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  Breakdown: The Perversion Records Series

  Copyright © 2019 by Aly Zigada

  All Rights Reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by information storage and retrieval system, without written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law and in the case of brief quotations embodied in articles or reviews.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  License Note

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only, and may not be resold or given away to other individuals. If you would like to share this book with another person, purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then return to your preferred ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the craft and intellectual property rights of this author.

  Cover Design and Interior Formatting: Qamber Designs & Media

  For those who find comfort in books that twist and hurt.

  It’s okay—I got you.

  SOUNDTRACK

  Music is the dark heart and sinful soul of Perversion Records.

  “All I Ask” Adele

  “All I Need” Within Temptation

  “All My Life” K-Ci & JoJo

  “Antidote” Travis Scott

  “Black Flag of Hate” Communic

  “Changes” 2Pac

  “Crazy in Love” (remix) Beyoncé

  “Dance of the Seven Veils” (Salome Op. 54) Richard Strauss

  “Duality” Slipknot

  “Everybody Loves Me But You” Brenda Lee

  “Get Back” Ludacris

  “Grenade” Bruno Mars

  “Hate Me” Blue October

  “I Don’t Give a Fuck” Lil Jon & The East Side Boyz

  “I’ll Be There for You” Bon Jovi

  “In My Blood” Shawn Mendes

  “Lean Wit It, Rock Wit It” Dem Franchize Boyz ft. Peanut & Charlay

  “Like A Prayer” Madonna

  “Love Story” (instrumental) The O’Neill Brothers Group

  “Magic Man” Heart

  “My All” Mariah Carey

  “My Girl” The Temptations

  “Never Be the Same” Camila Cabello

  “No Diggity” Blackstreet ft. Dr. Dre

  “Palace” Sam Smith

  “Perfect” Ed Sheeran

  “Power is Power” SZA, The Weeknd, Travis Scott

  “Pussy is Mine” Miguel

  “Put On” Young Jeezy

  “Salt Shaker” Ying Yang Twins

  “Smells Like Teen Spirit” Nirvana

  “Soldier” Destiny’s Child ft. T.I. and Lil’ Wayne

  “Somebody to Love” Queen

  “The Middle” Zedd, Maren Morris, Grey

  “This Woman’s Work” Maxwell

  “Trading Places” Usher

  “Where Echoes Gather” Communic

  “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?” Carole King

  “Would?” Alice in Chains

  Listen to the soundtrack on Spotify

  A friend is nothing but a known enemy.

  — Kurt Cobain

  PROLOGUE

  Two years ago...

  Imogen Creed

  When I was seven years old, Mama whispered in my ear, “Grow up and do something dangerous.” Before I could ask what she meant, her chapped lips brushed the tears from my cheeks and her shallow laughter tangled in my hair. It’s that kiss—Mama’s last—I hold in my memory, that feather’s quiver of breath in my amber strands that I sometimes sense when I’m on the verge of fucking up beyond redemption.

  I feel it now, and though I’m twenty-two and still don’t know what Mama meant by dangerous, I’m goddamn certain she didn’t intend for me to find myself naked against a wall of glass with a speedball in my system and a tattooed billionaire’s hand tight around my neck.

  The odds of dying tonight are high—from a lethal cocktail of illicit drugs or a violent encounter—but I proposition my personal driver anyway. Five figures to get behind the wheel of my Tesla and escort me to the Moss plantation. The platinum stud in his dimple catches the light as he frowns in offense at the words Moss plantation. A slave hasn’t been lashed on the grounds for over a hundred years, but if I can’t ignore my bloody history, why the fuck should Atlanta?

  His eyes stall on the gold-clipped bills I pull from my purse. When I said five figures, I meant crisp, unmarked cash.

  The car is new. Pimped and iced, free and clear. If Jordi delivers me to my destination and manages to escape with his beautiful body intact, then he keeps the car. If he’s a casualty of the bridges I burned racing to the top of every list from Billboard to Forbes, well, then he’ll understand why my attorneys included injury and fatality as occupational hazards in the employment agreement he signed. I’m alluring to darkness; it’s drawn to me. But Creed money doesn’t merely talk—it sings a rich and desperate and seductive melody that few can resist.

  Jordi takes the wad without offering an answer. His hair, plaited on the sides and sectioned into four braids, swings like long ropes as he secures the cash and pulls out a handgun. He eclipses me in size, strength, and venom.

  Only a few short years ago I pissed my Gucci skinny jeans when his men caught me stealing industry contacts from the back room of his Zone 3 barbecue dive during an open mic night. To get out alive—literally to walk away with my “rich white bitch” brains still in my head—I appealed to him, insisting that I was after some trap contacts who’d listen to me rap. That was half-true. The other half of that truth? I was a fierce-as-fuck teenage businesswoman addicted to music, cocaine, and turning my inheritance into an empire.

  Urine soaking my legs, I stared into the barrel of Jordi’s gun and freestyled—and I left that night with chipotle ribs in my belly and critical names added to my phone.

  I’m no longer afraid of him. Instead I’m afraid for him. The people I care about never stay. Death took Granddaddy Creed and my parents like a heartless thief. Music ripped the soul right out of my brother’s body, proving that even rock gods are mortal men, leaving a shell that fans still mourn and idolize. And my friends…

  “I need to get to the Moss plantation, Jordi. Now.”

  Another frown carves into his face, and his brown eyes narrow. The sharp curl of reckless anxiety in my voice is never difficult to miss if you listen closely enough.

  “What you doing, Imogen, chasing the Reaper?”

  “I chase no man.”

  “One—when ain’t you chasing a man? Two—the Reaper’s a spirit. Your ass had to go and turn it into a man.”

  “Stop,” I tell him. “I pay you to drive, not psychoanalyze.”

  “What do you think you’ll accomplish, going to a place where you don’t belong?” he challenges.

  “Fuck this rhetoric of belonging and not belonging.” When he snorts, I double down. “If no one ever came along to challenge that shit, to say fuck that, then you and I would be drinking from separate water fountains.”

  “A restraining order and Jim Crow laws are not the same. Don’t get that shit twisted, sweetheart.” The way he says sweetheart hurts as profoundly as a strike to the face. I would’ve preferred the strike. Calmly, he lodges the gun into the ass crack of his pants and casts a meaningful look about the Creed family ballroom that once hosted elite celebrities and heralded diplomats and the
poshest parties in Georgia but now offers empty, silent grief. “Oh… You’re in a corner, ain’t you? Scared pussy—”

  “Hey—”

  “—cat.” He hitches his chin, then captures mine. “Tell me why I shouldn’t throw your money on the fucking floor and quit this shit.”

  “Because you love me.”

  Jordi nods. “Yeah. That’s the fuckin’ truth. I love you enough to tell you to stay the hell away from that place.”

  “It’s my legacy. My birthright.” The Moss plantation stopped being that when my grandfather bought the estate and turned it into Perversion Records several decades ago. “It’s my fucking heart, Jordi. Take it away and I might as well be dead.”

  My voice is as fragile as Mama’s on the afternoon she died. It was snowing that day—not the faux-snow that teases Atlanta sometimes, but real snow that sweeps across as if to conceal everything we recognize and know—and my mother’s voice drifted and fluttered like cold, delicate flakes.

  Jordi snatches my purse, peers inside, and mutters, “Son of a fucking bitch.”

  “Don’t judge me.”

  “Do you think your folks would want you to go out like this, to bring that place back to its roots of blood and hell?” He shakes the purse violently. “They had legit plans for you. Ivy League degrees. Sydney Opera House. That kind of shit.”

  “Jordi, I mastered opera but I wanted the music they tried to keep out of my reach. Sort of like making love to Pavarotti while you’re fantasizing about fucking Luda.”

  I danced along the strict path of highbrow this and classically trained that, excelling in the destiny predetermined by my parents because that’s what children rich in luxury and starving for agency do. Their ideas of my future and fate died with them, but still I starve.

  “What about college?” Jordi asks.

  “I’m twenty-two years old with an IQ of 149 and a net worth of one-point-five billion dollars. I’m on the covers of Cosmo and Vanity Fair. What the fuck can college give me that I don’t already have?”

  “Perspective. It’s been a year since anybody put you on their covers. Your net worth dropped when you and Perversion went y’all separate ways. And there ain’t a doubt in my mind you fried some of those genius brain cells hitting blow as hard as you do.”

  The truth feels like unforgiving heat, penetrating through skin and muscle and bone. “Mama told me to do something dangerous.”

  “Damn it, running with scissors is dangerous. Running back to Perversion Records is stone-cold stupid.”

  “She didn’t get into specifics. She was busy dying.” Dying, with sweet tea fragrant on her breath and French silk draped over her skin…like a weary queen soothing her children with bedtime prayers as invaders emerge from gauzy shadows.

  What she told my brother, I don’t know. What words could’ve made a difference to a sullen teenager with a restless, angry heart?

  “You need Jesus, Imogen.”

  “I need what’s mine,” I correct, reclaiming my purse. I fish out a key fob and hand it over. “Don’t let my sexy new dress go to waste.”

  The ride is fast, loud, and reckless. Jordi drives with the seat leaned back and one hand resting on the wheel. Crunk blares into the streets and the bass pounds our bodies. A tiny gold cross swings from the rearview mirror. Jordi’s broken every commandment there is, but he’s a Baptist and keeps the Lord close.

  He doesn’t speak and neither do I.

  Until I’m left standing in the middle of a life that used to be mine. Under the canopy of a sweltering Georgia night, I’m assaulted by the flash of camera lights. For a moment I hesitate, glancing around for escape. But the Tesla’s taillights disappear as Jordi swerves out of view, and I go forward.

  Like I always do.

  Voices battle for dominance over the merciless beat of rap music as security ushers VIP guests inside the centuries-old Greek Revival plantation manor.

  The Moss plantation, once a place of slavery and cruelty, was boarded up and deserted before Granddaddy Creed purchased the estate and converted it into the home of Perversion. He founded the record label in an age when rock and roll was feared as wicked, and the coexistence of whites and blacks seen as dangerous in these parts. Of course, Granddaddy, who had the look of Burl Ives and the wrath of Lucifer, might’ve burned Atlanta all over again if he didn’t get his way. For every racist acquaintance he lost, Granddaddy seemed to sign a surefire hit singer. His malt-shop heartthrobs and disco megastars were on America’s most elite DJs’ lists, and their music burst from jukeboxes, car radios, and nightclubs north and south of the Mason-Dixon line. He died rich, and Daddy, who got even richer with a roster of Madonna and Nirvana wannabes but let elitism deny him the fortune to be mined from gangsta rap, died a millionaire.

  A millionaire with respectability. Dignity, in spite of the heroin-and-whore habit that cost him six figures yearly.

  The music industry was in transition when Daddy took his leave—the silver lining being that he didn’t kill Perversion too. Trapped in his own ego, he couldn’t adapt the way he needed to for the company’s viability.

  But I could—and I did, rebranding Perversion as a chart-dominating commercial hip-hop label worth billions.

  You’re welcome, Daddy.

  Those are words I never said. Daddy never thanked me for anything.

  Ironically, though the estate has changed hands, its composition hasn’t changed all that much. It still carries the stench of oppression because we’re all at the mercy of money, power, and our own ambitions—but Daddy sometimes got so caught up in his ideals that he didn’t see the forest for the trees.

  Bless his naïve, tyrannical heart.

  “This is mine, motherfuckers!”

  The people I shouted to aren’t so far away, and it’s Merritt Monaghan who registers my voice first. She’s gold and diamonds, from the gilded strands of her blond hair to the glitter of the stones sewn into her tight white dress.

  Expect nothing less from the Monaghans of Atlanta. Old money, old traditions, old treachery.

  When we were kids—playing with Barbie and Bratz dolls, sharing homework, wading up to our shoulders for red swamp crawfish—it didn’t matter that she was a Monaghan and I was a Creed, that her family was born into money and mine had to outmaneuver and trailblaze for ours. She was Merritt…my best friend.

  A bodyguard assists her up the grand staircase to the eight-columned portico, but she leans to the right to whisper something in her husband’s ear. Ezra del Toro’s reaction is predictable. He places a hand on the small of Merritt’s back and glances over his shoulder through the high rollers and paparazzi to me.

  Dressed in a well-cut suit, bound to his wife with a wedding band, Ezra appears an untouchable example of wealthy white male privilege. But the ink on his skin peeks out beneath his watch, and I’m reminded of who he really is. Not just that his father was Mexican and he was raised by his Irish mother’s family on a predominately black street in Grove Park. Deeper than that. Strip him of his clothes, kick his wallet aside, and you’ll see his brutality.

  For a moment the threat in his hazel eyes gives me pause, but I’m strong enough to resist even blinking.

  Take away my clothes and you’ll see three identical knife wounds carved into my back. One from Merritt. One from Ezra. And the other from—

  I swing my gaze to the brunette waif pressed to Ezra’s other side. Sophie Drew.

  By now she knows I’m here, but she deliberately ignores my presence. After my brother fucked her and then trashed her along with his rock career, I stayed in her corner. I made her COO of my family’s record label. Now she won’t give me the respect of acknowledgment.

  I’m surprised, embarrassed, and it startles me that seeing Sophie for the first time since she gutted me renders any effect. I considered her a friend—family, even—and she eviscerated my trust.

&
nbsp; I watch her ascend the stairs with Merritt and Ezra. Some intangible part of me starts to hurt. Not my soul. I sold that long ago, for the very thing my friends took from me: Perversion. I invested my soul into this label, bartered my body for corporate favors and industry alliances, and they voted me out.

  They claimed my legacy and made me an outcast in my own city. I still live in the Creed family home across town, but that place is haunted with remnants of what used to be and all I really care about is this place.

  Fuck the restraining order. I move toward the manor with the flow of the crowd.

  “Imogen Creed, top brass says you’re not on the guest list.” A security specialist slices through the crush, blocking my view of the raunchy elegance through the open doors.

  The place must be infested with rivals, media personnel, promoters, and talent. Perversion puts on one fucking incredible party when there are appearances to keep and lies to tell. The company’s just been hit with an intellectual property lawsuit. Soon it’ll hemorrhage artists and sponsors—die a slow, mortifying death, as I might’ve had my brother not heard the single gunshot ring down from the ballroom on my sixteenth birthday.

  I was saved, and I can save this entity. But I can’t do it from the outside.

  I want to walk through the doors and touch the walls to see if this place is nothing more than a shell now, same as my brother is. But I can’t seem to make progress with the security bastard matching my every step.

  “Kindly move the fuck out of my way, sir.” A bit of southern manners never hurt anybody.

  “I said you’re not on the guest list, ma’am.”

  “I’m not here as a guest. I’m here for business. I’ve got a private invitation.” The invitation part is a goddamn lie, but the rest is true.

  He puts his hands on me, tightening his clutch, and I gasp in pain. His barrel chest is eye level to me and I have to tilt my face up to get a look at him. The asshole is smirking.