He Wants An Open Marriage? Done!

Roxanne’s heart hammered a frantic rhythm against her ribs as she lifted her phone. Her palm felt slick with sweat against the cold glass casing. Pressing her thumb to the scanner, she closed her eyes for a split second, sending up a silent, desperate prayer. Please, let it not be Christian.

Before the screen could even load, a voice sliced through the heavy room.

"He wasn’t bluffing," someone muttered, the tone completely bewildered, thick with disbelief.

Richard looked around the long table, watching the color drain from the faces of his executives. His own brows pulled tight. "Who wasn’t bluffing?"

"Christian Westbrook," Nicholas answered from the threshold. He was staring down at his own screen, a look of pure, triumphant malice lighting up his face.

Richard whipped his head around, a thick muscle ticking violently in his jaw as he glared at his brother.

"This video is worse," one of the senior board members whispered, his hands trembling slightly as he held his device. "He’s directly targeting Vance Enterprises now."

Margaret moved swiftly back to her chair, snatching her phone off the polished table. "What has that little parasite done this time?" she hissed under her breath.

A suffocating tension filled the air. Nobody spoke. The only sound was the faint echo of audio playback beginning to bleed from a dozen different speakers.

Roxanne swallowed down a bitter lump of dread and tapped the video link. Oh, Christian. What did you do?

Suddenly, Nicholas’s sharp, grating laughter sliced through the room. The sound was abrasive, scraping raw against Roxanne’s nerves.

"I swear, I am an absolute genius," Nicholas chuckled, shaking his head in twisted amusement. "Just one leaked video, and this guy is doing all my heavy lifting for me."

A few executives flicked disgusted glances toward him, but no one actually wasted their breath on a retort. Their attention was entirely consumed by the screen.

"Well, I’ll leave you good people to your afternoon entertainment," Nicholas mocked, giving a loose, arrogant wave. "I have an office to go occupy at the Riggs Group. Best of luck handling this trainwreck." He turned squarely for the exit.

"If you walk through that door, you are officially dead to this family, Nicholas!" Margaret erupted, her voice dripping with pure venom. "Do not think for a second we will take you back when you come crawling on your knees!"

Nicholas scoffed over his shoulder, his eyes cold. "Why don’t you worry about the real problem sitting right at your table? I don’t need a single one of you anymore." With a hard slam of the door, he was gone.

At the table, completely deaf to the chaos, Pamela sat frozen. Her face was entirely bloodless, a stark, pasty white. Tears brimmed over her lower lashes as she clamped a trembling hand over her mouth, her shoulders shaking.

Richard leaned back into his chair, his sharp eyes instantly locking onto her distress. His forehead creased. "It’s about you, isn’t it?"

Pamela looked up, her gaze fractured and terrified. She swallowed hard, her voice dropping into a barely audible whisper. "I’m sorry. Richard, I’m so sorry."

"What’s on the video, Pam?" Richard pressed, his tone dropping into a low, dangerous register. "Just tell me before I hit play."

Pamela opened her mouth, her throat working silently, but the words choked in her chest. She could only shake her head, fresh tears tracing down her cheeks.

Richard let out a sharp, impatient exhale. "Fine."

He tapped his screen. The moment the video loaded and Pamela’s face filled the frame, Richard’s features hardened into stone.

On screen, the background looked like a dimly lit, upscale lounge. Pamela was holding a nearly empty wine glass, her fingers clumsy around the stem. Her eyes were unfocused, her pupils dilated to the edge of her irises, the clear mark of someone who had been overserved.

She was laughing hysterically at something off-camera. Even without seeing the person holding the phone, the smug cadence of the voice behind the lens was unmistakably Christian’s.

"Are you happy being a Vance, Pam?" Christian’s recorded voice echoed clearly through Richard’s speaker.

In the video, Pamela laughed bitterly, tossing her head back. "Happy? In that house? There is no happiness there, Christian. Honestly, I must have done something horrific in my past life, because being a Vance feels like an eternal punishment."

Margaret’s gaze snapped over to Pamela, her jaw tightening to a thin, rigid line, though she kept her lips sealed.

"What do you mean by that?" Christian’s voice pressed on the recording, low, coaxing, dripping with feigned sympathy.

Pamela stumbled a step toward the camera, her balance visibly compromised. "The Vances," she whispered, leaning in so close the lens blurred. She flicked her eyes side to side like a paranoid child. "They are full of secrets. Very, very dark secrets."

"What kind of secrets, corporate or personal?" Christian nudged.

Pamela shook her head vigorously, taking another sloppy gulp of wine before letting out a loud, unrefined belch. "I can’t tell you. They’re bad. Real, real bad."

She slumped forward, her shoulder heavily bumping against Christian’s arm as he finally came into partial view, a calculating smirk on his lips. "It’s enough to completely destroy the Vance name. It would crush the entire company into dust."

A brief silence hung over the audio as Pamela’s eyelids fluttered, her head lolling against his shoulder as she started to drift off.

On screen, Christian tapped her cheek gently to wake her up, his mask slipping to reveal a sharp, hungry desperation. "Your father?" he asked gently. "Was it something your father did? What could be that bad, Pam? Talk to me."

Pamela’s eyes barely cracked open. "I’ll give you a little taste," she slurred, her words thick and heavy as she leaned toward his ear. "Father’s side. His family wasn’t clean. They were very, very bad people. Criminals."

Across the boardroom table, Henry pressed the palm of his hand flat against his forehead, letting out a ragged breath as he flipped his phone face down on the wood.

"Are you serious?" Christian’s voice sounded borderline ecstatic on the tape. Pamela simply nodded, her head dropping back as sleep finally claimed her, though Christian kept shaking her shoulder. "Tell me what they did, Pam. Did they ever face charges? Did they pay for it?"

Pamela’s final words were almost completely swallowed by sleep. "Mother fixed it. She fixes everything. No one can ever know." She lifted a single, clumsy finger to her lips, letting out a faint, slurred "Shh," before the screen abruptly cut to black.

A collective wave of sharp gasps rippled across the boardroom table. The heavy silence that followed was suffocating.

Every single eye in the room pivoted slowly, fixing a dead, demanding glare onto Henry and Margaret. The older couple sat frozen, their expressions unreadable, wrapped in a stony facade.

"That video was completely staged!" Pamela suddenly shrieked, jumping to her feet, her voice cracking under the weight of panic. Her eyes darted frantically between her mother and father. "I didn’t tell him anything real! I was drunk. He was feeding me lines. I don’t even remember saying any of that!"

The board chairman slowly took off his reading glasses, his expression grim as he looked across the table. "Is there any truth to what your daughter just said on that video? What do you have to say to this, Henry?"

Henry met the chairman’s gaze dead on. He slowly leaned back into his chair, took a long, measured breath, and exhaled it into the quiet room. "Turn it off." Silence enveloped the room. "Now," he said firmly.

Everyone obeyed, putting their phones down. The silence grew even louder.

Henry looked away, pushing his chair back. "This meeting is suspended."

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