“I have a mission for you. I need you at the house this weekend.”
“Can you not tell me over the phone? I have plans.” I promised my small team I’d take them out for dinner and drinks tomorrow to celebrate finishing this project, and I was planning on visiting the club tonight for a rendezvous with the man I’ve been fucking this past month.
Thoughts of his rough touch, dirty mouth, and skillful cock have me salivating and squirming on my seat. No man has ever fucked me so good or captivated me enough to want more, and I don’t even know his name or what he looks like.
“Unmake them. Unless you’d prefer I assign this mission to your brother?”
“I’ll be there,” I snap, hating he uses Arlo to push my buttons because he knows I will always concede when confronted with that threat.
“I’ll send the jet. My assistant will forward the flight details by text. I’ll see you in the morning.” He hangs up, and I lean back in my chair glaring daggers at the ceiling.
“Fucking prick,” I hiss to myself as I try to remember if I hated my father this much as a little girl or if it was purely the consequence of his controlling ways as I grew older.
I’m thirty years old with a degree from Stanford, my own home, and a hugely successful marketing consultancy business, and I am still beholden to the asshole who gave me life.
I can only think of one way to end his control.
Ending him. Period.
Tapping my fingers on the desk, I contemplate the risks involved with killing my father. If I thought I could get away with it, I would do it in a heartbeat and feel no remorse. It wouldn’t only release me. It would release Arlo too, and I want that more than anything. I want to spare my little brother the life our father has mapped out for him, and short of murdering the controlling bastard, I don’t know any other solution.
Except killing a man of his standing in our society would warrant serious punishment if I was discovered. At least a lengthy stay in jail. Possibly a death sentence. And removing Amos Martin as the head of our family would ensure my brother is on the fast track to take his place. The men in charge of our world are changing things, for the better, but there are some things they cannot change, and these are the cold facts.
Rock, meet hard place.
And that’s before I’ve even considered my bitch of a stepmom. I’d have to kill Cadance too, and while she’s a total cunt to her only child, sheisArlo’s mother. He’s not fond of her, but I don’t know how he’d feel about me slicing her head from her shoulders. And I’m not sure he’d be understanding if I murdered his father too. Unlike me, he likes Dad. Though I wonder for how long.
My thoughts turn to bloodthirsty plans for the woman who got rid of every framed picture of my mother from our house, and my imagination has no limits. In an ideal world, I’d kill her and my father, and there would be no repercussions. Arlo and I would be free to live our lives the way we want to. Maybe my brother would leave the West Coast and come live with me in Boston. There are several top private schools in the area and I’m sure I’d have no trouble enrolling him.
My cell pings with a message from Dad’s assistant with my flight details, and I’m yanked out of the fantasy land in my head back into the steaming turd that is the real world.
Time to own this shitshow.
Pushing my aggravation aside, I head out to the reception area to break it to my team that we’ll have to reschedule our celebratory dinner.
* * *
“Oh, it’s you,” Cadance says the following morning when I appear in the kitchen of the massive house in Lowell, California, that’s been in the Martin family for generations.
“Try to contain your joy, Cady,” I drawl, dumping my purse on the island unit and heading toward the fridge to grab a bottle of water.
“Don’t call me that. You know how I feel about it.”
It’sdisrespectful. She told me that when I was thirteen and I first used the nickname. Cadance had been living with us for four months, and I already detested her. Dad had implored me to make more of an effort with my new stepmother, and I tried despite the humongous grief that hovered over me like a perpetual thundercloud.
“You need to ask permission before taking anything,” she adds as I open the refrigerator door and remove a water bottle. “This isn’t your home. It’smine.” Her over-inflated pouty lips curl upward as she attempts to put me in my place.
“Wrong, gold digger. It’s my father’s. You’re just a temporary resident.” I glance at the expensive gold watch on my wrist. “I’d say it’s nearing time for Dad to replace you with a younger model.” I rake a derisory gaze up and down her shockingly thin body. “No amount of cosmetic surgery or starvation attempts can turn back the clock. You’ll be forty in two years. I bet it won’t be long before he finds a third twenty-one-year-old wife.”
Distaste crawls up my throat every time I think about how easy it was for my father to replace my mother so soon after her death. It happened far too quickly, and now I’m older and not suffocating under a mountain of grief, I know he must have been screwing this bitch while my mother was undergoing treatment for stage 4 cancer and making plans with her while his wife was on her deathbed.
I was always destined to hate Cadance even if she wasn’t a prize cunt. That fact just makes it easier to suffer zero guilt for loathing my stepmother and taking every opportunity to piss her off and push her buttons.
“Unlike your mother, I’ve taken care of myself, and I take care of my man. He has no need to bed other women when I worship his cock and let him do whatever he wants to my body. I gave him the heir your mother couldn’t.” She shoots me a smug look, and I see red.
“My mother was a million times the woman you are.” Slamming the bottle of water down on the counter, I stride toward Cadance with venom shooting from my eyes. “She was the best mom, and you’re the shittiest one.”
Indecipherable emotion shimmers in her eyes for a fleeting second. Then it’s gone and her hands ball into fists at her side as she sneers at me. “Your mother was a washed-up wrinkly bag of pathetic bones who didn’t know the first thing about holding on to a powerful man. She?—”
