Sorry it's taken so long for this update! It's a short chapter, but hopefully it will appease you somewhat. I'm struggling to get this plot in motion, and then I plan on the updates coming more regularly. As always, please tell me what you think, I'd love to hear it.

Come into my parlor, said the spider to the fly.

Hayden grinned, white teeth flashing in the dark. "I can help you with that," she purred, sinking to her knees before the blonde boy sitting in the chair. Tate's eyes snapped open as he fisted himself, and he kicked her away, as if she were an offending piece of meat, before relaxing back into the chair, his hand still on his cock.

"I know we're dead, but I don't want to even begin to imagine all the diseases you had festering inside your body when you were alive," he sneered, closing his eyes to revive the image of Violet beneath his body. He resumed lazily stroking himself.

"She's never going to love you again," Hayden snapped, unaware of the petulant ring in her voice.

Tate, eyes still shut, half-smiled. It was simultaneously cruel, sweet, and indulgent. "She never stopped loving me," he said, a hitch in his breathing as he moved his hand faster along his length. "Violet's mine, and she knows it," and with that, he came.

"I have some information that may be of interest to you," Hayden tried again, a dark smile gracing her bow lips.

Tate opened his eyes and slackened his grip on his spent cock. His eyes narrowed.

"Do tell."

She innocently twirled a strand of red hair between her fingers, looking at him through lidded eyes, lusty and alight with dark giddiness. "There's a new family moving in," she told him with a grin.

He straightened, startled despite himself. "And how come I didn't know about this?" he demanded, incensed. "I know everything that goes on in this house."

Hayden's grin widened and she sunk back down to her knees and crawled into the space between his legs. "There's a first time for everything," she teased, and reached a bold hand forward. Tate sneered at this and settled back into his chair.

"You'd better not let that infested mouth of yours come anywhere near me," he warned cruelly, and imagined that the fingers stroking him belonged to his Violet.

Upstairs, Violet flipped through a dusty copy of Grimms' Fairy Tales she had filched from the attic when playing with Beau. The pages were worn and the illustrations, once vibrant with color, were faded.

Rapunzel was a particular favorite, and, Violet mused drily, it was no wonder why.

One day a young prince came through the forest where the tower stood. He saw the beautiful Rapunzel standing at her window, heard her sing with her sweet voice, and fell in love with her. At first Rapunzel was frightened, but soon she came to like the young king so well that she arranged for him to come every day and be pulled up. Thus they lived in joy and pleasure for a long time.

The fairy did not discover what was happening until one day Rapunzel said to her, "Frau Gothel, tell me why it is that my clothes are all too tight. They no longer fit me."

"You godless child," said the fairy. "What am I hearing from you?" She immediately saw how she had been deceived and was terribly angry. She took Rapunzel's beautiful hair, wrapped it a few times around her left hand, grasped a pair of scissors with her right hand, and snip snip, cut it off. Then she sent Rapunzel into a wilderness where she suffered greatly and where, after a time, she gave birth to twins, a boy and a girl.

On the evening of the same day that she sent Rapunzel away, the fairy tied the cut-off hair to the hook at the top of the tower, and when the prince called out:

Rapunzel, Rapunzel!

Let down your hair!

She let down the hair. The prince was startled to find the fairy instead of his beloved Rapunzel.

The following pages were missing, haphazardly torn out and thrown somewhere else, un-locatable and lost to her. Violet touched the remaining pages with a gentle hand, ugly thoughts bubbling to the forefront of her mind.

Violet didn't feel like innocent Rapunzel. Violet felt like Frau Gothel, jealous of her kin, angry and vengeful that Rapunzel would bare the children of the prince while she herself remained childless and unloved.

But, Violet thought to herself as she pushed away those feelings of resentment, that was the house whispering those things into her ears. It was the house that planted those crude images of Tate fucking her mother beneath her eyelids.

She took a calming breath.

"Boo," a voice whispered in front of her, and her eyes snapped open.

"What are you doing here?" she asked rudely, and Travis responded with a jaunty laugh.

"I figured you might need some company is all," he said with a grin, smoothly snatching the book from her hands.

"Well you thought wrong!" Violet snapped, alarmed, as his eyes skimmed over the page she had been reading from.

"Rapunzel?" he asked with a bemused shake of his head. "How poetic," he joked, then snapped the book shut, a disgraceful smack! resounding through the attic as the old parchment pages slammed together.

"Like you would know anything about poetry," Violet said stiffly, rankled. She moved to grab the book from his hands, but he feinted and removed it from her arm's reach with a playful wag of his finger.

"Uh-uh," he tutted good-naturedly and narrowed his eyes at her. "I do come with news for you," he said, a lopsided grin on his face.

Violet frowned. "What do you mean, 'news'?" she demanded, and he laughed at her authoritative voice.

"A little birdy tells me that a new family is moving into the house," he said, and at her disbelieving look, he amended his statement. "A little birdy tells me that a certain woman, near and dear to both our hearts, is moving into the house."

Violet's jaw slackened. It couldn't be. It had to be some sick joke. There was no way…

"Constance, the love of my altogether too-short life, wrinkled bitch that she can sometimes be, is moving in with a little boy in tow. She's told me that he can be a bit of a handful."