The Rules of Enmity: NC17

That's what I'd call promising ... I hope we'll get an update soon, I can't wait, I think I'm gonna love thise story.

Wow that was very interesting. I would so love how Chloe was the cause of Lucas death. The fact that she got that tatoo is just :P


Hope ;)

A very intense chapter--What exactly happened with Lucas? More as soon as possible--OKAY?

I feel so sorry for Lucas!! And I really wish that Chloe and Lex didn't hate each other!! I don't see how they will ever be able to get over the pain they caused each other!! Please update your story soon!!

First of all...God that must have hurt! I should now and even I had to shiver at that. Another great chapter, they're both kind of twisted in this story and yet it makes sense. They're just trying to get back at each other, but they ways things are looking it's going to escalate quickly...what a mess. I can't wait to read more!!

Steph*

"So what happened to Lucas?" Sheri had taken her shoes off and was curled up with her second martini on Chloe’s couch.

"Lots of things, really," Chloe stalled. "But what I did pushed him over the edge."

"There was never any indication that his death was anything but an accident." The lovely woman sipped her drink. She had the constitution of someone twice her weight. She’d once told Chloe that while it wasn’t necessary in her line of work, it had certainly helped on occasion that she could drink all of her vice-presidents under the table. "It just looked like a broken latch on the balcony."

Lucas had been staying in a hotel converted from an old mansion. The curved staircase made it nearly impossible to move furniture upstairs so a pulley system had been used in the old days to get beds and couches to the second and third floor. The balcony had a latch and gate so that the pieces could be moved in and out through the large, glass doors. Lucas had been on the third story and had apparently been drinking. Witnesses said he’d been standing out on the balcony, watching a lawn party until it broke up. Then, he’d apparently leaned back against the gate, which gave way, and fallen to the patio.

"The landing wasn’t caught on video, but the balcony was visible to the security cameras." Chloe shuddered delicately. "I’ve seen it." She recalled the black and white film that Lex had forced her to watch. She’d seen Lucas drinking and pacing and standing above a crowd of people. He’d never looked at the camera, but she saw his face clearly. He’d looked…relieved; even a little impatient, as if waiting for the party to break up. His movements had been casual, but the fact that he’d finished his drink, gone back inside and put on his suit jacket before walking back out to the balcony and leaning, ever so casually, against it.

"You’re sure it was suicide?"

"Lex showed me a letter that Lucas wrote, it arrived a few days after he died. It didn’t say anything specific, but it was enough to know he was saying goodbye."

"What happened?" It was a nicer way of saying ‘What did you do to him?’

"I stumbled across something in my research, when I was still a reporter," she began. "It was barely a breath of scandal, but since I hated Lex so much I dropped everything and pursued it like a damned terrier after a rat." She laughed, as bitter as the gin she drank. "I’d been following up on a lead that linked Lex to an upscale call service."

"Hookers?"

"Really high priced business. Makes the Hollywood Madams look like Singapore street-walkers."

"Makes? You mean it’s still in business?"

"Oldest profession in the world won’t be taken down by one reporter." Chloe went to the kitchen and grabbed a bag of chocolate-chip cookies. "Anyway, I was looking at anything I could find to discredit Lex. Timing was crucial in this because Luthorcorp had a couple of sensitive projects up in the air at the time." She chewed her cookie guiltily. "I got careless, just plowed into it so fast that I missed a few key points. The information I was going on involved Lex’s penthouse outside of the city, it was the taxi service used by the workers that clued me in. I went to take pictures for a few nights of the arrivals and departures used by this company. Then I hunted down names of all the people who went in and out.

"Eventually I found my story, and I even managed to sneak into the building and get photos of the workers going to the apartment." She leaned forward. "The story was even juicier than I could have possibly hoped for."

"You’re killing me here."

"The hookers were men."

"Oh my God," Sheri’s mouth dropped open. "Lex is gay?"

"No," Chloe replied. "I was so focused on the workers that I never bothered to actually verify that it was actually Lex in the suite."

"Oh," Sheri said, realization dawning on her. "It was Lucas using his brother’s suite?"

"Yeah, and I managed to get a beautiful shot of him greeting one of the men with a big kiss. It was what every trashy tabloid reporter dreams of."

"You’re not trashy."

"That’s just it. I went from investigative reporting to muckraking. I didn’t care about my reputation, or my career, I just wanted to hurt Lex. Then Lucas saw me and I ran."

"I don’t remember any Gay scandal when Lucas died."

"I sat on it for a few days, waiting for Lex to approach me. I developed the film myself, I didn’t want anyone to see them before I had a chance to drop a bomb. Eventually I heard from him. All he said was ‘Please don’t do it, Chloe.’ But I just hung up on him. I gave the pictures to the Inquisitor, not the Planet." She drained her glass and nearly choked on the lump forming in her throat. "I can remember sitting here, watching t.v., I was practically humming with self-satisfaction when I saw the story. Lucas was dead."

"How did Lex find out about your involvement?"

"Lucas must have told him." The downstairs buzzer sounded, startling Chloe off the couch. She’d been cleaning her oven. She walked to the door and pressed the button.

"Let me in." It had been Lex’s voice; she knew he’d come eventually.

"What brings you-" Her remark was cut off by Lex’s hand encircling her throat. He practically lifted her off her feet and dragged her backwards toward the couch. Unable to speak, Chloe clawed at his hand when he slammed her into the cushions. His face was a mask of cold rage.

"You sit right there and don’t you move." She hadn’t noticed that he’d been carrying something in his hand. He just went to her VCR and put a tape in. Chloe started to get up. "Get up from that seat, and I swear I’ll knock your teeth in." It was the first time Lex had ever made a threat like that. Not that she hadn’t been threatened by him before, he’d even tried to kill her. But this was a different animal altogether. He pressed play and stood to one side, watching her while she watched the screen.

"Is that Lucas?"

"Don’t you speak his name." She watched, a little nauseous, when she saw Lucas’ last moments on the screen.

"Lex, I’m sorry about your brother, but his death was an accident." She was feeling her stomach twist painfully. She shouldn’t feel guilty for the story. Not for his family.

"Read this." He took a crumpled piece of paper out of his pocket and threw it at her. "It arrived the day after he died."

The contents of the letter were simple; Lucas apologized for not telling him, wrote that he loved his brother, and that he was going to drop off the radar. Those were his exact words. ‘Drop off the radar.’

Chloe understood. She read the letter again and felt her hands go numb. It was a goodbye letter, dated the day before he died.

"You didn’t know about him?"

"No, he didn’t even feel like he could trust his own brother." Lex paced away from her, then back. "He was just trying to be happy, in his own way. And now he’s dead because of you." His words struck a defensive cord in Chloe. She buried her guilt under the anger.

"I didn’t know he was going to do it, Lex," she said. "And I can kill the story." She crossed to the phone but he snagged her arm.

"Story’s already dead. I had feelers out the second Lucas came to me. He didn’t tell me who else was in the pictures."

"I wondered why I hadn’t seen it in the papers." She jerked her arm out of his grasp. "So why did he do it?"

"He couldn’t face me."

"I’m sorry Lex. For you loss."

"No you’re not." He walked to the VCR and took the tape out. "You’re thrilled that you’ve been able to hurt me like this."

"I wasn’t trying-"

"Bullshit!" He turned to her with an accusatory finger pointed at her chest. "You blame me for your father’s death, so you decided to take away my only family."

"I didn’t plan for Lucas to die, Lex. I had no way of knowing that this would happen."

"What did you think? That he’s become a gay rights activist?" He flung his arms out. "We’re Luthors! We’re not allowed to be gay, sick, hurt, victims…" He trailed off. "We’re not like the rest of you."

"You think I’m somehow entitled to suffer because I’m not a Luthor?" Chloe’s rage boiled up. "You think you shouldn’t be attacked because of the ‘poor little rich boy’ story? You ass!" She got in his face. Her father had died and now his memory was being trashed because Lex considered him 'common'. She was too angry to stop her next words. "Now you know how it feels. Now you understand what happens to the rest of us."

The look Lex gave her was on the edge of homicidal.

"You think this makes us even?" Before Chloe could answer, Lex took her arm and pulled her out the door of her apartment. He practically threw her in the elevator and restrained her from getting out until they reached the lobby. Then he manhandled her into his limo and gave the driver a street address. "You’re right, Chloe, our situations are very similar here." He was looking out the window when they pulled up to the curb. "The results will be the same." He turned to look at her, the pain and grief in his gaze finally touched her through the anger. "You owe me this."

"And you just did it?" Sheri was beyond stunned.
"When I saw how hurt he was, I stopped being mad. I’d let my temper get the better of me in the apartment, and I’d let the worst part of my nature push me into taking the photos in the first place." She poured herself another drink. "That’s when I quit reporting. It may seem odd that I went right back into snooping, but it was the only thing I was really good at, and feeling a little bit lower seemed to fit. I made a living with people’s infidelity and lies. Just in a seedier way."

"Do you really see it that way?"

"As a reporter, I wrote just as many stories exposing the good in people as I did the bad. Now all I see is the ugliness. It just seemed appropriate."

"If you don’t mind me asking," Sheri ventured. "Why did you pull up your shirt at the restaurant?"

"Another long story, but to put it in a nutshell, the animosity wasn’t erased between us. The history is too long for that. But we spent years going back and forth with random pranks and general troublemaking."

"Sounds healthy."

"It just snowballed."

"I can tell."

"Well, it went from doing negative things to just the opposite."

"You can’t tell me you became friends."

"No, but I ended up with an opportunity to save Lex’s ass once. He was being hassled by a woman who claimed that he sexually harassed her. I managed to get her to drop the suit against him with no payout."

"How?"

"I found information regarding a similar suit filed when she was a teenager, two of them, in fact, suing schools claiming that her teachers were approaching her inappropriately."

"So she was a scam artist?"

Chloe paused. She chose her next words carefully. Or at least, as carefully as she could given the amount of alcohol she’d consumed.

"I don’t know for certain," she said. "I figured she probably was, but I paid a lot of people a lot of money to give me the dirt on a juvenile. Everyone believed her on both earlier cases."

"She was really beautiful." Sheri was sharp. "I’ve known someone like that. She really did get harassed a lot, men couldn’t seem to stop themselves from acting like asses around her."

"Either way, I approached her and gave her the information I’d gathered. Since it wasn’t an arrest record, and her parents had been the ones filing suit, it could have been damaging."

"I’m surprised that Lex’s people didn’t find this."

"They probably would have, and it would have gone to court, and she might have lost. But the damage would have been done. I just got there faster."

"Why did you help him?"

Chloe had asked herself the same question countless times. Why had she helped him? Why did she feel the need to have him in her debt instead of at her throat? Maybe it gave her more satisfaction to have his gratitude, however resentful. Maybe she wanted a to throw him off a bit, either way, it had made her feel more alive than she’d been in months to walk into his office and give him the news.

Lex had been beyond skeptical. But she’d timed it just right and his lawyer called while she was sitting in his expensive, leather chair. The way his gaze had darted to her in surprise while he listened to his lawyer on the phone gave her such a surge of adrenaline that she’d had the shakes afterward.

"Why did you do that?" he’d asked. He stared at her quietly, she could practically hear him thinking that their war was over. That she’d finally broken down and offered a truce. It had been so satisfying to stand up and smile at him.

"From now on, whenever I ask, you have to show it to me." She’d relished the expression on his face darken to something that wasn’t anger, wasn’t amusement, but somewhere in between. Either way, he’d accepted her challenge.

"What made you do that?"

"It’s twisted, and wrong; it makes no sense that two people, normally sane, have this need to play stupid games with each other. But I do need it. Or I did." She rubbed a hand over her eyes and felt a slight sting where a little bit of gin was left on her fingers. She let it burn and blinked away the moisture. "It escalated with him backing off a guy I dated who’d started to stalk me. He demanded to see mine whenever we met. The rules of enmity were laid out like this: Only the first person to see the other could ask, no one could refuse, and no explanations were to be given to anyone about the ‘arrangement’."

"You’re right, it is twisted."

"I don’t deny it."

"Did it ever get any worse?" Sheri watched her friend closely and when Chloe wouldn’t look at her she prodded. "You’ve got to tell me now; I’m here for the long haul."

"He made the next move after a couple of months of show and tell. We don’t usually run in the same circles so he’d have to come looking for me and vice versa for a fix."

"How did he kick it up?"

"I was offered this job." She giggled. "Go figure. I keep him out of trouble and he goes and brings me to the attention of my future employers."

"Why did you take it?"

"I didn’t know till I was working there a week. Then this big bouquet of flowers gets delivered to my desk with a note from him. It reads: ‘Hope you like the new job; when we’re alone, I get to touch it.’"

"You could’ve quit."

"Oh, but that would be backing down, and I couldn’t do that," Chloe said, dryly. "No, I felt the need to keep pushing things till I could arrange the upper hand."

"Did it involve anything illegal?"

"Nope, I just got him a little revenge."

"He doesn’t do that himself these days?"

"Not the way I can. I still have plenty of contacts in the journalistic world. Actually took two personal days and went digging up the business world history and found the one guy who probably hated him as much as I did. He’d been a thorn in Lex’s side for years. And a pretty sharp one at that."

"Who?"

"Randall White."

"That was you?"

"That was me."

Randall White had been a southern gentleman with political aspirations and a hatred of Lex Luthor that stemmed from his former dealings with Lionel. It was probably the fact that Lex , himself, had done very little to antagonize the man that Chloe had chosen him. If he’d had a real beef with the bald millionaire, maybe she’d have left him alone. But then, she’d almost believed the woman with the sexual harassment suit.

Chloe had been inspired by some of her old research. Randall White’s name had come up several times when she’d been digging frantically for dirt on Lionel Luthor in high school. Though she hadn’t recalled immediately what their connection had been, when she came across his name in connection with his criticism of Luthorcorp’s business practices, she’d made an immediate connection.

White had known Lionel as a young man, and the man’s history was now as pristine as a professional cleaning crew could make it. He hadn’t, however, counted on a teenage reporter having kept all of her research fastidiously organized since before his political aspirations came to fruition and he’d felt the need to cover his tracks.

"Lionel Luthor left him holding the bag when they had a business together. There was some insider trading suspected but nothing was proven. White had been the source in the company who’d told Lionel to sell his stock. When the Luthor legal team was done, even the deal White cut with the D.A. for immunity didn’t help. His name was kept out of it as part of the agreement, but he was still out of a job and Lionel was smelling like a rose."

"How’d you get the name?"

"I got lucky. I wasn’t the first person to go digging into the past. I came across someone who’d kept court documents and employment records. It just came down to records of his geographic location during the trial. Hotel receipts paid for by the D.A.’s office, phone calls between White and Lionel, all stuff that was almost meaningless until someone with an anal retentive attention to detail and an obsessive drive could put it all together."

"So you had the name of the informant, but what about the person who gathered the info."

"He was murdered a few weeks after I talked to him. A lot of his information was passed to me as the sole record, and I kept it to myself. But after White had his past cleaned up a little, and Lionel Luthor was dead, he went forward with his own agenda."

"You went to a lot of trouble."

"I’m not proud of it now, but at the time, I was excited about the challenge. It really took my mind off how unhappy I was."

"Now we get to the root of things." Sheri reached for a cookie. "I’m glad I didn’t have to say it."

"I might have been twisted and a basket case some of the time, but I still knew what I was doing."

"How long has this been going on?"

"A couple of years. Then I started seeing a counselor because I couldn’t sleep. I knew that this game was beyond unhealthy. I was punishing myself by pushing Lex to try to hurt me. My own guilt over my responsibility for my father’s situation."

"I know you put Lionel Luthor behind bars…for a little while, but how does that make you responsible for doing your civic duty."

"My relationship with Lionel started out as a partnership. I betrayed a friend because of my own hurt feelings. He might have preyed on my weaker moments, but I still made the choice. Then it was almost impossible to get out."


"Smallville sounds like a pretty dangerous town."

"You don’t know the half of it."

"You’re a girl with a lot of secrets, why share them now?"

"I made a huge mistake when I pushed Lex back into the game today." She glanced at the clock on the wall. "Or yesterday." It was nearly Three AM. "I’d managed to get myself out of the sick addiction to the humiliation cycle but the compulsion was too much. And now that it’s my turn again, all I can do is think about how I’m going to ambush him next, and what he might to to up the stakes."

"Walk away, Sullivan. It’s cost you a lot already. You don’t need your sanity to add to the pile."

"Might be too late."

A/N:Okay, this was the disclosure chapter. All the history is out there, coming soon...touchy feely moments...literally.

Wow!!! So much pain coming off the both of them. I'm actually really intruiged by this twisted version of their relationship and I can't wait to see what Chloe does next. More please.

It's been a long time since I read a story as interesting as this one. Hope you'll post next chapter soon.

Oooh. Dragon loves this story. And wants more updates...

Wow!!! That was intense. Great update!