trying to wrangle this dinosaur.
“You said ‘us,’” Bateman said, prompting Brayden to finish what he started.
“We visited him, me and my friend Abby. But you already know that. You already said as much. Whatever. This was after Maggie killed herself.” He took a long, uninterrupted pause without even so much as a breath from the detective. Then: “That…pervert…he was texting her. Maggie, I mean. Not Abby. He text her a video of her and him…doing it…but as blackmail. It was a threat. She missed several days of recording her new album because she was traumatized. He manipulated her, stole her virginity. It was how he sealed the deal on her recording contract, apparently. By taking advantage of her youth and innocence. Then he secretly filmed her. Her father didn’t know about all this. She didn’t want her father, or anyone else to see it. But Abby saw it, then I saw it, so it’s real.”
“And you didn’t contact the police?”
“We weren’t thinking clearly. I mean, we were, but after Maggie…did what she did…we just wanted to hurt him, you know, by showing his wife the video. And then we’d turn it over to the police and let them sort it out. We figured that would be the best way to ruin him.”
“You’re saying you saw Bryn Giardino?”
“I just said that, Detective.”
“And you showed her the video?”
“Abby did.”
“So where’d the gun come from?” the detective asked. He didn’t ask if there was a gun, he only asked where the gun came from.
Abby’s gun, the one he helped her buy illegally.
2
In her head, Julie Sanderson, a.k.a. Julie Satan, said the words over and over and over again, like a mantra, but to the tune of near desperation: I will not get pregnant this summer.
Her philosophy was if she said the words enough, she would eventually believe them, and that she would indeed, not get pregnant again.
The clock next to her bed said it was late. Just after midnight. She drew the blankets to her chin and rolled over, her mind a riot of emotion. She was thinking about dinner. How it left her in this anxious state of wanting.
Dinner had been at the long mahogany table in their overly ostentatious dining room. Her step-brother, Emery, sat to her left; her step-sister Constance was to her right. They both looked amazing. Especially Emery. He was growing his hair out again. It was shoulder length in the back, thick and slightly curly, and longish up front, too. His bangs fell to his nose at least, but he’d pushed them back behind his ears so his face could take center stage.
And what a gorgeous face it was.
He had heavy eyebrows and summer tanned skin and dark eyes that were always narrow with some mysterious emotion whenever he looked at her. She wondered if he was in love with her, or if this was all a game. It was probably a game.
But it could be love…
She was thinking of Emery, yet she was consumed by Constance. The smell of her. Her perfume bore the sweetest nectar scent, its delicate fragrance so airy and intoxicating it could’ve been the worst tease ever.
During prayer, under the table, Constance—her beautiful Persian step-sister—took her hand and Julie held it briefly. She liked the feel of her step-sister. Beside her, Emery traced a finger lightly up and down the outside of her thigh.
