Harold Maxton sat in his library, nursing a whiskey that wasn't helping his mood and a phone call that was actively making it worse.
The leather chair creaked as he shifted—the same chair he'd sat in for fifteen years, behind the same mahogany desk, in the same room where generations of Maxton men had conducted business, broken rivals, and pretended they were kings of their little Paradise empire.
Kings.
More like middle managers with good PR and very forgiving wives.
The only thing different was the monitor.
Melissa had dropped the old one, she'd said. Clumsy accident. Had to buy a replacement.
Harold hadn't questioned it. Why would he? It was just a monitor. His wife was many things—cold, distant, perpetually disappointed in his existence—but she wasn't usually clumsy.
He didn't know that, his wife had been bent over this very desk, screaming into the polished mahogany while their charity-case nephew fucked her senseless from behind.
