That evening, Melody Lee stepped across the marble floor of the family penthouse, with the city lights glittering from just right beyond the floor-to-ceiling windows that stood right on the walls of the house.She did not think she would not be questioned by anyone, but she did not expect anyone to be around waiting for her either way. The first person she saw was her mother, Eleanor Lee, standing at the grand staircase, wearing a silk robe, with her arms folded like she had been waiting there hours on end.Melody tried to ignore the woman, acting as though she had not seen her at all. “I know what you’re up to,” her mother finally said quietly.Melody didn’t flinch as she heard the cold words. She had practiced this moment in the car the whole entire ride back home from Nathan's house. “I have no choice, Mother." She sighed, shutting her eyes in a moment of resignation. "I cannot afford to be poor. No, not in this life, but certainly not in another.”Eleanor’s eyes softened, but on

A black SUV rolled to a stop in a narrow alley just two blocks from Club Eclipse. It was a very suspicious and looking place, the kind of place one would imagine demons crawled out from. The streetlights here were broken or missing, and the only glow in the place came from a single flickering bulb resting just above a rusted steel door. Jason killed the engine of the car, its roar stopping right there. “Remember what we said," he said, turning to Michael. "Don’t speak. Don’t look at anyone, either. Just keep your head down.”Michael’s head was still spinning from the whiskey from the club before, but the warning cut through the fog in his mind. “Where the hell are we?” he managed to ask. Max opened the door and gave him a shove. "Just go outside, now."The moment Michael hopped out of the vehicle, the smell of the place hit him right in his nostrils. It was the smell of chemical, acrid, like burning plastic and bleach. His stomach lurched, almost twisting inside out. This wasn’t som

Melody Lee’s eyes snapped open at exactly 2:17 a.m. The glowing numbers on her nightstand were the only source of light in the dark room.Her heart was already pounding with much purpose. Tonight was the night she had planned for. She had waited long enough for this and she wouldn't let it slide away from her. She slipped out of bed, her bare feet silent on the marble floor as she was nearly tip-toeing about, and moved through the penthouse like a shadow. In the kitchen she filled two porcelain cups with fresh coffee, with steam curling upward into the air. One cup was left untouched, while the other she was stirring with a single measured spoonful of a sedative she had taken from the medicine cabinet earlier. It was one enough to make her father drowsy and compliant, not enough to raise alarms when he woke up.She ran the plan through her mind one final time as she tiptoed. She was going to walk into the study casually, and hand him a drugged cup of coffee, and talk about anything

The next morning the boardroom on the fifty-eighth floor of the Cloven Tower felt smaller than it usually was as sunlight poured through the glass walls. The air was thick with a kind of tension that seemed to had frozen even the air around them.Victor Lee sat at the head of the long mahogany table, flanked by his wife Eleanor who had a blank expression on her face, and a handful of other stone-faced executives, all of whom gathered around the couples like flies. Only Melody stood a little apart, with her arms crossed, and her chin high as always. Her hair was pulled back in a bun, making her look extremely like her bother Michael, who coincidentally had only empty chair in the hall. He was no where to be found, and no one mentioned it. Through varied interpretations, it would be easy to think that Melody had replaced him as the man of the House.Nathan Rhodes entered last with David Brune. He took a sit right opposite the Less, while David Brune sat exactly at his side. He wore a

In a penthouse overlooking Central Park in all its beauty, one was supposed to feel like they had just won something glorious, something ever lasting, a victory like no other. Instead, Amelia Frank paced over the marble floor like she was a caged animal in heat, while the seven beautiful vixens lounged on the cream sofas that were across the living room of the penthouse. Donna, Avery, Gene, Golden, Bella, Rene, and Chloe watched her with a mixture of amusement and boredom, they lips looking like they were they were just a little push away from laughing disastrously.They had grown closer in the last weeks with Amelia, bonded by a single thread that still held them together: every one of them still felt that they had been betrayed in some way by Nathan.“I still can’t believe it,” Amelia spat, voice sharp enough to cut the glass that framed the high floor to ceiling windows. “The one person that I thought would never break, the one person who I thought hated Nathan the most, just han