The Fates (Book II)

8.5 - Secrets

Let's hop on over to the Weaver mansion and see what sort of scandal may be brewing... ;)

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Scene 5: Secrets

A.D. 2015

"She's a good little girl. Just like her mother."

Katherine scowled, slapping away the hand that rose to stroke her pale blonde hair, from where her loveless lover lay beside her in the bed they often shared. In the Weavers' master bedroom, whenever Bentley wasn't there. Away on business or whatever. "Don't you dare patronize me, Parker."

Parker lifted his head from his pillow, body weight shifting as he propped himself up on one elbow, bringing his lips closer to his unlovable lover's ear. "Patronize? Why would I ever, Katie dear."

'Katie'. She flinched, face twisting into a grimace, and inched away from him a bit. Parker always enjoyed calling her that -- not in the least as a term of endearment, but rather as a term of torment, a reminder of her past. The past that he'd been holding over her for almost as long as he had known her. Because of this, because Parker Campion knew all of Katherine Weaver's dirtiest secrets, he owned her.

"She is, though," Parker insisted. "The lovely Lacey Campion née Weaver. A good little girl and the world's most obedient daughter."

"More like daughter-in-law," Katherine grumbled, reaching for her nearby phone. "You're the mastermind behind everything that I tell her to do."

"Oh, you know that's not true -- your ridiculous demands for calorie summaries every week? That's all you."

"There is nothing ridiculous about wanting one's daughter to look perfect," she asserted as she scrolled through her text messages.

Parker chuckled, surveying her face for a second with his piercing stare -- a dark blue similar to his son's, though its depths were much more treacherous, as shady as this entire affair. "Well, I can't imagine that it's necessary, Katie. Looking perfect is probably just programmed in her genes."

"Ugh, don't flatter, Parker. It's the most despicable form of patronization, for which I've no patience."

"Did you know that you're even prettier when you're pissed off?"

"When am I ever not pissed off," Katherine scoffed.

"Ah, that must be why you're always so pretty..." her paramour teased.

She slapped his hand away again, otherwise ignoring him. Her icy eyes, a blue far lighter and shallower than Parker's, skimmed over the most recent texts from her daughter. "Well, Lacey seems to be proceeding as per usual. As if she never read a word of those accidentally sent texts."

"Just like I said. Good little girl." Parker reached for his own phone situated on Bentley's bedside table, where it sat as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Checked the time. "No doubt we've nothing to worry about, if she's inherited your habit of harboring secrets. And I'm sure she won't be spilling the beans to Daddy dearest."

"I've told you a thousand times -- Bentley already suspects that I'm carrying on with a lover and makes nothing of it."

"And I've told you a million times -- the issue in question isn't your obvious infidelity, Katie. It's whether your poor old husband knows that you've been carrying on with me."

"With the father of his son-in-law, you mean? Or with some creep who slithered his way into this bed by blackmailing me?"

"Tsk, tsk -- lest you forget, I seduced my way into your bed before I ever made my first threat," he reminded her, bringing his lips near her ear again in a twisted, sadistic caress. "Even if you never wanted this, an affair built on duress... you always wanted me nonetheless."