“So a woman is pissed that we won’t give in to her demands. I don’t care, and as a company, we need to stand firm. You said so yourself, Emma, that after the crap Lo Grizz pulled we wouldn’t buckle. But we did cave, didn’t we? We let Odell Murdock take his toys, and what happened? He went straight to Shatter, and we’re trying to fill a huge-ass hole in our schedule. Our list is already thin.”
“Moniqua wants to get with Shatter,” Joshua said. “After our lawyers called, I got through to someone in her entourage. She’s got Grizz in her ear, 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 midsize powerhouse “Scatter for Shatter.” Performers, creators, and distributors across the country were vying for partnership.
“Settling with Lo Grizz sliced open our jugular,” Joshua said frankly. “Moniqua and the others who’re pushing us to let them go, they’re the lifeblood of our roster right now. We need to drop a new album.”
“We don’t have a new album ready, Joshua,” his wife said. “Not yet.”
“Christ, I need to think.” Chelsea swung her feet to the floor. Lipstick, confidence, and even her rubber band weren’t enough to save this situation. The Devil’s Music empire had made them all billionaires—people to be envied and hated and idolized and lusted after—yet they were falling at breathtaking speed. How could that be?
“We’ve tapped our resources,” Emma said.
“Not all of them.” Joshua stood again, pacing the perimeter of the conference table. “You said you didn’t want to hear about the dark web. ’Cause it makes you feel immoral and dirty and wrong, right? Get over it, quick. Because we’re going to need to go darker than that.”
Chelsea and Emma exchanged a puzzled look. “How dark?” Chelsea asked.
“Shatter drew first blood. Now we respond.”
She sipped her iced coffee but tasted nothing. “How? Seduce their talent? None of their people want to join a label that’s currently getting DPed by lawsuits and social media bashing.”
“There’s one key player sitting pretty at Shatter who’ll come running to Devil’s Music and kiss the soil it sits on—if we let her.”
Delilah.
“Joshua, no,” Emma protested.
“The last time Delilah Bishop was in this room, she tried to set it on fire,” Chelsea said, swallowing past the bile that rose as, for the first time, she drew the comparison between what had happened to her great-grandmother and what could’ve happened to her three years ago.
“I remember damn well what went down the last time Delilah was here,” he assured her, a dash of some sort of violent regret in his eyes. He raked one hand, then the other, over his hair, shaved practically to the scalp. “Calling her back here doesn’t have a goddamn thing to do with what we want. She’s the only fucking option we’ve got. She’d kill herself before she let Devil’s Music die.”
Sad thing was, he was right.
Chelsea looked to Emma. This was ultimately their call. And one of them would need to make that soul-gutting call to Delilah Eloise Bishop, Shatter’s acclaimed producer and newly minted vice president.
“She might tell us to go fuck ourselves,” Chelsea said, but Emma shook her head.
“No. She’ll come home. But she’ll have terms. I know Delilah. She’s my best friend.” Emma sniffled, and sitting primly, like the delicate southern beauty the Toledo 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.
Joshua stood near the door, appearing to debate whether to take away Chelsea’s band and wipe away Emma’s tears. But he did neither. “I…I need to get away from this for a while.”
“And go where?”
Emma’s accusatory tone seemed to jar something loose in him, and he swore. “Next time you ask me that question, be sure you want the answer.” Then he addressed them both. “No one involves the board until we talk to Delilah. 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,” Chelsea said in a whisper. “That’s what we agreed to before we approached the board and got her voted out.”
But they weren’t united, because Emma was still in tears, Chelsea continued to snap her band, and Joshua strode through the door toward a place where neither of the others would follow.
And they were each left to wade through their own personal hells.
Chapter 3
Revenge suited Delilah. Not that her reluctance to engage Devil’s Music execs was unexpected, and not that she wasn’t entitled to be insulted that the people who’d led a corporate crusade to overthrow her as CEO were now calling her to come back from a glittering beachside tower in the City of Angels to a former plantation manor in the Big Peach. But she’d waited three days to respond to their calls for a face-to-face conversation.
Those three days had unraveled Chelsea. She felt as if she were moving through molasses. She couldn’t recall what she’d eaten—if she’d eaten—and she had been next to useless in yesterday’s meeting with Research and Development. This morning Emma had requested that a member of the kitchen staff keep Chelsea company, meaning the man’s duties were to ensure that she ate her fill of gourmet meals and stayed hydrated with beverages that didn’t contain profuse amounts of liquor.
Emma found her in the recording wing of the museum-like main house, and shared that Delilah had made contact and would be arriving discreetly the following day.
“One meeting. One conversation,” Emma relayed, standing beside her in front of a glass-walled studio. On the other side, audio engineers in the control room manned gear as Clint Jermaine, lead rapper of Vitalz, laid down a track before his flight to New York to tape a spot on a late-night talk show. Vitalz’s next explicit album wouldn’t officially release until August, but they would drop an under-wraps video, “Nasties,” in a few weeks. People were going to lose their shit when that happened. The company was banking on it.
“Then we’ll make every word count,” Chelsea said to Emma, glancing at her friend. The woman appeared sunnier than the clear-skied, sun-warmed day outside this centuries-old fortress. Not a strand of blond hair defied her by slipping free of its elegant knot, and her Tiffany-blue dress didn’t dare hold any wrinkles. The only teardrops on her were the striking colorless diamonds dangling from her ears. “Are you afraid to confront her, Emma?”
“No.” Concern made her irises sparkle like cut crystal. “Are you?”
“Do I look afraid?” Truthfully, Chelsea wanted to know if her fashion-runway pantsuit, her Louis Vuitton sandals, and the gems she’d retrieved from her vault at the bank disguised the fact that she felt like shit.
Perhaps she should’ve made an attempt to eat the beef tenderloin and sautéed spinach the kitchen assistant had brought to her office a few hours ago—or the eggs Benedict and mandarin orange slices that had been wheeled to her on a tray adorned with bursts of vibrant flowers early this morning. All she’d accepted was the coffee. The rest she’d sneaked to her reluctant assistant when she’d faked a need for more linen napkins.
Chelsea packed a hell of an appetite for someone her size. She’d always been thin, morphing from fragile-skinny to birdlike-slender thanks to puberty, which had struck late in her adolescence. She’d been fifteen, flat as a boy, and focusing too much on hiding hairpin burns with long sleeves to notice how her body was changing—and how guys were reacting to that.
But God, did she love food. She ate for so many reasons that had nothing to do with hunger, but her slight frame appeared to have nowhere to store all the calories she never regretted.
Coin genes, her father had said flippantly. For generations their family hadn’t the money or freedom to eat at will, and he and Chelsea were
making up for it. But while he was a robust man, as broad as a barn, his daughter was still just a bird.
Silly as it might seem, she loved that quirky similarity to her father, even if his explanation made her feel bottomless grief for what her ancestors had endured. The thought that her insatiable appetite had failed her was saddening.
She hoped this was only temporary, and that all of this—her disinterest in food, her inability to sleep, her dependence on the rubber band tucked in the pocket of her ink-colored pants—was just temporary.
Maybe, once this conversation with Delilah Bishop was over and done with, she’d be back to a somewhat normal routine.
“You look like a million bucks,” Emma told her.
“Just a million?”
“Okay, ten million.” She smiled, but it was fleeting, and she turned to face the glass again.
A few men had pulled out cards and dice, and the room was hazy with the mingling smoke of cigars and weed. Still, music was being made, and neither woman would interrupt.
When it came to in-house goings-on, Devil’s Music had an unspoken “blind-eye” policy. The job of the artists and producers was to make the company money. Most performers brought in entourages. Some had pizzas delivered to the recording lounges and stretched out on leather couches with Cristal in tumblers and video game controllers in their hands in between sessions. A few preferred to come in alone, work without outside distraction, and leave. What they did once they exited through the security gates was what made them liabilities, from brandishing guns in clubs to letting the cops catch them riding dirty with fake tags, open booze, and several ounces of marijuana in their rides. They frequently relied on the company’s legal team to put out fires with expertise that could be interpreted as magic or shady.
“Who are they?” Emma gestured to the scatter of women whose interpretation of modesty involved lingerie and stilettos. “Clint’s muses?”
“He promised them pool access after he wraps up in the booth.” Chelsea shrugged, clarifying, “They’re rentals.”
“Of course they are.” Like several of their label’s artists who weren’t attached to relationships and families, Clint preferred to keep his group fresh. The women who’d accompanied him today would be one-time guests, but at least he’d allow them a glimpse of the Devil’s Music experience: expensive liquor on tap, a ballroom-size indoor atrium pool, and memories of being catered to before they were snipped loose.
“To answer your question,” Emma said, “you don’t look afraid. I can sense it, is all.”
Chelsea looked around. The sounds of footsteps and conversations from open rooms and long halls and spacious corridors were muffled. “This isn’t fear.”
“Then what is it?”
“Guilt.”
Her friend frowned, her perfection slipping. “Oh, Chels.”
“Don’t pity me or tell me I’m wrong. I’ve been fighting this for a while, refusing to admit what it is.”
“What happened with Delilah was necessary. Our only option.”
“Yeah, just as it’s our ‘only option’ to beg her to swoop in and help us save the company we took from her.”
“Stop it.” The words whizzed past Emma’s perfect teeth. “We didn’t take it from her. This was our company, too, before the vote. When she took over after her father offed himself, she put Joshua in as CFO and you in as COO.”
“And you in as a producer, not as CEO. That was her place.”
Emma shook her head. “Come with me. We’re not going to hash this out here.”
They retreated to a vacant corridor that was grand even in its simplicity, with a stone water feature and tropical plants that stretched high toward skylights. Trickles and splashes filled the air until Emma finally spoke. “Delilah and I were friends long before she met you and Joshua. My uncle invested in Devil’s Music before I was even born. This place was a part of me, too. I was right there with Delilah. We grew up on music. Her dad and my family didn’t approve of us listening to rap when we were kids, but we said fuck that and we listened to it anyway. We wanted that culture. We wanted it for Devil’s Music, and that’s what happened.”
“With a little help,” Chelsea reminded her, scratching an old personal wound. “South Sounds fell to build this company in hip-hop.”
“I know that. Sacrificing that label earned you your place on the executive floor. No one’s discounting that. No one’s saying you don’t deserve it. And it’s too late for remorse. Who will it help?” Emma’s hesitation was brief. “Delilah was CEO because she was next in line after Dante cut out. It was a matter of birthright, not that I don’t have what it takes to lead this company.”
“You aren’t just a little freaked out to come into that office every day knowing a man died, his son took off, and we booted his daughter out to make it possible?”
“What the hell, Chelsea? This is you borrowing guilt that’s not yours to claim. Jude Bishop killed himself. That’s his fault, not ours. Dante left. Again, that’s on him, not us.”
You’re wrong. It is on me. You just don’t know. There are so many things you and Joshua…and even Delilah…don’t know.
“Delilah instigated a war in New York, trying to steal talent from the wrong label, and we all—including the rest of board—agreed we wouldn’t let her take us and this company down with her. We had to let her go.”
“Now she’s coming back.”
“Not to stay. Not to influence anyone.”
“Are you shitting me? Who’s to say she won’t demand our jobs the second she walks through the door?”
“Who’s to say we’ll agree?” Emma’s face was flawless steel now. “She doesn’t control Devil’s Music. We do. The thing is, Chelsea, you don’t grow up with a person like that as your closest friend without absorbing part of her. If she wants to fight for the CEO seat, that’s between Delilah and me—not you and not Joshua.”
“He won’t let you face her alone. Neither will I.”
“Thank you.” Emma patted her arm, then peeled the sleeve back a bit. “Make sure you’re not wearing this rubber band when she comes through tomorrow. She can sniff out fear.”
“I said I’m not afraid.”
“Guilt and fear smell the same.”
—
Security was on high alert the next day. At sunup specialists had been put in place, some blending in with maintenance staff, others disguised as landscapers tending to the grounds, several patrolling from a distance as a team monitored the advanced camera monitors housed in a room that had been converted from a nineteenth-century nursery.
Delilah Bishop wasn’t being set up to waltz into an ambush. The Devil’s Music owners were protecting themselves from her ambush. It took balls to be a woman who made enemies as routinely as she made her bed. She could cause chaos with her words and burn down a building she claimed she loved.
Her two-year tenure at Shatter Records and new promotion to VP planted seeds of assumption. Perhaps she wasn’t as volatile as she’d once been. Could be she’d built a solid new life in Los Angeles and had something to lose should she misstep. That didn’t mean she cared. If she was the same Delilah who’d shot herself, skipped her father’s funeral to handle company business, and attempted to set fire to the boardroom, she could very well strut through the double-door front entrance to deliver a message from hell.
Chelsea smoothed her skirt as she meandered into the foyer. Under normal circumstances she appreciated the modern upscale glory that exuded from textured walls, antique furnishings, and Art Deco brilliance. No expense had been spared to make this place a lesson in luxury.
Just as no expert tricks of photography had been spared to erase the frown of uncertainty from her image on the wall. Lighting had flattered the sensual warmth in her brown skin, emphasized the gloss of her tousled ebony hair, coaxed a smile from her tea-dark eyes. Emma and Joshua appeared confident in their photos, as did she, but digital enhancements had softened her mouth as effectively as they’d transformed the
colors of Emma’s dress, Joshua’s loosened necktie, and Chelsea’s off-the-shoulder top to a wealthy, unapproachable gold.
“You okay, Chelsea?”
She looked to Joshua as he approached with an easy swagger. “Just noting how my photo’s such a friggin’ lie.”
“What’s untruthful about it?” He stopped next to her and glanced up. “I see a smokin’ hot, powerful woman. Jesus Christ…I see why that reporter lost his job.”
Jack Barley, a local nightly news reporter, once a celebrity in his own right for journalistic integrity, had been escorted from here last year after being caught masturbating while staring at Chelsea’s picture. He’d been “encouraged” to resign and now was more recognizable by his new moniker: Jackoff Barley.
“Your charm doesn’t work on me, Joshua,” she said. “Save it for someone who gives a crap.” But she did feel her nerves shake off a layer of tension. Vain person that she was, she never got tired of superficial male appreciation. “Besides, Barley blamed me for what he did.”
“I didn’t say he wasn’t a fucking idiot.” He put an arm around her shoulders and squeezed. “Quit standing here thinking of reasons to blame yourself for what needed to be done years ago. Concentrate on what needs to be done now. She’ll be here soon.”
“I know.”
“Then don’t stand here waiting to greet her at the door. Go upstairs, do some work. She’ll be escorted to the boardroom.”
She nodded agreement. “Fine. Aren’t you coming, too?”
“Eventually.” He set her loose and crossed his arms. “I’m the one who’s going to escort her up.”
“Is it a good idea for any of us to confront her on our own?” she protested gently, feeling unsettled at something she detected in his tone but not altogether sure what. “Come with me. Emma should be wrapping up her conference call. We should all be together.”
“Go upstairs, Chelsea,” he said with finality.
Pissed to be dismissed, but choosing to not engage in a petty battle with someone she needed in her corner today, she threw up her hands and took the stairs to the executive suites.
Sin for Me Page 4
