Breakdown Read online

  “She refused further treatment,” he said.

  “And they let her?”

  “She signed releases. Answer my question. Did she tell you she was going to wash down sleeping pills with a thirty-two-ounce tumbler of vodka?”

  “Are you blaming me?”

  “Should I be?”

  “I know about her bedtime cocktails, but it’s not like I mix them for her.”

  Merritt had started taking sleep-aid cocktails at bedtime shortly after their wedding. I’d found out during an overnight trip, but she’d explained it as a stress remedy that she didn’t practice often. She’d said she was always careful…that she was okay.

  But she wasn’t.

  They weren’t okay.

  I wasn’t okay.

  “I’m alive and awake, so drop this,” Merritt said. “Back to the guy Sophie fucked. He can be of use to our label.”

  “What’s his name?” Ezra asked.

  “Club Promoter,” I said. “It’s a simple deal. I gave him a night and he’s providing us with an exclusive promo web in Florida. He’s leaving this afternoon and I don’t have plans to see him again. Recreationally, I mean.”

  “All I asked for was his name.”

  “Benito Sandoval. Know him?”

  Ezra shook his head. “I’ll have someone look at him.”

  And give Club Promoter incentive to taunt the people close to me with details of what I’d done in his hotel suite to persuade him to return my phone? To relive the physical and emotional hurt? No. “I’m capable of investigating him myself, Ezra.”

  “Yeah, how? A Google search? A look at his FICO scores? Fuck that.”

  “I meant I’d have our HR group take a look. They’re thorough.”

  “No one in this company has the resources I do.”

  “If this has anything to do with death row and darknet shit, I don’t want to hear about it. I won’t be your accessory.”

  Ezra gave me a patient look. “We became one another’s accessory when we cut Imogen out. Each of us is a part of what the other does. And as a reminder, Sophie, that includes what you do recreationally.”

  “Okay, that sounds awfully judgmental.”

  “No one here’s got room to judge.” He stood and nipped Merritt’s earlobe. “Ain’t that right, wife?”

  She averted her gaze. “Sleep with as many people as you want, Soph, but be selective. That’s all he means to say. This company’s under attack. That’s what we need to talk about this morning and why our publicists are probably all doing Valium as we speak.”

  “Maybe I’ll go soak in a bubble bath and wait for you two to work out whatever the fuck I walked in on.”

  “It’s just a disagreement between married people. Since you’re apparently sticking to your resolution to one-night-stand your way through life, I’m really not expecting you to understand.”

  First fight each other, then take it out on the one caught in the middle. I knew the pattern. “Both of you can kiss my ass.”

  “What I said was uncalled for—I’m sorry,” Merritt offered.

  Exiting the situation, I extended both middle fingers in a “fuck-y’all” gesture. “I’m going to take a shower. Since I’m still addled from being jackhammered all night, I’d appreciate some coffee in the conference room. Cream, two sugars.”

  CHAPTER 2

  Sophie

  There were too many halls and parlors in this fucking place. There was too much history here. How small Atlanta…this world…was. How connected the past and present were. How curious it was that the darkest truths could lie beneath the brightest surfaces.

  Beneath my surface of ivory skin and straight hair was ancestral color and texture. I was the daughter of a Swede who’d fallen for a “tanned” American while in Georgia on a student visa. But by the time she’d learned he was equally white and black, and was part of a culture she didn’t know or want to genuinely understand, she was already pregnant and committed to gaining US citizenship.

  At least, that was how Dad had explained it to me when I’d demanded to know why some kids at school teased that there was coffee in my cream, and why Mom had told me to blame him.

  She’d resented him for my quadrant of blackness, for history that horrified and confused her.

  My ancestor Elias Moss had worked the sugar cane fields that centuries ago thrived on this land—once a plantation of an unfathomable seven hundred acres of private property, now only a fraction of that. It was documented that Master Moss’s wife had secretly helped Elias learn to read and write using a gospel hymnbook. He’d written unfinished original lyrics in the book, but they hadn’t seen the light of a Georgia day until after he’d been trampled to death in the field and she’d sneaked the hymnbook from the slave cabin to eventually donate to a church that had fallen as a casualty of warfare in 1864.

  Dad’s grandmother had earned wages to provide for her only child by sewing and cooking for the wealthy Gould family that had lived here on the former Moss plantation—until a fire charred part of the Greek Revival main house and claimed eight lives, including my great-grandmother’s.

  “Bad things happen in that house. It’s the devil himself at work,” my parents had insisted, united in only one thing—keeping me from a place I just couldn’t resist.

  I didn’t believe these walls were cursed, but I did believe in retribution. I’d endured unmasked misogyny during my teen years learning the biz at A-Town Sound and never would’ve found a real career in music if it hadn’t been for Perversion…if it hadn’t been for a man with tattooed skin, a sulky frown, and a sweet soul.

  I’d burned for his melody. He’d burned me into dust.

  Shutting myself in the Garden Suite, a nickname for the accommodations that offered a front-facing veranda in addition to side and rear views of a garden Eden itself would envy, I had to remind myself to breathe.

  The suite was southern comfort for me. I slept here more often than I cared to admit, preferring the presence of housekeeping staff and 24/7 security that had been installed after Imogen Creed crashed Ezra and Merritt’s anniversary party two years ago.

  Tension clutched me tight as I grabbed a T-shirt and bottoms from the wardrobe where I kept a random array of clothes. Rotating my shoulders did nothing to alleviate the pinch. We had an on-site steam room as well as on-call masseuses and chiropractors, but no one’s touch would remedy my stress.

  Sex with a stranger had been a temporary fix. The release had helped me sleep, until morning had come to reveal a waking nightmare. Now, as I spread my ass cheeks in the shower and winced at the water’s contact to my sore passage, I wished it hadn’t happened.

  I shampooed, soaped, and scrubbed away dried sweat and other bodily fluids I didn’t want to think about. But I was hurting, enduring every smarting moment until I could shut off the spray and run to the drawing room where I’d left my purse.

  Dripping and leaving a trail of wet footprints, I crawled onto a neoclassical chair, upending the purse until everything tumbled onto my lap.

  Finally, the rubber band sprang free.

  It was all I wanted.

  Eyes closed, I put it on the wrist that was already beginning to scab from the earlier assault of the band. I was shaking as I pulled the rubber taut then released it.

  Snap!

  Better. The pain shocked my eyes open, brought instant tears, but I could breathe easier now. Snap! Snap! Snap! Snap!

  My hair was damp and I’d paired yoga pants with Zanotti winged stilettos, but false confidence was what’d make this look a trendsetter as opposed to a fucking disaster. Fake it ’til you make it. Money, power, and popularity said I’d made it. I said I was still faking it.

  “Are we ready to begin?” Tablet and phone in hand, I strode into the sumptuous second-floor English parlor that served as the executive conference room. My heels puni
shed the polished floor until they encountered the lush imported Persian rug. The décor, from the heavy tapestries and antique secretary to the leather chairs that guarded the imposing table, was a mishmash of styles from various destinations and historical periods. One lap around this room was a world tour through the ages.

  Ezra and Merritt sat together at the head of the table as they viewed a laptop screen. “Your coffee’s cold,” she said, glancing up.

  “No prob! In fact, I’ll ice it up.” I took the mug from the silver tray and went to the bar to scoop out a few cubes. When I noticed both of them staring at me, I said, “What the fuck?”

  “You’re perky all of a sudden,” she said. “No, it’s beyond perk. It’s full-on zest. A simple shower doesn’t just one-eighty a woman’s mood.”

  “Could we concentrate on the reason our attorneys called us and why we’re all here at this unholy hour?”

  Ezra abandoned his chair and came around to join me at the bar. He took my hand, raising it to call Merritt’s attention to the rubber band I couldn’t bring myself to remove. Red welts marked my wrist.

  “Ezra, stop.”

  “You stop. Stop hurting yourself.”

  “Good God, Soph,” Merritt said with sympathy. “You were doing great before the lawsuit.”

  No, I wasn’t. They both were too wrapped up in themselves to notice.

  The rubber band stopped me from mutilating myself with hairpins and a lighter. Didn’t they know that? Shouldn’t my closest friends know that I was held together by a piece of elastic around my wrist?

  “Business,” I reminded them, pulling free of his grasp without spilling a drop of my drink. I sat—gently—on a leather chair and propped my feet on another. “On to that.”

  Ezra resumed his seat beside Merritt. “From a business standpoint, we’re fucked.”

  Nikita Jade, a young talent from Chicago’s South Side, who’d learned the lyrics to Tupac’s every track before mastering the alphabet, who’d drawn comparisons to leading black artists but was known for instigating social media wars, had lawyered up with the same firm that represented Heezy Floyd. According to my attorney, who’d reamed me out for taking so long to return his calls this morning, Nikita was reaching deep. Ninety-five-million-dollars deep.

  “Jacoby Watt’s intel says she intends to sue for close to a hundred million,” I said. “But I don’t know on what grounds. Did your attorney say, Merritt?”

  Ezra and I employed the same attorney, but Merritt’s family controlled nearly every facet of her life, including her legal counsel.

  “Yes,” Merritt said. “Intellectual rape.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “She’s saying her most recent collab was originally meant to be solo tracks, but we picked her brain and distributed her work to other artists without her permission. Which is a lie. She pushed us for that collab. She accused us of putting her on the backburner.”

  Nikita Jade’s vocals had declined in the aftermath of complications from a cosmetic surgery procedure. She’d been undergoing voice coaching and otolaryngology treatment, but she’d shared her concern about losing her place of importance on Perversion’s roster—although that’d been before news erupted that Gash Lyrics had debuted an artist at number three on Billboard’s US charts and number one across numerous UK charts.

  “My assistant was made aware of a social media campaign”—Merritt turned her laptop so I could view the screen—“created by Nikita’s supporters. The ‘artist abuse’ and ‘slave labor music’ hashtags are trending on Twitter. Our sponsors are hyperventilating.”

  “So, a woman is pissed that we won’t give in to her demands. Her motivation to paint us in a bad light so we’ll void her contract is transparent. We need to stand firm. You said so yourself, Merritt, that after the crap Heezy Floyd pulled we wouldn’t buckle. But we did, didn’t we? We let Authentix take his toys, and what happened? He went straight to Gash and we’re still trying to find a jam-as-fuck crunk rapper. We need his sound, and we need Nikita’s.”

  “Nikita wants to get with Gash,” Ezra said. “After I talked to Jacoby, I got through to someone in her entourage. She’s been taking meetings with Heezy’s boys, wants to do something with him. He’s telling her, step by motherfucking step, how to take from the top and walk away.”

  The media were calling the recent migration of hip-hop artists to Los Angeles’s underground powerhouse “Dash for Gash.” Performers, creators, and distributors across the country were vying for partnership.

  “Settling with Heezy Floyd sliced us wide open,” Ezra said. “Nikita and the others who’re pushing us to let them go, they’re the lifeblood of our roster. We need to drop a new album.”

  “We don’t have a new album,” Merritt said. “Not yet.”

  “Christ, I need to think.” I swung my feet to the floor. False confidence and even my rubber band could lend me no clarity. Perversion’s empire had made us all billionaires—people to be envied and hated and idolized and lusted after—yet we were falling at breathtaking speed. How could that be?

  “We’ve tapped our resources,” Merritt whispered, almost dismayed.

  “Not all of them.” Ezra stood again, stalking the perimeter of the conference table. He looked to me. “You said you didn’t want to hear about the darknet. ’Cause it makes you feel immoral and dirty and wrong? Get over it. We’re going darker than that.”

  Merritt and I exchanged a puzzled look. “How dark?” she asked. “Nikita feuds with everyone, but her conflict with our label is too public and heated for police to not look our way if she ends up dead.”

  “Are you saying I can’t make that shit look clean?” he replied, the words edged with something more lethal than us considering taking a life.

  “I’m saying you were convicted before. Quartering a man and strangling him with his own intestines isn’t exactly clean.”

  He paused, and that moment of stillness was as though a shut window inside me had flung open to allow a merciless chill entry. The murder hadn’t been his first, or last. His kills were deliberate, logical, calculated by some algorithm of his mind and motivations.

  Had imprisonment been deliberate too?

  Why that conviction?

  Why that kill?

  Why that victim?

  “Nikita’s a symptom,” he said. “I want to eliminate the cause. Gash drew first blood. Now we respond in kind.”

  I sipped my iced coffee but tasted nothing. “Seduce their talent? Yeah, that’ll work. None of their people want to join a label that’s currently getting DP’d by lawsuits and social media attacks.”

  “There’s one key player sitting pretty at Gash who’ll come running to Perversion and kiss the soil it sits on—if we let her.”

  Imogen.

  She’d joined Gash a year ago. Now she was pulling strings as its shiny new vice president.

  “Ezra, no,” Merritt protested. “The last time Imogen Creed was in this room, she tried to set it on fire.”

  I swallowed past the bile that rose as I drew the comparison for the first time between what could’ve happened to me three years ago and what had happened to my great-grandmother on this property.

  “I remember damn well what went down the last time Imogen was here,” he assured. In his eyes flickered something that struck me as violent regret. He raked one hand, then the other, over his hair. “Calling her back here is the only fucking option we’ve got. She’d kill herself before she let Perversion die.”

  Sad thing—he was right.

  I faced Merritt. This was ultimately our call. And one of us would need to make that soul-gutting call to Imogen Creed, Gash’s acclaimed producer and VP.

  “She might tell us to go fuck ourselves,” I said, but Merritt shook her head.

  “No. She’ll come home, and she’ll have terms. I know Imogen. She’s my best friend.” Merri
tt sniffled, and sitting primly, like the delicate southern beauty the Monaghan family had bred her to be, she began to silently cry.

  Confronting someone you’d hurt, depending on them to save you, was a good reason to cry.

  Or to snap a rubber band against your wrist.

  Ezra stood near the door, appearing to debate whether to take away my elastic or wipe away Merritt’s tears. But he did neither. “I…I need to get away from this.”

  “And go where?” Merritt asked. “We need you.”

  Her accusatory tone seemed to jar something loose in him.

  “Next time you ask me that shit, be sure you want the answer,” he warned her. Then he addressed us both. “No one involves the fuckin’ board until we talk to Imogen. We do this quietly, and we do it in the dark. Don’t talk to anyone. No assistants. No friends. No family.”

  “United, the three of us,” I said. That’s what we’d agreed to before we approached the board to vote her out.

  But we weren’t united, because Merritt was still in tears, I continued to snap my rubber band, and Ezra flung the door open to stride toward a place where neither his wife nor I would follow.

  And we were each left to wade through our own personal hells.

  CHAPTER 3

  Sophie

  Imogen lived out loud. She was drama and grandeur, an emotional mindfuck. So, the radio silence that answered my repeated requests for a private conversation was downright eerie.

  She’d abruptly stopped following Merritt, Ezra, and me on social media after their first anniversary party, but the celebrity buzz surrounding that had been buried under the discovery of a dead security guard on the grounds. Cops had quickly attributed the death to an accidental self-inflicted gunshot, and everyone had moved on.

  Except me. I knew what Imogen was capable of, that she was loud in everything she did, and the implications of her unfollowing the three people she’d stalked in spite of a restraining order was an action that screamed what words could not.

  Now we were calling her to come back from a glittering beachside tower in the City of Angels to a former plantation manor in the Big Peach. We were playing a game of life and death, literally.