Part 6.
The firm was generous, Aziz offering me four weeks off with pay to deal with the trauma, though as part of the package I was supposed to attend counseling. Now, I wasn't much for that one-on-one therapist crap, which I think is Oprah goop for the soft-minded, so I chose group therapy for trauma survivors. Where I sat, listening to these sad-sacks tell about their crappy lives, not sharing and biding my time.
When I wasn't in therapy, I didn't mope. Instead, I took matters into my own hands. Because after Old Man Sterling stepped down, leaving his son Trey in charge, the firm had grown more contemporary. More like a hedge fund, earning our investors fatter returns than our traditional "buy IBM or this balanced mutual fund, and hold it for thirty years" approach.
Problem was, I didn't understand the new products much, which made it harder to sell clients. And while I took finance classes in undergrad, it was mostly staid, traditional stuff. Like you owned a firm and ACTUALLY wanted to make the best widgets in the world. And you had to figure the future benefit versus the cost of an investment in a new widget machine
As if.
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Me, I wanted to create money from air, like they did on Wall Street. And fast. We're talking the high-octane, high-stakes world of futures and derivatives trading, and the secrets of modern financial engineering.
Widgets? Making stuff in... factories? Right. Just show me the cheddar!
This was the world Trey was pushing the firm towards. So, to advance my career, and maybe earn enough to open my own firm one day, I took an online course from the New York Institute of Finance on using best-in-class tools to build a resilient portfolio. Though heavy on the math, at its core it was a hands-on, no BS course outlining advanced trading strategies, like straddles and arbitrage and all that. Brilliant stuff.
I could smell the cheddar in my future.
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Through it all, the Capital City Police kept me in the loop. After the rape kit came back, they arrested Squee, PJ, and three other brothers based on DNA evidence. Which made me even more disgusted. Five dudes raped me. Five.
And it turned out Squee had loads of GBH in his room, stashed under a loose floorboard, next to a half-once of coke. And since word of the arrest had gotten around campus, several other girls have stepped forward claiming to have been roofied.
What the fuck was the matter with my Omega brothers?