“They weren’t hit evenly,” Rowan continues. “Drawers opened, storage compartments rifled, most of them had minimal damage, until they got to Celeste’s.” The sentence pulls the air out of the room; even the leftover echo of the crowd seems to hold its breath.
“All the windows were broken from the inside,” Rowan says, voice flat. A cold threads through me.
“From the inside?” I ask, my own voice sounding distant to my ears.
Lucian nods. “We won’t know until you look through things, but there’s a good possibility everything will need to be replaced.We think they were trying to leave a message, and it wasn’t subtle.”
“What do you mean?”
“There’s spray paint everywhere,” he continues. “It covers the exterior of your rig.”
Korbyn’s breath catches so sharply it sounds like a small startled animal. “What does it say?”
Rowan hesitates and then looks straight at me. “One word over and over, insideandoutside.”
Lucian’s hand returns to the small of my back, steady and grounding. He presses there with a quiet insistence. He says the word aloud, and it lands in the room like a physical thing: “Mine.”
The syllable closes around my throat, and the air seems to stop moving.
My thoughts scramble, hunting for the explanation that fits the evidence and the fear. “Do you think James would do this?” I ask Korbyn, my voice small in the sudden quiet.
Korbyn’s eyes harden. She starts tugging at the neckline of her shirt as if the motion will loosen something inside her. “He might,” she says. “He has the temper. He needs to mark things.” Her fingers pause, and the light catches a pale line over her heart, a scar we have never noticed before. It gleams like a secret.
She swallows and then tells us, voice low and steady as if she is naming a wound that belongs to someone else. “We had a fight a few years ago that was so explosive I woke up with a concussion. When I came to, he was pouring hydrogen peroxide on this.” She taps the scar. “He said, ‘X marks the spot.’ And he could kill me if he wanted to. He told me if he couldn’t have me, no one would.”
The words land like stones. Korbyn’s confession makes the room tilt; the afterglow of the show curdles. Shiloh’s shouldersgo rigid, Linkin’s jaw works as if chewing on the sound, and Rowan’s face drains of color and then hardens into rage sharpened by disbelief.
“That’s—” Linkin starts, then stops, unable to finish.
Rowan turns away for a heartbeat, and then his hand finds the nearest wall. He punches it with a single, brutal motion. The sound cracks through the locker room, and everyone flinches. A chunk of plaster flakes loose and skitters across the floor.
“Don’t,” Korbyn says, voice small and quick, as if she is trying to stitch the moment back together with words. “I didn’t tell you because I wanted pity. I told you because I thought you should know.”
“We will handle this,” Lucian says, catching everyone’s attention. “We will make a plan.”
“It lines up with the timing,” Shiloh says. “After everything that came out.”
Lucian does not contradict her. His hand presses harder against my lower back, his thumb finding the hollow of my spine as if to steady both of us. There is something held behind that pressure, something he is not saying.
“I want to see it.” The words leave my mouth before anyone can stop me.
Rowan’s head snaps up. “Celeste—”
“I need to,” I cut in, my voice steadier than I feel. “I need to know what they did. I can’t sit here and imagine it.”
Lucian does not argue; he just sits in the silence and buys himself a second to think, his eyes moving over the band as if measuring risk in the air. Finally, he says, “You can. But not like this.”
“Like what?”
“You are not walking into it unprepared,” he replies. “And you are not going with Korbyn.”
The sentence lands, and the room tightens again. Rowan straightens, the tour manager’s posture snapping into place, the anger that made him punch the wall cools into a different, harder emotion.
Korbyn frowns. “Why not?”
Because it would destroy you, I think. Seeing my rig carved up with words like that would feel like the weight of responsibility she isn’t ready for.
Rowan answers instead. “If this is James, he did this because he wanted a reaction. There’s no reason for Korbyn to take that hit.”
