Breakdown Read online

  “Uh-huh. It’s also a yes, I’m coming.”

  “And I’m hanging up.”

  The next call came at daybreak. It caught me disoriented, groggy, and on the edge of a hangover panic.

  Where am I? What happened to my clothes? Why does my body feel like lead?

  I flipped onto my belly, peeled a condom wrapper off my cheek, and felt around for my phone. The ringtone, the chorus of my favorite Queen song, was muffled under the dead weight of a sleeping, semi-erect stranger.

  Oh…the club promoter.

  It was a bit unfair to refer to him as a stranger when technically he was not. I knew his name but I had no use for it outside of professional circumstances. Instead, I called him by his occupation, as I did every man I’d fucked before him—every man except the first.

  I’d met Miami club promoter Benito Sandoval the previous night at a launch party in Halo Lounge. He’d attentively replenished my glass with top-shelf liquor, and later while explaining what his company could do to benefit mine, he’d stripped me.

  Sleeping with him had been a casual release of tension, and God, did I have plenty of that.

  Club Promoter accepted what I could spare: three-position, two-orgasm, one-night sex. In exchange, he’d facilitate a unique promo partnership that would give Perversion fresh exposure in untapped markets.

  I nudged him awake and he grunted. “Fuck, what time is it?”

  “It’s get-off-my-phone o’clock.” I tried to wedge my hand under his back, but he captured it and brought it to his penis. “Let me go. I don’t have time for another round, okay?”

  “I’ve never seen someone as addicted to tech as you are,” he said, moving my hand up and down his shaft. “People call and text me at all goddamn hours of the day and night, but I figured out a way to make myself inaccessible when I need to. My son’s a little older than you. He’s an app developer, has the same dilemma. His wife complains he’s married to his phone. I told him my secret and I’ll tell you too. It’ll blow your mind.”

  Rolling my eyes, I humored him. “What’s the secret?”

  “I turn the fucking phone off.”

  Just the suggestion gave me low-grade anxiety. My phone was my lifeline. It was my connection to the record label, and the record label was my life now. “Turning off the phone, putting it on Do Not Disturb, making myself inaccessible—I don’t do that.” The Queen ringtone was assigned to my attorney, and a five a.m. call from the exclusive and elusive Jacoby Watt, whose psychological maneuvers could probably get Satan acquitted, was a warning in and of itself. A clusterfuck indubitably awaited. “I don’t ignore important calls because some random guy wakes up with a hard-on.”

  The phone went silent and I glared at him in the pale light of dawn filling the hotel suite through the uncovered windows. He countered with a husky morning-after laugh, tightening his grasp.

  In this light, his smile wasn’t as charming as it’d seemed the night before. His touch wasn’t as gentle as it’d been when he’d handed me a drink and led me to a VIP table.

  He really was a stranger. So was the man before him, and the one before, and before, before, before—

  Except the first.

  Atticus Creed had never been a stranger.

  “You spent the night with me to get a deal for your label,” Club Promoter said. Accurate, but I hated that he put it in a way that sounded desperate. This wasn’t desperation. It was commitment to a brand. Pride was a commodity. What wasn’t in a creative industry driven by followings, filters, and façades?

  The ringtone wailed beneath him again, almost like a cry for rescue.

  “Decision time, Sophie Drew. What’ll you do to get your phone back?”

  This was my first ride of shame.

  The rideshare app on my phone hadn’t warned me that the nondescript sedan picking me up in front of the Loews Hotel—barefoot, with my shoes under my arm—had another passenger, and a chatty one, too, with inquisitive eyes and braces on her teeth.

  She appeared to be in her early twenties, like me, but seemed so much younger somehow. Maybe it was because she carried a backpack while I carried a couture handbag worth four figures, or perhaps because her image was on an Emory University student ID hanging from a lanyard, while mine was featured on magazines, billboards, and multimillion-dollar media ads. Or was it that she was headed to Starbucks to study for a summer-term exam, while I was headed to a damage control meeting with music moguls and struggling to forget what I’d just done to reclaim possession of my phone?

  Each jostle of the car over uneven pavement triggered a sharp twinge and my complaint to the driver as I reangled my body to assuage the pain. Every time, he apologized for the state of the city’s infrastructure and suggested I either write to my councilman or go to a pharmacy to treat my hangover headache.

  It wasn’t my head that ached.

  “Does it hurt?” the woman asked a few minutes later, pointing at my hands. “Snapping the rubber band on your wrist like that? Look how red it is.”

  Dusky blotches darkened my pale skin. “Yeah,” I said, forcing myself to stop. “It hurts.”

  That’s why I do it.

  When stress bottlenecked, I wore a rubber band to administer pain that I could control. Internal hurt was a distraction from all the external—business enemies, media attacks, men who exploited me once they found my vulnerability. I’d congratulated myself when I stopped burning my arms with hairpins as if they were branding irons. But all I’d done was replace hot pins with elastic, and burning with snapping.

  She squinted, as though seeing my messy hair, liquor-stained dress, and bare feet for the first time. “We’re close to the coffee shop. Can I get an espresso for you?”

  I could pay off the woman’s student debt with what I spent to attend the Met Gala last month, yet she was offering to buy me an espresso.

  I wanted to ignore her or ask the driver to pull over so I could request a private car, because envy came swift and cruelly. Seven years ago, I’d been her—open and unassuming, wearing All Stars and carrying a cheap backpack to class.

  Then I’d gotten caught in the crosshairs of a man with the voice of a devil and the heart of a poet, and loving him had fucked us both.

  “Thanks, but no,” I said eventually, as we approached Starbucks. Not yet six, and already the parking lot was full while a line of vehicles pursued the drive-through. “It wouldn’t be fair for you to buy me anything. I don’t need help.”

  “Probably not financial help, but some help. You’re one of the ‘rich young things.’” She framed in air quotes the snarky moniker Twitter culture had given me, Merritt, and our company’s former CEO. There were memes, gifs, hashtags, and threads dedicated to tearing us down. “Rich young things have problems too.”

  Understatement.

  “COOs have more problems,” she added thoughtfully. “Second-in-command—that’s serious responsibility.”

  Serious understatement.

  My title exuded importance and evoked intimidation, but I hated what being a chief operating officer in a cutthroat industry really meant. It meant acquiring a taste for blood because if you didn’t feast on the competitors first, they’d for damn sure suck you dry. It meant constantly sacrificing, outmaneuvering, and selling yourself for the sake of the brand.

  The driver, who up until now had pretended to listen to sports radio, blatantly studied me through the rearview mirror as the car idled. If he uttered one more derogatory comment about me or my lifestyle, I would negative-rate the abstract fuck out of him.

  All he said was a gruff, “Darlin’, are you going to let the girl get you that espresso, or do you want to keep on to your destination?”

  “Go,” I insisted to the woman. “I’m good. Really.”

  “Okay.” She slid out of the car and slung her backpack across a shoulder. Then I noticed the phone in he
r hand.

  I’d been reckless to leave the hotel half-dressed, to neglect to order a private car, to snap my wrist in front of a stranger. I wasn’t a COO or a billionaire or a powerful woman in this moment. I was “rich young things” fodder…and I was afraid. Pointing to her phone, I shook my head. “Please don’t.”

  Her smile fell into an expression of profound concern. “No, of course not. You don’t have to worry.”

  “Thanks.”

  As she disappeared into Starbucks and the driver navigated into traffic, I reached for my phone to triage the dozens of text messages and voicemails that had accumulated since earning the device back from Club Promoter.

  There was nothing I wouldn’t do to protect Perversion. It was the promise I’d made to myself when Imogen Creed and I had been caught orchestrating a merger between her father’s lucrative but static pop genre label and A-Town Sound, an indie rap label that was rich with unique recording artists but ass-broke in terms of resources. I’d been nineteen and she was eighteen—neither with authority, but both fueled with passion to screw the status quo. The truth of what we’d done had come with a singular hard consequence…death.

  The death of A-Town Sound.

  The death of Imogen’s brother’s music career.

  The death of our life together.

  And the death of Sawyer Creed, their father.

  My phone slipped from my hands and I started snapping the rubber band on my wrist again. Faster, and faster, and faster, and faster—

  “Darlin’, we’re here,” the driver said, breaking through my fog of guilt-induced pain. For some reason he was holding up a dented box of tissues.

  I glanced down at my wrist, whispered a swear, and extracted a pair of tissues without meeting his eyes. “Yeah, guess I should blot my face. It’s hot this morning.”

  “Eighty-seven and climbing,” he muttered on a sigh, going along with the lie, pretending he hadn’t offered the tissues because my wrist was bloodied. The rubber band had broken skin.

  I looked out the window at Perversion’s sprawling estate as I tossed the rubber band into my purse and put on my stilettos. It was more than structure and land. Its bloodstains had been covered with gold; its horrors were disguised in success. It had ravaged the lives of people centuries ago. It had ravaged A-Town Sound, stripping the label of its talent and contacts, abandoning its community and culture and origins for the favor of mainstream exposure. It had motivated me to break the people who trusted me, including Imogen.

  It couldn’t be dying…

  Striding to the security gate, I feigned ignorance when the attendant’s gaze stumbled over my appearance.

  He was new, not quite broken in to how things worked in the land of Perversion. Executives arriving and departing the estate at all hours was ordinary. The company had been in a state of damage control for over two years, since rapper Heezy Floyd—stage name of Sheldon Small of Idaho—had slapped it with a lawsuit for intellectual property theft among a plethora of other bullshit legal complaints.

  The current CEO and I had responded with countersuits, and we’d prepared ourselves for years of litigation, yet faith in Perversion’s stability had started to crumble immediately. Forced to the settlement table, we’d misjudged the implications of a peaceful resolution. Heezy Floyd had walked away with an eight-figure check, content rights, and victory in the court of public opinion.

  He’d used the history of this land and the physical makeup of Perversion’s executives versus that of its artists to suggest racial and color discrimination. Later he’d retracted the claims, citing misconceptions and hypersensitivities triggered by social tensions, rather than admitting to the public that for the sake of personal opportunity he’d taken advantage of a real, living, breathing crisis that had teeth and claws and appetite.

  Ultimately, he’d invited us to his table, one littered with weed, corner-store snacks, and legal papers. “What I did, it’s about means and ends, and it’s between me and my conscience now,” he’d explained. “But there’s a lesson y’all gotta learn, fam. Rap, black R&B, Negro spirituals—see where I’m goin’? That’s for none of y’all—not even the one-dropper among us.” This he’d added with a pointed look at me. “No shade, a’ight? Y’all call it music and art and entertainment, but do you ever call it what it really is? It’s life. Know what I’m sayin’? This life can’t ever be for y’all. It made y’all rich, fuckin’ kingmakers, and it might keep on doing just that, but it ain’t yours to claim. Won’t ever be.”

  We’d smoked his weed, agreed to his settlement, and accepted his hugs, though no one could unring the bell.

  The company’s marquee talent threatened legal action if not released from their contracts, but after Heezy Floyd and artist Authentix had straightaway inked deals with Gash Lyrics in Los Angeles, Merritt had refused to release anyone else. Now our label wore a gaping wound that I wasn’t sure could be stitched together before it bled out.

  “Your, uh…ma’am, sorry for noticing, but your dress isn’t zipped all the way,” the attendant said, color flooding his cheeks as he gestured to the back of his collar.

  “Noted, thanks.” I felt him watch me with confusion as I strode through the gates with my dress halfway open and fake confidence in my step.

  At this hour the estate was practically vacant, and I found the main house sedate until I climbed the stairs to the executive floor and bristled at the sharp voices spiraling from the CEO’s suite.

  A man’s obscenities and a woman’s threats grew louder and increasingly violent, probably carrying from one wing of the mansion to the other.

  Not this shit again.

  “Morning,” I interrupted, with extra perk in my voice as I slapped my palm to the open door in lieu of knocking. I’d grown up caught in the middle of my parents’ fights and wouldn’t revert to a girl locked in the bathroom burning my arms with hairpins while I listened to Atticus Creed’s guttural, soulful vocals on the indie metal radio station. “Merritt? Ezra? If you want to continue yelling God knows what at each other, I’ll go to our downtown studio and figure out how to fix this company.”

  Merritt stepped away from Ezra, casually sliding her fingers behind her reading glasses to swipe at tears. They were liquid knives, slicing open her haute couture façade, exposing an almost childlike weakness—the need to be loved in a certain way and the engulfing hurt that came with being denied.

  Jesus. I couldn’t stand to see her cry. I hated to see him glare with vivid, unalloyed anger that might split the world like the careless fracture of an eggshell. Perhaps that was because, despite the corporate hell Perversion was being dragged through, only on rare occasions was Merritt reduced to tears and Ezra to unadulterated rage.

  “Are we going to have this meeting or not?” I asked, entering the office. This cheery, luxurious place wasn’t meant to host vulgar anger between people who three years ago had stood in a church and vowed to cherish, protect, and love each other. My parents’ marriage had crumpled under weaker pressure than this, and I didn’t understand what Ezra and Merritt were fighting for. “If you turn against each other, we’re all screwed. You do realize that, right?”

  “We’ll take care of you,” Ezra said to me, though his concentration rested on his wife. His button-down shirt was open at the collar and the sleeves had been shoved up to his elbows. Arms crossed, with a hip on Merritt’s desk, he appeared to be relaxed, but I wasn’t naïve enough to believe he was. The man stayed on constant guard and could snap out of a dead sleep to neutralize a threat—a side effect of years spent in a maximum-security facility.

  “No matter what happens, you’ll be okay, Soph,” Merritt assured, her blue eyes sincere but her lashes dark and saturated with tears.

  “Famous last words. My parents said that before the court stamped their papers. Then they stopped fighting about how much they despised each other and started fighting about who’d dea
l with me. Difference here? I’m twenty-five now and I don’t need a keeper.” I glanced from one friend to the other. I’d supported their marriage and would support their divorce, too, if it meant an end to their battles. “I can’t return the sculpture I won at Christie’s for your wedding gift, but plenty of art museums would be happy to have the donation. Be sure to let me know when you file.”

  “No one’s filing.” Merritt returned to Ezra, wrapping an arm around his neck.

  He flinched. “What’re you doing, Merritt?”

  “Being your wife. That’s who I am—your business partner and your wife.” She kissed him. “Tell her, Ezra. Nothing’s going to change.”

  “This is what you want?” He gave her an intimate squeeze, and there stood American princess Merritt Monaghan with a sexy ex-convict’s hand gripping her pencil-skirted ass. “Sure about that?”

  “I’m sure.” A little coaxing on her part, then something seemed to give way between them and he pulled her to him. In his eyes was a flicker of defeat, but he returned her kiss with more than just his mouth. One hand twisted in her hair as the other dove into the front of her skirt.

  It was the kind of heat that destroyed people in its path, and I had to step back.

  But I didn’t leave.

  “Nothing’s going to change with Merritt and me,” he said when he decided he was done toying with his wife.

  “Good to know,” I said, though it wasn’t. Nothing would change, which meant the arguing, tears, and anger would continue.

  “Sophie,” Ezra said, spinning the focus to me, “you were wearing that dress at Halo last night. And you smell like sex.” The man had a brilliant mind, but diplomacy wasn’t his forte.

  “She had a nightcap with someone,” Merritt said. “She and I spoke before I went to bed, and I could hear him doing her.”

  “Yeah?” Emotion fled his expression. “Did my wife tell you she was going to drug herself into a fuckin’ coma? EMTs had to wake her up.”

  What?

  “Merritt, oh my God, are you okay? Should you be at a hospital?”