Eli cracks open a mini bottle of Jack and grins. “One shot each,” he says, holding it up. “Tradition.”
Miles groans. “That is so not a fucking tradition.”
Drew shrugs. “We’re in Vegas, man. Everything’s tradition if you do it with conviction.”
I laugh, the sound sharp and nervous in my throat. “Fine. One.”
We pass the bottle around. The whiskey hits like liquid voltage. Eli whoops, slamming the empty on a crate. Miles grimaces, Drew coughs, I shake it off with a hiss.
Eli’s already grinning. “You ready to blow the roof off this place?”
“Born ready,” I say, though my pulse is wild.
The tech waves us forward. The house lights dim, and the roar turns to a thunder. My skin prickles. I feel it in my teeth, in my ribs. Every nerve is awake.
We walk out under the heat of the lights—Miles steady and focused, Eli swaggering like he owns the stage, Drew adjusting knobs like a surgeon. I grip the mic, glance at the crowd, and the rush hits like a punch.
Hundreds of faces. Blurred and shining, a sea of noise and motion. They’re chanting, clapping, already ours.
“Vegas!” Eli yells from behind the kit, and the place explodes.
I grin. “We’re Steel Saints,” I say into the mic, voice more level now. “Let’s make some bad decisions together.”
Laughter ripples through the crowd—loud, warm, hooked. Then the first chord hits, and it’s like falling into gravity.
We tear through the opening set—“City Static,” “Voltage Veins,” “Last Exit.” Every note lands like a heartbeat. The sound is massive, bigger than the room, bigger than us. My throat burns, my fingers ache, and I don’t care.
I prowl the edge of the stage, hair sticking to my forehead, sweat soaking my collar. The crowd screams the lyrics back at me, and I give them more.
Then it hits me—they know the words.
Not just the chorus. The verses. The hooks we wrote at 3:00 a.m. in our apartment when the AC broke and the neighbors banged on the wall to shut us up. The lines we bled into a cheap mic, uploaded half asleep to YouTube, thinking maybe a handful of people would ever find them.
And now an entire room is shouting them back at me. Word for word.
I grin, pointing into the crowd, singing along with them. It’s electric. Unreal.
They’ve been watching. Listening.Following.
It means the hours in that cramped practice room, the nights we wondered if any of it mattered—theydid.
It’s mind-blowing and dizzying and better than any drug.
I lean close to the front row, mouthing lines against outstretched hands, and the noise swells until it feels like the whole damn city is breathing in time with us.
I’ve done this before, but never like this. Never in Vegas. Never with the stakes this high.
Between songs, I let the noise wash over me. “You guys are fucking beautiful,” I say, breathless. “Don’t ever stop being loud.”
Eli crashes a cymbal behind me like punctuation.
We slide into the next number, “Riot.” Halfway through, I start scanning the crowd—habit, curiosity, something else clawing up my spine. My gaze drags across the blur of lights and movement until it catches on one still point.
Him.
Ollie.
Front row balcony, hands on the rail, expression unreadable. He’s dressed down—dark tee, cap low, but there’s no mistaking him. The jawline, the eyes, the weight of that focus.
