Connor-fucking-Dempsey.My pseudo-uncle, my dad’s former bandmate.
But does he see me?The whole fucked-up, flailing wreck of myself?I don’t think he does.Can I trust him?
“How do you know I’ll find a sound?”
He smiles too easily.“I have the perfect person,” he says, like he’s offering a shortcut out of hell.“She’s helped a lot of artists find their sound, their ...call it a new style, again and again.”
What the fuck is he talking about?“You just want me to trust some ...what is she?”
“A Julliard-trained musician, a former musical prodigy.”He pulls back his shoulders in the same breath he’s puffing up his chest.“You were the first one she shaped, if you remember.I’m sure you and Kit can work together to find something that fits the version of you now.”
I go still.
Kit.
Did he say Kit?
There’s a pause—a cold, hollow stretch of silence inside my chest that lasts longer than it should.It expands, presses outward, a breath I forget to take until it’s too late.It’s almost like the drop between heartbeats when something lands too close to where it hurts.
It hurts so fucking much that suddenly I can’t breathe.
ChapterTen
Roderick
“Kit, as in ...”
I can’t find a single fucking word that sounds remotely intelligent, let alone composed.My throat constricts, dry as sandpaper, and every cell in my brain starts to throb, like I’ve stepped into a room that once felt like home and now feels haunted.A ghost town filled with my mistakes and everything I’ve ruined.
I try again.“Kit—as in your daughter?”
He nods, unbothered.Like it’s no big deal.Like he didn’t just drop a bomb at my feet and ask me to walk barefoot across the shrapnel.Good luck surviving this, Wilder.
Kit.
Of all the people he could name-drop, he picksher.
Her.
My Kit.
The one person I broke and never apologized to.
The one I never reached for—not even once—not because I didn’t care, but because I was too much of a coward.She’s the girl whose silence didn’t just hurt—it lived in me.Took up residence in my chest and stretched out in every breath, turning everything else into static.I’ve carried her absence like a song I couldn’t stop hearing, even when the rest of the world cranked up the noise.
No matter how much I drank or shot, she was still there, reminding me that I’ve lost everything.My everything.
Kit Dempsey isn’t just another musician on a roster.She’s not a footnote in my career.She’s not some studio prop I can just plug into a track and call it synergy.
She was my best friend, my inspiration, and the first person I ever loved—the only one.And now, Connor wants me to sit across from her?Breathe the same air?Pretend the implosion between us didn’t exist and ask her to help me claw back from the hell I fell into after what I did to her?
He wants me to ask her to help me find whatever scraps of soul I still have left?
I nearly laugh.It’s a bitter thing, caught somewhere between disbelief and self-loathing.Help.Right.As if I even know what that means anymore.But if anything of me still survives and beats, she has it.I handed it to her years ago, without grace, without apology, and then had the audacity to fuck everything up.
There’s a storm brewing inside me.It’s panic with nowhere to escape.I don’t know what scares me more: that she’ll still see me for who I was, or that she won’t recognize me at all.That I’ve decayed so much she won’t even care about me.
I force a breath, trying to calm myself the way people say at the center—count backwards, picture the ocean, whatever trick is supposed to quiet a mind clawing at itself.My hands won’t stop trembling.
