Free The Successor by Stephen Frey

daughter.
    The night she’d won her award there’d been more than fifty screenplays stacked up on the dining room table of her apartment. Several she was extremely interested in, with roles she felt might win her the ultimate Oscar—Best Actress. The next morning her agent had called—again and again—to tell her that directors were demanding the scripts back. Then he’d called one final time at the end of the day—to quit, right on the phone. Richard Hart had struck with fury and force.
    A month later she’d been out of money—and friends. Even the girls she’d gone to Elaine’s with wouldn’t return her calls. So she’d taken a job as a waitress and—nightmare of nightmares—been forced to sell her Oscar on eBay.
    That’s when they’d called, just when she was at her most vulnerable. With an opportunity to make a big pot of money—an amount that wouldn’t have seemed like much a few months ago, but seemed like a ton now—and an opportunity for revenge. As poor as she’d suddenly become, the chance to one-up her father was almost as big an incentive as the money. Calling him out in public for being a failure as a husband and a father wasn’t enough anymore. Now she wanted to take him down. She was still too young to understand that revenge never ended up tasting as sweet as you thought it would.
    Melissa glanced into the sports car’s rearview mirror. The long blond hair and blue eyes were gone. Now she had short dark hair and green eyes. She hadn’t wanted to be recognized as that young woman who’d won the Oscar, then been banished from Hollywood.
    Now she
couldn’t
be recognized as that. They’d made that clear in no uncertain terms. They’d put so much emphasis on staying anonymous she got the feeling that if anyone ever found out who she was and these people heard about it, she might not be around long.
    She shook her head. A few months ago she’d been on top of the world. It was amazing how quickly life could change.

6
    ALLISON WALLACE looked around anxiously. It was like no other office she’d ever been to. It was more like the reptile house at a zoo. Not the conservative surroundings of a prominent Manhattan senior executive she’d been expecting. Lining two walls were shelves of aquariums and cages, filled with snakes and lizards of all shapes and sizes. And a three-foot alligator lay in a tank in one corner.
    “Everything all right?”
    Allison glanced at the plump, middle-aged woman wearing cat’s-eye glasses who’d led her in here from reception. She’d barely heard the question because she couldn’t focus. The whole scene was too distracting. “Um…”
    “Never been here before, huh?”
    “No.”
    “Don’t worry, they usually stay put.”
    “Usually?”
    The woman smiled. “Do you want anything to drink while you wait for Ms. Graham?”
    “How about boric acid? In case I have to throw it at something slithering at me?”
    “Sorry. The guy who was here before you got the last bottle. Good thing, too. That cobra over there would have nailed him if he hadn’t.”
    Well, at least she had a sense of humor about it. “Pepsi would be great,” Allison said, checking in the direction the woman had looked when she’d mentioned the cobra. Sure enough, there were eyeglasses on the back of the coppery hood. It was a small snake, but so what? Weren’t baby snakes supposed to be even more poisonous than adults? “Thanks.”
    When the woman was gone, Allison took a closer look at some of the creatures, keeping her distance, especially as she neared the alligator. The teeth on the thing were already getting big and the tank didn’t look that sturdy. It seemed as if it were smiling at her with those menacing pearly whites—not in a friendly way, either. More like he was hungry—and she was dinner.
    “Like him?”
    Allison whirled around. Victoria Graham stood in a far corner. She’d entered the office from an anteroom. Allison hadn’t heard the door open.
    “I call him