“Do you want to continue?”
“Abso-fucking-lutely not.”
She nods, accepting it without question. The card disappears back into the deck, and she starts shuffling again, giving me the quiet, the rhythm, the space she knows how to offer.
I lean back in the chair, cross my arms over my chest, and close my eyes for a moment.
Lucian is still outside this door.
And fate, apparently, has a sense of humor.
16
Celeste
Their energy rolls back toward the stage in broad, pulsing tides that slide under my skin and set my blood humming. The verse unfolds like a conversation in a language I know by heart: I give, they answer; I push, they surge back, and the room becomes a single, electric organism. This exchange is the part I love the most, where control loosens, and something larger takes over.
In Nashville, something unplanned slipped through that seam. It was a sharp, unguarded shard of feeling that was real enough to tilt the air, and the second it happened, the world onstage shifted on its axis. Clips of that moment live everywhere, replayed and paused and argued over, as if anyone could point to the exact second the song stopped being performance and started being confession.
Tonight I want to touch that place again. I know lightning cannot be summoned twice; the crack that opened my voice lasttime was accidental and singular. Still, it taught me what the song has been asking: more room, more risk, more of the raw interior that the melody can hold if I let it.
The line is coming. I feel it like a mile marker, my pulse picks up, a metronome under my ribs, as I search myself for the same ragged edge, that breathless tension that nudged me past clean and controlled before. I draw in air and let the swell of sound lift me, letting the crowd’s weight carry me forward as I remember that Lucian is somewhere along the barricade line, low beside the raised stage where he belongs. He is invisible to the crowd: a shadow tuned to vigilance, eyes cataloguing hands and faces instead of lights and motion.
I let the beat stretch and the moment breathe. Just before I reach the place where my voice fractured in Nashville, I turn my head and meet Lucian’s gaze. It’s a quick glance, but our eyes lock for half a second, and I let my breath stutter. There it is: the echo. Not the blow itself, not the moment of betrayal, but the quieter aftermath: the ache of having loved someone so fully that the loss left a shape inside me.
Not because of what he did. Because of what I felt when I saw him and realized I hadn’t healed as neatly as I’d told myself I had.
The line leaves my mouth with a catch I don’t fight. The note roughens at the edge, bending instead of breaking; I stay with it, let the hitch live, let the imperfection make the sound human. I lean into the wobble, stretch it until it vibrates through my chest.
The crowd feels it like a current. Their response crashes over me—wild, ecstatic, deafening—and I ride it, threading that rawness into the next phrase, then the next, until the song swells beyond anything it had been before.
I don’t look at Lucian again. I don’t need to.
He gives me exactly what I’m reaching for without meaning to, and I return it to the room like a benediction, pouringeverything into the chorus until the arena dissolves into a roar of noise. The sound folds over itself, a living thing that swallows and answers, and for a few incandescent minutes the world narrows to that exchange.
The rest of the set blurs in the best possible way: songs bleed into one another like colors on a wet canvas, each transition seamless, each beat landing with the precision of a practiced ritual. The crowd is loud and willing and utterly present, a tide that never slacks. I ride that current until my lungs burn and my legs hum with fatigue, grinning behind the veil because I know we have given them exactly what they came for.
When the lights finally drop, the roar chases us offstage, a trailing comet of sound that refuses to let go. Backstage air hits me, cool and thin, and adrenaline sharpens everything until the world feels bright, edged, slightly unreal. My heart still thunders in time with the last chorus; my head is full of faces, flashes, and the quiet satisfaction of a set thatlanded.
I jog toward the checkpoint, already imagining Rowan and the band, the collision of laughter and noise that always follows a show that goes right.
Rowan appears first, a familiar silhouette just past the curtain. Lucian stands too close beside him. Their voices are low, buried under the hum of equipment, and the anger and shock in their tone registers before the words do. Something’s wrong.
A thread of tension pulls through my chest. The smile I’ve been wearing slips as my pace falters and I lose momentum.
Rowan looks up. The expression on his face vanishes the instant his eyes meet mine, wiped clean with a speed that feels intentional and controlled. Before he can move, Lucian’s hand is at the small of my back as he steers me away with a pressure that allows no argument.
“There’s a situation,” he says, voice low and steady, already angling me away from the curtain.
The excitement drains out of me like color from a photograph. A cold spiral unfurls from my sternum, widening into a slow, precise panic. A thousand possibilities slam into my mind at once.
I let Lucian guide me, his body already a barrier between me and whatever has shifted; the angle of his shoulders and the set of his jaw carry the weight of something that cannot be shrugged off.
The locker room door thuds shut behind us with the blunt finality of a dropped curtain. The air still hums with the aftershock of the show, but something in the hum is off, a wrong note under the applause. The band drifts in behind me, voices fraying as they read the space between Lucian and Rowan; laughter dies mid-sentence like a light being switched.
Korbyn is the first to speak out about it. Her brow tightens, eyes sliding from my face to Lucian’s hand possessively at the small of my back. “Okay,” she says, slow and careful. “What’s going on?”
Lucian answers before Rowan can shape the words, his voice even and controlled in a way that makes the room lean in. “During the show, several rigs in the crew lot were broken into.”
