House of Cards
Disclaimer: I don’t own anything you recognize. The characters belong to Charlaine Harris and Alan Ball. I’ve taken material both from the books and from the show.
Summary: Sookie Stackhouse is a telepathic New York socialite. When business and fate cause her to encounter one Eric Northman, cutthroat businessman and vampire, the world she knows comes tumbling down.
A/N: Think Gossip Girl meets True Blood/SVM novels. Like any chick lit, it has plenty of clothes and shoes, romance and drama. Just sit back, relax, and enjoy!
WARNING: ADULT CONTENT
Chapter 1: Murder Game
Mornings in the Upper East Side are great daily migrations as people move from home to work. Cars lined the streets, and the horns sound like battle cries as commuters vie with one another to slip into any possible space on the road. Even in my seventieth storey penthouse, I can still hear the incessant angry honking.
Mornings are one of those times when I am particularly grateful for my parents’ ability to churn out cash. That is, before they were swept away by a flood on a road trip when I was seven. After that, our grandmother took us in, my brother Jason and me. Gran was from an old and prestigious family, the Hales. Her grandfather had worked in the property business. Her father had taken over after my great-grandfather died, and so the business had been passed down through the family from father to son, until Gran’s generation. At first, it had been passed to her brother, my great-uncle, Bartlett Hale. The thing was, he…wasn’t the type of person that anyone had wanted to represent the family company. At first, when the news had leaked, no one wanted to believe it. Bartlett, of course, denied the fact that he’d had sex with two underage girls from poor families. I suspected that he paid their families a lot to shut them up and stop them from pressing charges, before running them out of the state. However, it is impossible to wrap fire in paper. Those two girls weren’t his only victims. There was my cousin Hadley, and then…there was me.
To cut a long story short, he’d resigned as the CEO and moved back to Louisiana, and my father, Corbett Stackhouse, took over the running of the company until he went and died in a flash flood. This brings me back to the present as I stand at the window of my living room and sip a cup of perfectly brewed coffee whilst I am still in my robe. I, Sookie Stackhouse, am not one of those people who needed to make the morning commute to my work place, mainly because I don’t have one, unless ‘socialite’ or ‘rich girl’ is actually a profession. Granted, sometimes being a Stackhouse woman does feel like a full time job with no set hours.
I suppose I could have worked for the company, but I’d discovered early on that I had no taste for the family business. When I was little, my father sometimes took me to board meetings. The thing was, he was one of the few people who knew about and sort of accepted my little quirk, as I liked to call it. I am not just any Upper East Side socialite. I am a telepathic Upper East Side socialite. Imagine what that must be like, hearing all the thoughts of the people in this particular circle. Trust me, it’s not fun seeing the most intimate details of Kevin Berger’s affair with one of his married neighbours and then hearing his commentary. There is a reason why I tend to isolate myself in order to try and find a little bit of peace.
