Total pages in book: 140
Estimated words: 129207 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 646(@200wpm)___ 517(@250wpm)___ 431(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 129207 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 646(@200wpm)___ 517(@250wpm)___ 431(@300wpm)
I crash down against the stage, bracing my elbows on my knees as my face falls into my hands. “I don’t know how to be around her,” I admit. “She blames me for Axel’s death, and she’s fucking right. How the hell am I supposed to face her every day?”
“Axel’s death is not on you.”
“Isn’t it?” I challenge. “No matter how you look at it, it always comes back to the fact that she asked me to look out for him and I failed.”
“If that’s the case, then we all fucking failed,” Dylan throws back at me. “Have you even talked to her about it? Does she even know how it happened?”
I shake my head. “She doesn’t need to know,” I tell them. “It’ll only eat her up inside. She’s better off believing the media about a drug overdose. Knowing the truth . . . It’ll fucking kill her.”
The boys nod, and without needing to press them on it, I know they’ll keep their mouths shut. They might be assholes who constantly overstep my boundaries, but when it comes to Rae, they’ve always had her best interests at heart.
“What’s it going to be?” Lenny asks a moment later, reminding me he’s still here.
“What does she want?”
“She doesn’t know,” Dylan says. “We gave her the night to think about it. She thought she was coming here to meet a new band and to work on their tour marketing, so she’s a little . . . thrown. Plus, I can’t imagine walking in to see you snorting a line with Jessica and Stacey was really on her bingo card for the day.”
The day.
Fuck.
I let out a breath and bury my face in my hands again. “It’s her birthday.”
“Shit,” Rock says as both he and Dylan automatically reach for their things, more than ready to go after her and somehow turn her day around. Though after seeing me in that room with the dancers, I’m not sure anything could fix that. But neither Rock nor Dylan has ever shied away from a challenge, and if anyone could put a smile on her face, it’s them.
The boys walk out of the studio, and a piece of my soul goes with them. I’d give anything to spend the night celebrating her twenty-fourth birthday. Fuck, I’d spend the rest of my life celebrating her if I could, every fucking night, over and over again, but that’s a warped reality that’s never going to happen. It’s something that used to be in reach, something we could have held onto and created a life together with, but I let go, and the reality of that dream slowly drowned until there was nothing left to grab hold of.
Cutting across the studio, I grab a Demon’s Curse muscle tee and pull it over my head before clutching the three pendants hanging around my neck—the guitar chain my mother gave to me as a kid, Axel’s ring, and a simple R that’s been with me since the day I left. They’re my lifelines, a reminder of where I came from and the things I’ve had to leave behind.
Jett, the newest member of Demon’s Curse, walks out of the bathroom after missing the whole fucking showdown since he took his damn time backing one out. He stares after Dylan and Rock as they disappear around the corner. “Yo, where the fuck are they going?” he questions, oblivious to the tension in the room.
All I can do is stare at him.
I can’t stand the fucker, and every time he steps up onto my studio stage and stands in the same place Axel used to stand, I want to rip his teeth out with my bare hands. I know I’m not being fair to him. He’s an alright guy and an incredible musician, and if I’d met him under different circumstances, we might have even been friends, and yet I can’t help but hate him. Dylan and Rock think he’s our best option, and while he vibes well with all of us on the stage, I can’t seem to allow him in.
No one answers him, but it doesn’t faze him as he wanders back across the studio and picks up his guitar. Jett is a whiz on that guitar and has easily picked up all of our music. In fact, he plays it flawlessly, but we’ve been playing these songs for years. I could play them in my sleep, and until Jett is as natural as we are, he’ll be spending every waking hour perfecting the sets.
“So,” Jett says as he strums his fingers across the strings for the opening chords of “Hypothetically Yours.” “Has that new marketing chick been by yet? I wanted to see if she’d be an easy screw since the dancers have been all over you.”
Irritation burns through me, but I manage to keep a lid on it. It’s not the first time I’ve had to deal with people talking about Raleigh. She’s fucking gorgeous, and given I was only a teenager then, I had to learn quickly that not only could she handle herself, but I couldn’t go around beating the shit out of every guy who appreciated her beauty. Though, there were a handful of those who all but begged me to, and I was more than happy to rise to the occasion.