Korbyn opens her mouth to argue and then closes it. Her shoulders drop a fraction, the fight leaking out of her like air from a punctured tire. “Okay,” she says. “But I want to see it at some point. I need to know what he did.”
Lucian nods once, eyes locked on mine as if to say he’s doing me a favor and I should not argue. “You and I will go with Rowan; we’ll just do a quick assessment of the extent of the damage.”
“Fine,” I answer.
The door opens before we can move, and a tide of black fills the room, earpieces tucked, movements practiced, and quiet. The afterglow of the show sours; the air that had been warm with adrenaline feels thin and borrowed. When these people step in, they take the last of the light with them.
Rowan straightens, and the room tightens around him. He calls for attention, and the chatter dies.
“Effective immediately,” he says, “you’re all being assigned individual security details. These teams have been vetted, cleared, and locked down under extensive NDAs. Your identities, locations, movements, none of it will leave this group.”
One by one, the new security personnel step forward and take positions, arranging themselves near each of us without crowding us, and taking their place as our shadows.
Lucian’s presence at my back does not change, but I feel it sharpen into something more precise.
“This isn’t optional,” Rowan continues. “You do not move without your assigned detail.”
As the room breaks into motion with security coordinating in low voices, Rowan issuing instructions with the clipped authority of someone who keeps the tour moving, the band is shepherded toward separate exits. I watch Korbyn being gently boxed in by people she did not ask for but clearly needs. Her shoulders are small under the weight of it.
A question nags at the edge of my mind: how did Rowan pull this in so quickly? These teams are not the usual road crew; they move in a way that smells of favors he called in. It’s the kind of reach Rowan doesn’t use unless he has to. Our eyes meet across the room, and the look he gives me is complicated, almost like he wants to tell me no, but he knows better than to try.
We change quickly. Street clothes replacing stage costumes, paint washed from our skin until the mirror gives me back a version of myself that feels strangely exposed. When I step away from the sink, my hands are steady, but my chest feels tight in a way that has nothing to do with adrenaline.
Lucian is waiting.
He doesn’t rush me. Just falls into step beside me as we head for the door, his presence solid and unyielding, like he’s already decided where my balance lives tonight. When the hallway narrows, I find myself leaning into him without thinking, my shoulder brushing his arm, my weight shifting just enough to feel supported.
“We’ll make it quick,” he says, as the words slide under my skin, intimate in a way he doesn’t intend. I shiver anyway, notfrom fear but from the steady assurance threaded through his voice, at the unspoken promise that whatever waits for me out there, he’ll be between it and me.
I nod, leaning almost imperceptibly into the quiet strength of him, into the way his presence steadies me without demanding anything in return, as if he’s offering a place to breathe in a night that suddenly feels too thin.
When we get back to the campground, it’s lit far too brightly for this late hour, the LED beams slicing the darkness into hard white and bottomless black, like the night has lost faith in itself and is trying to overcompensate.
Security fans out ahead of us, efficient and silent. Lucian stays close enough that the heat of him at my back feels like a promise that I’m not walking into this alone. Rowan steps past the caution tape, and we follow.
The chemical smell of spray paint hits first, still fresh enough to sting the back of my throat.
For a moment, I just stand there, suspended between the world I walked out of and the one waiting inside.
Then I step over the threshold.
It looks like someone grabbed my life by the ankles, turned it upside down, and shook it until everything they wanted fell loose. The couch cushions are slashed open, foam spilling out like exposed bone. Cabinets hang crooked on their hinges, doors yawning wide, their contents dumped carelessly across the floor. A lamp lies shattered near the kitchenette, glass glittering under the harsh lights like a field of tiny, mocking stars.
Lucian goes still behind me, between Rowan and us; the tension is so thick you can cut it with a knife.
I move farther in, my boots crunching softly over debris. My chest feels tight, but there’s a strange, eerie calm settling over me, as if my body has already decided that panic won’t change anything, won’t undo whatever this is.
Catching sight of my bookshelf, my stomach drops so fast it feels like the floor shakes beneath me.
Empty shelves stare back at me where spines should be. There are bare spaces where color and paper and stories once lived. Every shelf is hollow, every book is gone.
I pull in a shaky breath, the air stuttering on the way down as the realization settles in my bones that someone didn’t just break into my rig—they violated the one place that was mine, and they took the part of it I loved most.
“They took my books,” I whisper, the words tasting wrong in my mouth, too small for the enormity of what’s missing.
The bedroom is worse.
My mattress is ripped open, long, violent slashes carving through fabric and foam as if someone wanted to gut the room itself, to make sure nothing soft or safe remained. Sheets hang half off the bed, torn and tangled, stripped of any sense of rest.
