Chapter 3 - a leech’s ambition (1/2)

Scarlett Chapman had all but exhausted her prospects in the states. Despite her father’s begrudging financial backing, her perfume lines and designer brands and modeling career had each limped from the public spotlight and into quiet, anticlimactic obscurity. No amount of Chapman’s clout (or checks) could circumvent Scarlett’s fundamental absence of imagination and innovation. She had body enough to sell, sell, sell whatever inane, consumerist garbage she wanted to push onto the American people, but was ultimately a vapid cardboard cutout of a person — a pretty face with little purpose beyond grifting her way into the lifestyle she deemed suitable for her bloodline.

It was that one truth which had been killing her slowly.

What a waste of beauty and blood! While her father was a frigid little weed of a man, Scarlett’s body was soft and sculpted and alive with a natural warmth. Her skin was lightly tanned and glazed with the passion of youth. In the light of the sun, she was a sight to behold, as it was the only time her irises burned with their sultry, amber fire from within those almond eyes. On all other occasions, though, she adopted her father’s gaze. Calculating Dispassionate.

Her cheeks were full and glowing, yet untouched by the reddening flush of lesser women — a stain meant only for the coy and sheepish.

Spineless, all, in Scarlett’s eyes. Instead, she mirrored the poise of men more powerful than herself. She remained aloof, keeping much of the world (save its vices) at arm’s length. Her clinical comportment, however personally grounding, was at great odds with her sun-kissed aesthetic. Her icy, reptilian nature slithered only inches under her radiance

She was a snake in a bonnet; none would know know her fangs from a glance.

Her square jawline was tempered with a touch of roundness, giving her face a friendlier frame than her father’s. This element was elevated by her full, inviting lips — nestled beneath the adorable bud of her nose, which was flanked by petite comma nostrils and complemented by the gentle slope of its bridge.

A few pinprick moles tastefully accented her slender back and the faint outlines of her ribs. Her tummy lacked any abdominal definition, but was smooth and flat, softening slightly, sensually around the olive pit slit of her navel. Her well muscled calves led to thighs with flesh enough to crease at her rounded hips and tease the tiniest of gaps between the plump meat of her inner thighs.

Scarlett’s ass was subtly cushioned and flawlessly sleek, a balance achieved through focused discipline on her part. Its peach shape wasn’t particularly plump, but it did pull her hips wide enough to endow her with a hypnotic sway as she walked. She’d often flex the lean muscles of her arms as she ran her hands along her frame, wordlessly tempting onlookers as she sunbathed and reveled in the futility of their advances.

The star of these little shows was not the curvy hardbody that Scarlett so carefully maintained, but her impressive 32E bust she displayed proudly in only the most revealing outfits. Each round, ripe breast was kept cradled in a barely-there top, some tight enough to squeeze her chest into attention — others let her cleavage fall open, the fabric very nearly slipping away and letting its cargo tumble out into the open air.

If her elitism had not fueled a repulsion towards all other women in the field, then Scarlett might have found a calling in sex work, but she gagged at the idea of joining the seas of desperate women scrounging for the loose change of degenerates.

Granted, all of her father’s powerful associates were perverts of the highest order, but none of that was of consequence for the rich, she had concluded.

Despite how quickly Scarlett ate up Chapman’s yuppie ideology, she had not always been a proud member of the family. Regardless, Chapman could not deny that it was indeed his loins that spawned a specimen so single-mindedly horny for money. Upon Scarlett’s conception (a result of one of his hundreds of affairs), he had cut all ties with her harlot mother, unwilling to give either of them a penny of his wealth.

Chapman had assumed the bastard child would be buried like the shameful secret she was.

He had not realized that his ruthlessness was hereditary.

Scarlett had — through years of threats, tantrums, and the occasional cajoling — extracted her true origin from her poor, defeated mother, then immediately sought out Chapman. She was to take her rightful place among his syndicate. There had been plenty of other bastards before Scarlett; Chapman was a man of many, many pleasures, after all. Still, he had swaddled himself in red tape and had constructed a swarm of lawyers and guerillas, all to dissuade any illegitimate offspring from dipping their fingers into his fortune.

All except Scarlett.

She stalked and studied Chapman for years, ingratiating herself into his outer orbit just enough to slip into his debaucherous parties without suspicion. At the height of one such celebration, her window of opportunity had opened! The harder drugs hard been brought out and were kicking in as the festivities ramped up, and in the madness and she simply snatched several thinning, blonde hairs straight from Chapman’s scalp. He had been so thoroughly blasted that she could’ve drawn blood without him realizing.

A short while later, once she had the paternity test procured, Scarlett confronted him very publicly, pulling a few strings to guarantee a paparazzi presence at the scene. Chapman, contemptible reptile though he may be, was still clever, in his way.

He was able to read the writing on the wall.

His finely tuned paranoia (which one could credit to his unshakable coke habit) kept him interminably on his toes. He greeted Scarlett with the magnanimity and bravado of a father embracing a child once thought dead and buried. It was a tearful spectacle, and the media lapped it up on instinct.

Chapman, for his part, was none too upset with that particular turn of events. Scarlett was definitely of his blood, and he was, for a time, proud to have a child whose devious mind was molded in the image of his own. As they were cut from the same sallow cloth, Chapman knew neither of them cared at all for familial bonds outside of the public arena, so he was more than content to pay her a handsome allowance and let her fuck right off.

At the time, Scarlett couldn’t have asked for a more favorable arrangement.

That had not been entirely true in hindsight, though.

Wealth bored her, mostly. She had no friends who weren’t simply sycophants, and she had excommunicated any family who shared her mother’s impure peasant-blood. She traveled until she had seen the world, fucked until sexual ecstasy dulled into a gray blur of faces and flesh, and ingested enough drugs over the years to kill a small city of people.

And yet, nothing could sate the aching of her existential appetite.

She wanted only to share in her father’s infamy, to establish her own legacy. Unfortunately for Scarlett, her natural cunning did not quite translate into the cruel acumen of Chapman himself, however she might have tried to imitate him.

While she had inherited her mother’s dark locks, Scarlett had begun to pathologically bleach her hair blonde to mirror her father. To her chagrin, however, her roots were too stubborn to lose their original color. Her eyebrows too, in turn, were permanently coffee bean brown, a stark reminder of her wretched (read: anything less than obscenely rich) lineage. Ironically, all of Scarlett’s finer qualities were solely attributed to her mother. Her height, the delicate architecture of her bones, the ability to not smolder in the sunlight like an unearthed grub — all aspects which Chapman, despite his vast pool of resources, would never have at his disposal, even if he resorted to the most radical surgeries.

It was this obsessive fixation to emulate Chapman and chase his vile prestige that set Scarlett on the road to Bacchanalia. She would, at long last, have her wish.

She would be part of something much, much larger.