Backstage Lies

By nine the next morning, the bus smelled like stale beer, leather seats baked too long in old heat, and the sour chemical bite of energy drinks spilled into carpet years ago and never fully scrubbed out.

Sienna stood in the narrow aisle with one hand braced on an overhead bunk rail while the whole vehicle swayed down the Highway. A crate of laminates pressed into her shin. Her phone buzzed in her back pocket. Jenna again.

“Tell me you found the black pass pouch,” Jenna said the second Sienna answered.

“I found three black pass pouches.”

“The one with the silver zip.”

Sienna looked down at the chaos spread across the little dinette table. Lanyards. Sharpies. A crumpled set list with somebody’s coffee ring in the middle. Two batteries. A packet of painkillers. One bra that definitely did not belong to any crew member trying to keep this tour alive.

“Of course there are three,” she said.

Jenna made a tired sound that meant she was already moving somewhere else, already putting out another fire. “Check under the bench seat. Myles stuffs things there when he thinks it’s funny.”

“That seems hygienic.”

“Nothing about this band is hygienic. We hit the arena in forty. Cal wants credentials sorted before we park. And if you see Jax, make him drink water.”

Sienna glanced toward the curtained bunks.

“Is he alive?”

A beat. “Probably.”

Then Jenna hung up.

Sienna crouched and shoved aside a rolled hoodie, an empty packet of crisps, and a glossy magazine with Jax on the cover looking like sin had hired a publicist. Under the bench she found the silver-zip pouch, one missing backstage wristband, and a half-empty bottle of vodka wrapped in a tour T-shirt.

“Unbelievable,” she muttered.

“Actually,” Brent said from behind her, voice rough with sleep, “that’s one of the more believable things you’ll find before noon.”

She banged her head lightly on the table edge and swore.

Brent grinned, hair sticking up in six directions, T-shirt inside out. “Morning.”

“You people move like ghosts.”

“We move like men afraid Jenna will ask us to help unload.” He eyed the bottle in her hand. “Ah. Breakfast.”

Sienna set it on the table with two fingers, like it might stain by contact. “Whose?”

He opened the fridge, stared into its depressing blue light, and took out an orange juice. “If it’s wrapped in merch, probably Jax. If it’s hidden badly and smells expensive, Myles.”

“It smells like paint stripper.”

“Jax, then.”

He said it without much heat. That was what struck her already. Not one person on this bus acted surprised. Tired, yes. Amused sometimes. Angry when it became impossible not to be. But not surprised.

Brent twisted the juice cap off and leaned against the counter while the bus shifted lanes. “You sleep at all?”

“A little.”

“Good. Keep doing that while you can.”

“That a threat?”

“Nah.” He drank. “Professional guidance.”

From one of the bunks, a voice drawled, “Jesus Christ, do y’all ever stop flirting this early?”

Sienna looked up. Myles shoved his curtain back with a dramatic flourish and blinked at them, shirtless, grinning, hair flattened on one side. He had the kind of face trouble often borrowed.

Brent didn’t even turn. “Go back to sleep.”

“I would, but I sensed fresh blood.”

Sienna lifted the vodka bottle. “Is this yours?”

Myles put a hand to his chest. “Babe, I’d never hide vodka in a T-shirt. I have standards.”

“Do you?”

“Not really, no.”

He climbed out of the bunk, all loose-limbed confidence and bare feet, and crossed the aisle too close on purpose. Sienna stepped back before he could brush her shoulder. He noticed. Of course he did.

“She’s quick,” he said to Brent.

“She’s employed,” Brent replied.

Myles laughed and took the bottle from the table, peering at the label. “Yep. Jax. He likes this one because it doesn’t fight him on the way down.”

Sienna held out her hand. “Give it.”

“Why?”

“Because if Jenna sees it, she’ll have both your heads mounted at the front lounge.”

“My head looks good anywhere.”

“Myles.”

He watched her for one second longer, amused by the order in her voice, then surrendered the bottle with a small bow. “There you go, California.”

She hated how quickly that nickname had spread.

“You call me that again,” she said, “and I start charging.”

His grin widened. “Oh, she’s fun.”

“No,” Brent said. “She’s new. Don’t ruin it.”

For a flicker of a moment Myles’s expression changed. Not much. Just enough to show the joke had bones under it.

Then Chester stepped down from the back bunk area already dressed in jeans and a dark henley, phone pressed between shoulder and ear, murmuring something soft that had to be for one of his kids. He gave Sienna a nod, took in the table mess, the bottle in her hand, Myles looming where he shouldn’t, and closed his eyes briefly like a man who had seen exactly enough of life.

“Morning,” he said when his call ended.

“Is it?” Sienna asked.

He smiled without much joy. “Depends how attached you are to peace.”

The bus hit a pothole. Something clattered in the tiny sink. A curtain swished at the far end, then went still.

Sienna looked toward it.

“Don’t,” Brent said.

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You thought it loud.”

Myles stretched like a cat and yawned. “He’s meaner before coffee and worse after vodka. Pick your poison.”

“I’d pick a different job,” Chester said, reaching for the coffee pot.

“Too late,” Sienna replied.

That got the smallest real smile from him.

By the time the bus pulled behind the arena, Sienna had sorted the passes, texted Jenna a photo for proof, confiscated two more hidden bottles from places no bottle needed to be, and learned three things.

First, nobody ever put anything back where it belonged.

Second, everybody blamed everybody else until Jenna walked in.

Third, Jax Blackwood slept like a dead man and woke like one too.

She saw him for the first time that morning when the driver killed the engine and the bus settled with a heavy sigh. Jax shoved his bunk curtain aside and sat up slowly, forearms on his knees, dark blond hair hanging into his face. His black T-shirt had ridden up enough to show hard stomach and the black-grey ink climbing over his ribs. He looked wrecked in a way magazines never printed. Skin too pale under the tattoos. Mouth dry. Eyes bloodshot even half hidden.

Then he looked right at her.

There it was again, that hard click in the air between them. He remembered the coffee. He remembered her making him kneel in front of the room. Good.

She held his gaze for exactly one beat too long.

His mouth tipped, not quite a smile. “Mornin’, trouble.”

Her own answer came easy now. “Hydrate.”

Brent made a choking sound into his juice.

Jax pushed to his feet, tall enough in the cramped bus to seem unfairly made, and took the bottle of water Chester silently held out. Instead of thanking him, he twisted the cap, drank half, and kept his eyes on Sienna the whole time like obedience itself was a threat.

Then he tossed the empty-ish bottle onto the seat and brushed past her toward the door.

Vodka ghosted off his skin under soap and sleep and whatever expensive cologne he used to pretend he wasn’t rotting.

“Soundcheck in an hour,” Sienna said.

He paused with one boot on the steps, glanced back over his shoulder, and his southern drawl came low and cutting. “Didn’t ask.”

Then he disappeared into the bright loading-bay noise outside.

The arena back corridors were all the same in every city: painted cinderblock, old tape marks on the floor, a draft that smelled faintly of fryer oil and bleach, crew voices bouncing off concrete. By midday it all became one long moving puzzle of cases and calls and who needed what now.

Sienna spent the next hour learning the shape of disaster.

Cal thrust a radio at her and said, “If Jenna calls, answer on the first ring.”

A lighting tech asked for triple-A batteries and then admitted he meant cable ties.

Myles vanished twice and reappeared each time with a fresh coffee and no explanation.

Brent wanted tea but forgot to drink it.

Chester tuned in a folding chair at the side of the stage while texting his wife, his face gone soft in a way that made him seem younger and sadder at once.

And Jax,

Jax vanished.

At first nobody noticed because frontmen were allowed a certain amount of dramatic lateness, especially when they were famous enough to make people nervous. But fifteen minutes before soundcheck, Jenna did a slow turn in the wings and said, very evenly, “Where is he?”

Silence moved through the crew like cold water.

Myles looked up from his bass and shrugged. “Probably having a spiritual moment.”

“Find him,” Jenna said.

Nobody moved fast enough.

Cal dragged a hand down his face. “Christ.”

Jenna’s eyes landed on Sienna. “You’ve got legs and no fear of God. Go.”

“Why me?”

“Because Chester will cover for him, Brent will apologise for him, and Myles will lie for sport.”

Myles gave her a wink from the stage.

Jenna pointed two fingers toward the service corridor. “Now, before local security clocks he’s missing and this becomes a whole thing.”

So Sienna went.

She checked dressing rooms first. Empty except for garment racks, mirrors edged in bulbs, and the stale perfume of old hairspray. Then catering. Then the side hall by production where two local hands smoked beside a fire exit and said they’d seen “the blond singer bloke” heading toward storage with a girl in a silver skirt.

Of course.

The storage bays sat off the loading area behind a line of stacked black road cases and rolled crowd barriers. It was quieter there, the kind of quiet made of distance and concrete and trouble thinking it had privacy.

Sienna heard the laugh before she saw him.

She rounded a tower of speaker trunks and found Jax sitting on an overturned flight case in the half shade, one long leg stretched out, one bent. A girl barely older than twenty leaned against his knee, glitter still clinging to the skin above her collarbone from somebody else’s night out. Jax held a small bottle by the neck. Clear liquid. Vodka again, because of course it was. The cap lay on the floor beside his boot.

He didn’t startle when he saw Sienna. He just tipped his head back and drank.

The girl looked Sienna over with instant dislike. “Can I help you?”

“Yes,” Sienna said. “You can leave.”

The girl barked a laugh and looked at Jax for backup.

He kept his eyes on Sienna. “She always this sweet?”

“Only when I’m working.”

“Then you oughta quit.”

The words came lazy, but there was steel under them.

Sienna crossed her arms. “Soundcheck started three minutes ago.”

“No, sweetheart,” he said. “Soundcheck waits for me.”

The girl smiled at that like she’d been handed front-row proof of what power looked like.

Sienna looked at the bottle, then at him. “Jenna sent me.”

That got his attention, slight but real.

He rolled the vodka against his palm. “Did she.”

“Yes.”

“And did Jenna say, ‘Sienna, honey, go fetch the singer because he wandered off with a pretty little thing and forgot he’s got a job’?”

The girl giggled. Jax smirked.

Sienna did not.

“She said if local security notices you missing,” Sienna replied, “they’ll start asking where you are. Then Cal gets involved. Then somebody checks cameras. Then maybe somebody from press sees Crimson Tide’s frontman hiding in a storage bay with liquor before the first soundcheck of the tour.”

The smirk faded.

That was the first useful thing she had learned about Jax Blackwood. He didn’t care much about being a mess. He cared about being caught in the wrong shape of it.

He stood in one smooth movement that made the girl step back. Up close, with anger rising under his skin, he was even more dangerous-looking than he had been on the bus. Tattoos crowded his forearms. His jaw flexed once. A little tremor moved through his hand before he stilled it by curling his fingers around the bottle.

“You threatening me?” he asked softly.

Sienna kept her voice flat. “I’m telling you to get onstage.”

The girl looked between them, suddenly less entertained. “Jax?”

He didn’t take his eyes off Sienna. “Baby, give us a sec.”

It was said gently enough that the girl left without protest, though she shot Sienna one filthy look on the way out. The click of her heels faded down concrete.

Now it was just the two of them and the low electric hum of the building around them.

Jax took one more swallow, then offered the bottle toward Sienna like a dare.

She took it.

Something hot flashed across his face.

Then she walked three steps to the nearest open road case packed with coiled cables and set the bottle down inside, out of sight but out of his hand.

His laugh came short and mean. “You got a death wish, California?”

“You ask that like it’s charming.”

He moved closer until there was hardly room for air between them. Vodka, mint, sweat, expensive soap, and the rough clean smell of stage dust already in his clothes. His voice dropped lower. “Lemme make this easy for you. You don’t come looking for me. You don’t tell me what to do. You sure as hell don’t touch what’s mine.”

Sienna’s pulse kicked once, hard and treacherous, but she held his stare.

“You’re late,” she said. “You’re drunk before midday. And if you pull this in every city, half my job is going to be dragging your ego back where it belongs.”

His eyes narrowed. “Your job lasts if I say it does.”

There it was. Plain and ugly.

She thought of the coffee at her feet yesterday. The way the room had waited to see if she’d bend. The way he had looked almost surprised when she hadn’t.

“No,” she said quietly. “My job lasts if Jenna and Cal say it does. And unless you want Jenna hearing that I found you hiding in storage with a fan and a bottle in hand, you’re going to walk with me to soundcheck like a functioning adult.”

For a second she really thought he might explode. Not hit her. Something worse in a way—laugh in her face, refuse, force a larger scene, make her lose in front of whoever happened to walk by.

Instead he smiled.

Jenna had warned her about that smile.

It was slow and bright and empty of anything kind.

“Well,” he said. “Ain’t you a mouthy little thing.”

She stepped aside and pointed toward the corridor. “Move.”

He stayed where he was another beat too long, making the air itch. Then he brushed past her so close his shoulder clipped hers on purpose.

As they walked, he said, “You know what your problem is?”

“I’m sure you’ll tell me.”

“You think because you embarrassed me once, you know how this works.”

They turned back into the busier service hall. Crew rolled cases past. A local security guard nodded without looking closely enough to matter.

Jax kept talking, his drawl soft enough that nobody else would catch it. “Girls like you come in thinkin’ rules keep you safe. Thinkin’ if you’re sharp enough, if you talk back cute enough, men like me back off.”

Sienna looked straight ahead. “I’m not trying to be cute.”

“No,” he said. “You’re trying to matter.”

That one landed harder than she wanted it to.

She stopped walking.

He took two more steps before he noticed and turned.

For once she let him see it, the anger clean and unhidden. “Listen carefully. I do matter. Not because of you. Not because you looked at me and decided I was entertainment. I matter because I’m the one stopping this whole circus from catching fire while you pour petrol on the floor.”

A pair of stagehands pushing a wardrobe trunk went silent as they passed.

Good, she thought. Let them hear.

Jax stared at her, something dark and unreadable shifting behind his eyes. Shame maybe. Fury definitely. Interest, worst of all.

Then his mouth hardened.

“Big mistake,” he said.

She folded her arms. “Getting you?”

“Nah.” His gaze slid over her face, cool and deliberate. “Staying.”

Then he turned and headed for the stage.

Sienna followed because someone had to make sure he actually got there.

At the wings, Jenna clocked him instantly and checked her watch with theatrical disgust. “How lovely of you to join us.”

Jax spread his hands. “Traffic.”

Myles barked a laugh loud enough to echo.

Brent looked down at his snare before his smile could be seen. Chester just studied Jax’s face one second too long, reading what everyone else was pretending not to.

Jenna’s eyes cut to Sienna. A question.

Sienna gave the slightest nod.

Found him. Handled.

Jenna looked relieved for half a breath, then irritated with herself for being relieved at all.

Jax slung his guitar on and stepped to the mic like none of it had happened. Like he hadn’t just been drinking in a storage bay. Like his hands weren’t just a little unsteady when he adjusted the strap. Then he opened his mouth and the whole room changed.

That was the other thing Sienna learned fast.

He could be cruel. Petty. Wasted. Mean for the sport of it. But the second he sang, every ugly thing about him rearranged into something people would forgive too easily. His voice came out ragged and gold-edged, full of smoke and ache, and men on ladders stopped moving to listen.

Even Sienna felt it.

She hated that.

Halfway through the second song, Myles sauntered over during a monitor adjustment and leaned down from the lip of the stage.

“What’d you do,” he murmured, “threaten to neuter him?”

“Worse,” she said.

Myles grinned. “Knew I liked you.”

“No you don’t.”

“True.” His grin sharpened. “But he hates you now, and that tends to make things interestin’.”

Onstage, Jax glanced over as if he’d heard that from twenty feet away through guitar feedback. Their eyes met. No smile this time. No swagger either. Just a flat, open promise of trouble.

He looked away first only because the next verse started.

Sienna stood with her radio in one hand and the silver-zip pass pouch in the other, watching him give the room everything he had while acting like he hadn’t bled a drop.

By the end of soundcheck, she knew exactly what this job was.

Not coffee runs. Not passes. Not fetching towels.

It was hiding bottles before Cal found them. It was intercepting girls before cameras did. It was learning the thousand small sounds of a train coming off its tracks and throwing your body in front of it anyway.

And Jax Blackwood had made his decision.

He was not going to let himself be managed by her.

He was going to try and break her until she left.

The first show ended in heat.

Not the clean kind from stage lights and bodies packed shoulder to shoulder at barricade. This was dirtier. It lived in the hallways after the encore, in the sour reek of beer tipped into plastic cups, in the sweet chemical stink of hairspray and sweat and whatever somebody had smoked behind catering. The arena walls held the bass like a second pulse. Crew shouted over it. Fans pressed at the barricades near the back corridor doors with phones lifted, hoping for a glimpse of someone famous enough to ruin their sleep.

Sienna stood just off stage left with a towel over one arm and a radio crackling against her hip, watching Jax come off under a wash of white light and noise like he’d been fired from a cannon.

He was grinning.

That was the dangerous version of him, she was learning. Not the sulking drunk one. Not the mean one that looked at her like he wanted to pick a fight just to hear the glass break. The grinning one made everybody relax half a second too soon.

He snatched the towel from her hand without slowing down and dragged it over his face. His shirt clung damp to his chest. Sweat ran from his hairline down his throat and vanished under black ink.

“Hell of a first night, sunshine,” he said, voice still rough from singing.

“You’re welcome,” she said. “I spent most of it making sure you were upright.”

He gave her a sideways look, amused and edged. “There she is.”

Myles came off behind him, bass still hanging low, mouth split in a laugh at something Brent had said. He smelled like smoke and expensive cologne failing to cover whiskey.

“After-party?” Myles asked nobody and everybody.

“Absolutely not,” Jenna said, appearing from nowhere the way disasters called her. Her headset sat crooked over one ear. Mascara had smudged beneath her eyes. “Hotel. Showers. Bed. We have press at eleven.”

Jax tossed the towel back at Sienna. She caught it against her stomach.

“That sounds miserable,” he said.

“That sounds like employment,” Jenna snapped.

Cal arrived a beat later, already on his phone, tie loosened, face carrying the gray cast of a man who had spent too many years solving the same problem with different bottles. “Five minutes,” he said without looking up. “Then everyone moves.”

Chester peeled off his guitar strap and rubbed the back of his neck. “Food first,” he said. “Or Brent’s gonna start eating drum hardware.”

“I’ve thought about it,” Brent said.

It got a tired laugh out of all of them but Jenna, who was looking at Jax the way people looked at frayed wires near standing water.

Sienna took the used towels and passed a bottle of water to Brent, then Chester, then to Jax because Jenna had glared. Jax took it, twisted the cap, and drank enough to perform obedience before handing it right back.

“You keep lookin’ at me like that,” he said quietly, “people are gonna think you care.”

“People already think lots of stupid things,” she said.

His mouth twitched, not quite a smile, and then a cluster of local promoters swept in with wristbands and false cheer and too many teeth.

That was how the night slipped.

One minute there were cases being rolled and laminates being counted and Jenna barking for headcounts. The next there were three men in fitted jackets insisting the city’s biggest rock station had arranged a private after-party upstairs in one of the arena lounges and how great would that be for buzz and content and fan engagement, and Cal, already taking another call, gave a distracted go-ahead he would hate himself for later.

Jenna looked like she might actually bite someone.

“No more than thirty minutes,” she said. “No random guests in dressing rooms. No live streams. No”

Myles kissed the air near her cheek and swept backward down the corridor. “Love your little speeches, Jen.”

Jax followed at an easier pace, guitar pick still tucked between his fingers, with girls and hangers-on already drifting toward him like filings to a magnet.

Sienna watched the shape of the night forming and knew it was rotten.

The lounge upstairs had once been built for corporate hospitality. Leather banquettes. gold trim rubbed dull at the edges. A long bar under blue backlight. Somebody had tried to make it exclusive by dimming the lamps and turning the music loud enough to loosen judgment. It worked on everybody except the people paid to be there.

Sienna spent the first twenty minutes doing small ugly jobs no one would thank her for. She redirected a pair of girls who had somehow gotten past security with no credentials. She took two shots out of Brent’s hand and replaced them with ginger ale, which he accepted with a wounded expression and a thank-you under his breath. She found Jenna cornered by a local sponsor and rescued her by claiming there was a problem with transport timing.

“There is now,” Jenna muttered as they escaped.

On the far side of the room, Chester sat on the end of a banquette with his phone in his hand, smiling down at a photo Sienna guessed was one of his kids. He looked up when she passed.

“You eaten?” he asked.

She blinked. “No.”

He reached into a paper bag beside him and held out half a wrapped sandwich. “Take it before Myles decides this is performance art and throws it.”

“Are you always this paternal?”

“Only to people who look like they’re about to pass out.”

She took the sandwich. “Thanks.”

“Don’t thank me yet,” he said. “Give it ten minutes.”

That should have been enough warning.

At first Jax only drank. Vodka in a low tumbler. Then from the bottle because somebody decided glasses were too slow. He stood in the center of everything with his shirt changed but not buttoned right, exposing a strip of tattooed stomach and one hard hipbone every time he moved. Women laughed too loudly around him. Men circled near enough to be seen. The room bent toward him the way every room did.

Myles added fuel because that was his gift.

He got hold of a wireless mic from somewhere and started giving fake acceptance speeches from atop the back of a sofa. He pulled one of the local radio girls into a twirl so wild she nearly lost a heel. He shouted Brent’s name whenever Brent tried to disappear. He leaned close to Sienna once as she passed with a tray of empties and said, “You got that little line between your brows again. Means trouble’s about to get fun.”

“It means move,” she said.

“Oh, sweetheart. It’s already moving.”

The first real problem hit when a photographer appeared where no photographer should have been.

Not one of the approved venue shooters downstairs. This one had the look of a freelancer who lived off nightclub mess and celebrity bad decisions. Black camera harness. Quick eyes. No laminate Sienna recognized. He blended well enough with the sponsor crowd that he might have made it another twenty minutes if she hadn’t seen him angle his lens toward Jax and one of the girls draped across his lap.

She got to him fast.

“Credentials,” she said.

He smiled without warmth. “Media.”

“Not ours. Let me see your pass.”

He gave her a shrug and drifted off before she could physically block him without making a scene. She followed, trying not to look like she was chasing.

When she got Jenna on the radio, all she got back was static, then Jenna’s clipped voice from somewhere near the lift. “Handling transport. Keep him out.”

Keep him out of where, Sienna wanted to ask, but by then the room had shifted again.

Jax was gone.

The absence of him had become its own kind of alarm bell. Noise still filled the lounge, but the center had dropped out. Myles was laughing at his own joke near the bar. Brent was arguing with a bowl of mixed nuts. Chester was standing now, scanning the room.

“Lost your singer?” Sienna asked him.

Chester’s expression said he hated that question because he hated the answer. “Five minutes ago.”

She was already moving.

The dressing-room corridor downstairs felt cooler, meaner. Concrete walls. strip lights. The floor sticky in patches where beer had dried. Security had loosened because the show was over. That was always when stupid things got through.

She heard laughter before she found the door.

Jax’s dressing room stood half open. Music thudded faint through the walls from upstairs, muffled now under the closer sounds inside: a woman’s bright, drunk giggle; Myles’s voice somewhere farther back; a male voice Sienna didn’t know saying, “Mate, just one more—”

Then the camera shutter clicked.

Sienna shoved the door wider.

The room smelled like stale air-conditioning, sweat, and sharp chemical powder. A mirror rimmed with bulbs threw hard light across the mess. Bottles on the counter. Crushed limes. Ice melting in a silver bucket. A line of white cut ragged across the dark wood table under the mirror.

Jax sat on the edge of it half-dressed, shirt hanging open, belt unfastened, one knee spread, laughing at something one of the girls had said. White dust marked the back of his hand. Another streak sat careless and bright on the table inches from his thigh.

And three feet away, the photographer raised his camera.

Everything in Sienna went cold.

“No,” she snapped, and lunged.

The flash went off anyway.

She hit the camera with the heel of her hand and sent the shot wild into the ceiling. The photographer swore, stumbled back, then recovered with the ugly confidence of a man who smelled money.

“Get out of my way.”

“You’re not cleared to be here.”

“Neither’s half this room.”

He tried to sidestep her for another angle. She planted herself between him and the table.

Behind her, silence had fallen in that sharp, terrible way it did when people realized the fun had become evidence.

Jax looked at her over the photographer’s shoulder, eyes glazed but not stupid. Not yet. He knew exactly what she was blocking him from. He just didn’t move.

That made her angrier than the coke.

Myles appeared in the doorway with a drink in one hand and took in the scene with open delight. “Well. There’s our evening.”

“Get Jenna,” Sienna said without looking at him.

“Bossy.”

“Now, Myles.”

Something in her voice must have cut deeper than usual because his grin thinned. He pushed off the frame and vanished.

The photographer lifted his camera again. “You can’t stop this.”

She stepped closer until the lens nearly touched her shoulder. “Try me.”

He looked at her then really looked, maybe noticing she wasn’t some hostess or drunk fan. She had a radio, venue black, the kind of expression that meant paperwork and police and a ruined night.

Behind her Jax said, too lazily, “Aw, let the man work. Everybody’s got bills.”

She turned on him so fast the movement cracked through the room.

“You shut up.”

A girl near the sofa sucked in a breath.

Jax blinked, then laughed once under it, mean and soft. “There she is.”

Sienna pointed at the white on the table. “Get rid of it.”

He held her gaze for a long second, as if deciding which version of himself he wanted to wear. Then he dipped two fingers into the powder and wiped them across the inside of her wrist.

It happened so fast she almost didn’t register it. Cool skin. Fine grit. His mouth curved like a wound reopening.

The room seemed to tilt.

The photographer snapped two frames in quick succession.

That did it.

Sienna grabbed the nearest bar towel, swept the line off the table onto the floor, and shoved the photographer backward hard enough that he hit the wall with an offended grunt. “Out.”

Jax slid off the table at last, unsteady but upright. “Careful, California.”

She wiped her wrist on the towel until the skin burned. “You think this is funny?”

“I think you’re wound tighter than a snare.”

“Jax,” she said, and her voice came out low and shaking with fury, “you are one bad night from being a corpse in a headline and you still act like the room exists to clap.”

He stared at her.

For the first time since she’d met him, he looked almost sober.

Footsteps pounded in the corridor. Jenna arrived first, then Cal right behind her, and whatever words they’d prepared died the second they saw the table, the girls, the photographer, Jax with his shirt hanging open and his pupils blown wide under dressing-room lights.

Cal went white before he went red.

“What the fuck is this?”

Nobody answered fast enough.

His roar hit the walls hard enough to rattle the mirror bulbs. The girls started collecting their handbags. The unknown man vanished through the side door. The photographer attempted a retreat, but Jenna planted herself in front of him with one hand out.

“Camera,” she said.

He barked a laugh. “No chance.”

Cal turned on security in the corridor and then back on the room like a man trying not to set fire to his own life. “Who let him in? Who let any of them in?”

Myles had the grace to look interested in the floor tiles.

Brent materialized in the doorway behind Cal, then Chester behind him, both taking in the wreckage with the worn expressions of men who had seen too much and hated themselves for recognizing the pattern.

Jenna’s composure cracked next.

“I am done,” she said, not loud, which was worse. “Do you hear me, Jax? I am done dragging your body and your filth and your appetite through every city praying we make it to the next one before you kill this tour.”

The room held still.

Jax leaned back against the table as if the wood behind him could prop up the swagger he was losing. “Bit dramatic.”

Cal made a sound that was almost a laugh and had no humor in it. “Dramatic? You want dramatic? Wait till that shot lands online before midnight and sponsors start calling. Wait till insurers ask me whether the frontman of my band is doing lines off venue furniture with unauthorized guests after the first bloody date.”

The photographer used the distraction to head for the hall. Security finally moved in, but not before he lifted the camera above their reach with a triumphant little smirk that promised he’d already got what he needed.

Sienna felt the night break open right there.

All the cleanup, all the little saves, every bottle hidden and door blocked and lie told to keep the machine moving. None of it mattered if he kept choosing this.

She looked at Jax.

He looked back, and something in his face dared her to say it. Maybe he thought she wouldn’t in front of everyone. Maybe he needed somebody to.

“Your talent is not enough,” she said.

The room went quiet in a different way this time.

Jax’s jaw tightened.

Sienna didn’t stop. “It isn’t enough to save Jenna from this every night. It isn’t enough to save Cal from burying stories and paying people off. It isn’t enough to save the band when you and Myles act like consequences are for other men. And it sure as hell isn’t enough to save you forever.”

Myles muttered, “Jesus.”

She turned on him too. “You’re not innocent just because he’s louder.”

That shut him up.

Jax pushed off the table and took one step toward her. Not enough to touch. Enough to make the girls by the sofa tense. His voice dropped into that southern drawl he used when he wanted words to feel like fingers closing.

“You got a lot to say for somebody been here five minutes.”

“Long enough.”

“Think you know me?”

“No,” she said. “I think I know what happens to everyone standing near you when you decide being adored is the same thing as being untouchable.”

He went very still.

She saw the hit land. Not because he looked hurt. Men like Jax would rather bleed out than let a room watch them hurt. But his eyes changed. The shine in them sharpened to something dangerous and alive.

Cal dragged a hand down his face. “Everybody out. Now. Except band and crew.”

The room emptied in nervous fragments. Heels clicking, murmured excuses, one final burst of protest from the photographer in the corridor before security shoved him farther off. When the door shut, it shut on the fake glamour too. What was left looked ugly and small. Powder ground into the grout. Melted ice. A lipstick print on a bottle neck.

Jenna sat down hard in the chair by the mirror and pressed both hands over her mouth.

No one spoke for a moment.

Then Chester did.

He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t perform the speech. He just looked at Jax with plain old disappointment and said, “She’s right.”

It landed harder than Cal’s shouting.

Jax’s head turned.

Chester held his gaze. “You sing like a man with his chest split open and then you spend every hour off stage trying to prove none of us can make you care if you bleed. I’m tired of it.”

Brent shifted by the door, uncomfortable in his own skin, but he nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “Me too.”

Myles scoffed because that was the only shield he had left. “Oh, come on.”

Brent looked at him. “No, man. Come off it.”

That was the unexpected part, maybe. Not the agreement itself. Sienna had seen enough in both of them to know they weren’t blind. It was that they said it out loud. In front of Jax. In front of Cal and Jenna and all the wreckage. Quiet men choosing a side usually mattered more than loud ones.

Jax’s face gave nothing away.

That was almost worse.

Cal pointed at the table. “Clean it.”

No one moved.

“I mean it,” Cal said, each word clipped. “Every trace. Then you go back to the hotel. No bars. No guests. No disappearing. If a single image from tonight hits before I can get ahead of it, I swear to God I will pull dates.”

“You can’t pull dates,” Myles said automatically.

“Watch me.”

Jenna lowered her hands and looked up. Her voice had gone scraped raw. “Sienna, with me.”

Sienna followed her into the corridor on legs that felt suddenly unsteady. The door shut behind them, muffling the low rumble of male voices and the clatter of somebody in there finally doing what they were told.

The hallway smelled like bleach and cold chips from catering gone stale.

Jenna leaned against the cinderblock wall and closed her eyes.

For a second she looked older than she had upstairs. Not by years. By damage.

“You all right?” Sienna asked.

Jenna laughed once, short and humorless. “No. You?”

Sienna looked down at the red mark across the inside of her wrist where she’d scrubbed her skin raw with the towel. “Working on it.”

Jenna followed her gaze and something flinty moved through her face. “Did he touch you?”

“He tried to make a joke.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

Sienna met her eyes. “I’m fine.”

Jenna nodded, but only because there wasn’t time for anything else. “You did the right thing.”

Inside the room, something crashed. Probably Myles objecting to consequences in the only language he knew.

Sienna let her head rest against the wall for one breath. “He’s going to hate me.”

Jenna opened her eyes. “He already did.”

That pulled the ghost of a smile from Sienna, thin but real.

At the far end of the corridor, Chester stepped out first. He carried himself with the exhausted steadiness of a man who knew how to go home after ugly nights and still open the front door gently. Brent followed, rubbing one hand over his mouth.

Chester stopped in front of Sienna.

“You were brave in there,” he said.

“I was angry.”

“Usually the same thing.”

Brent tipped his head toward the dressing room door. “For what it’s worth, he heard you.”

Sienna let out a breath. “That doesn’t mean he’ll change.”

“No,” Chester said. “But it means he heard you.”

Behind them the door opened again.

Jax came out alone.

His shirt was buttoned now, badly. A faint smear of white still marked one knuckle, missed in the cleanup or ignored out of spite. He looked at Chester, at Brent, at Jenna. Last of all he looked at Sienna.

The corridor narrowed around that look.

She expected mockery. A threat. One of his lazy cruel lines tossed like a match.

Instead he said, very softly, “You enjoy that?”

It was the wrong question. Maybe the only one he could ask.

Sienna pushed off the wall and faced him square. “No.”

His eyes dropped once to her wrist, to the raw skin, then lifted again.

“Good,” he said.

He walked past her before she could decide whether that word had been meant as warning, confession, or something uglier because it sounded too much like both.

Sienna watched him go down the corridor under the hard white lights, shoulders set, stride loose with drink and pride and damage. Myles fell in beside him a second later, talking already, trying to turn catastrophe into a story he could laugh through.

Jenna straightened from the wall. “Back to work,” she said, because that was how these nights always ended. Not with resolution. With cleanup.

But as Sienna turned toward the stairwell, Chester touched her elbow lightly.

“You asked if anyone would say it,” he said.

She frowned. “I didn’t ask.”

“Not out loud.”

He gave her a tired half smile and headed after Brent.

Sienna stood there for a beat with the radio hissing at her hip and the taste of adrenaline still metallic at the back of her mouth.

Somewhere above them the after-party music had finally been cut. Somewhere outside, in a car park or service lane or a freelancer’s speeding hatchback, a camera held the shape of the night waiting to become a headline.

Before midnight, she thought.

Maybe sooner.

The bus lurched hard enough to throw hot coffee across Sienna’s hand and into her lap.

“Shit.” She caught the cup before it tipped fully, but not before brown heat soaked through the thin black cotton over her thigh.

From the lounge bench opposite, Myles looked up from his phone and grinned. “First blood.”

“It’s coffee, not a stabbing,” Brent muttered without opening his eyes. He was folded into the corner seat with his hood up and both drumsticks tucked into the neck of his sweatshirt like he’d fallen asleep mid-complaint.

Sienna set the cup in the holder with more care than the road deserved. “Tell your driver he’s trying to kill me.”

“Driver’s trying to miss potholes in a county that hates roads,” Myles said. “He’s an artist.”

The bus smelled like stale beer, laundry that had given up, and the sharp burnt edge of machine coffee. Morning light came in mean and gray through the smoked windows. Someone had left a pair of boots in the aisle. Someone else had left a half-eaten bag of salt-and-vinegar crisps open on the table. The vinegar smell sat in the air like a dare.

Sienna dabbed at her leg with a napkin and checked her phone again.

Three missed calls from Jenna.

Two texts from Cal.

One new message from the venue production office asking where the revised laminate list was and whether the guest count had changed again.

She exhaled through her nose. “Did either of you see the blue folder?”

“Nope,” Brent said.

“Yep,” Myles said at the same time.

She looked at him. “Where?”

He took his time, thumb still moving over his screen. “Depends how nicely you ask.”

Brent made a sound that might have been a laugh on a better morning, but it died before it got there.

Sienna stood. The bus shifted under her feet. “Myles.”

He looked up then, pleased with himself. “Behind the driver’s seat. Under Jax’s jacket.”

She found it where he said, bent at one corner and sticky from something clear and sweet. When she turned back, Myles waggled his brows like he’d performed a public service.

“You could have said that the first time.”

“And rob myself of your sunny charm?” he said.

The bunk curtain to her right snapped open.

Jax leaned out with one hand braced overhead, hair crushed flat on one side, shirt half-buttoned, tattoos dark against sleep-warm skin. He looked wrecked and somehow still arrogant about it. His eyes found the coffee stain on Sienna’s clothes first, and his mouth tipped.

“Bus attack you, sweetheart?”

“Go back to bed.”

His smile sharpened. “There she is.”

“You missed Jenna’s calls,” Sienna said. “Again.”

He pushed fully into the aisle, bare feet silent on the floor. “Did I?”

“She rang three times. Soundcheck moved up by forty minutes because the opener’s truck blew a tire. Cal wants everybody inside as soon as we pull in.”

Jax took the mug from the holder and drank her coffee like he owned both it and the air around it. “Then I guess we’ll all need to move very fast.”

“That was mine.”

He handed the cup back empty. “Problem solved.”

Myles laughed.

Brent opened his eyes at last and looked at Jax with flat tiredness. “You’re a dick before noon. That’s talent.”

Jax flicked him a glance. “Write that on a shirt.”

Sienna stepped into his path when he moved toward the little sink. It wasn’t dramatic. She just stood there with the folder under one arm and the empty cup in her hand.

“You need to answer your phone.”

He looked down at her. Up close, his face showed what distance hid. Fine burst veins near the side of his nose. The faint grayness under his eyes. A cut on his lower lip he’d either worried with his teeth or earned honestly. He smelled like yesterday’s vodka dragged through expensive soap.

“You need to stop talking to me like I’m twelve.”

“Then stop acting like it.”

Myles whistled softly.

Jax’s gaze cooled. “Move.”

“No.”

The bus rattled over another patch of bad road. For a second the only sound was the cupboard latch clicking and the low growl of tires under them.

Then Jax bent, close enough that she could see where his pupils were still a shade too wide for morning.

“You always this brave,” he said in that lazy southern drawl, “or just when there’s witnesses?”

“Always,” she said.

Something unreadable moved behind his eyes. Not softness. Nothing so easy. Then it was gone.

He took the folder from under her arm, flipped it open, and read the top page like she wasn’t there at all.

“This guest list is wrong.”

She hated that he was right. “It was changed at six.”

“It was changed again.” He tapped one name with his thumb. “That promoter’s nephew is on every stop this week. Cal said cut him loose after the stunt upstairs last night.”

Sienna reached for the sheet. “Why do you know that?”

Jax gave the paper back. “Because some of us hear things when y’all are busy glaring.”

He slid past her, shoulder brushing hers just enough to feel deliberate, and disappeared into the tiny bathroom.

Myles let the silence breathe half a beat before ruining it. “Look at that. Domestic already.”

“Shut up,” Brent said.

Myles glanced at him, amused. “Touchy.”

Brent sat up and scrubbed a hand over his face. “You’re exhausting.”

“That hurt my feelings.”

“You don’t have any.”

Myles gave Sienna a wounded look. “See what I live with?”

She was checking the list again. Jax was right. The nephew’s name sat there in block capitals, added after midnight by someone who thought rules were for other people. Her temper sharpened at the edges. It would have felt better if he’d been wrong.

Jenna called again before they hit the venue lot.

Sienna answered on the second ring. “I’ve got the folder.”

“Tell me you’ve fixed the guest passes.”

“Working on it.”

“Work faster. Loading dock’s a mess. Local security changed supervisor this morning and nobody told me until five minutes ago. Where’s Jax?”

Sienna looked toward the bathroom door. Water ran. “Vertical.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

“He’s here.”

A pause crackled down the line. “And?”

“And difficult.”

Jenna made a rough sound of agreement. “Get him inside. No wandering. No girls. No side doors. I mean it.”

Sienna looked at the closed bathroom door again. “You say that like he listens to me.”

“No,” Jenna said. “I say it because he doesn’t.”

The venue was one of those concrete sheds that looked built to host either hockey or riots. The loading bay stank of diesel and wet cardboard. Rain had started somewhere on the last stretch of road and left everything slick, from the yellow painted curb to the black flight cases rolling over it.

By noon Sienna had run three sets of passes to security, chased down catering over a missing allergy note for Chester, and nearly collided with Jax twice in corridors too narrow for the amount of anger between them.

The first time, he came out of wardrobe with a fresh black shirt hanging open and a cigarette behind one ear.

“You’re late for radio,” she said.

He kept walking.

She walked backward in front of him. “Jax.”

“Dangerous habit, darlin’.”

“Being right?”

“Thinking I care.”

He kept moving until she stopped dead and forced him either to crash into her or halt. He halted with a look that promised annoyance as sport.

“The station’s patched in already,” she said. “Cal covered the first six minutes. If you miss the rest, he’s going to lose what little mind he has left.”

Jax looked past her toward the dressing rooms, jaw working once. “You ever shut off?”

“When you start behaving like a grown man.”

His smile came quick and nasty. “You must be real fun to sleep beside.”

Heat flashed up her neck, less from embarrassment than fury that he’d reached for that. “Try it and die.”

That made Chester, passing with a guitar tech, bark out one surprised laugh before he caught himself.

Jax’s eyes flicked to Chester, then back to her. “There she is again.”

He went to the radio room.

The second collision happened because Myles decided to be funny.

He’d stolen Sienna’s phone ten minutes earlier by snatching it off the catering table while she was signing for bottled water. She got it back from him after a chase through two service corridors and one stairwell, only to find he’d answered a missed call from her mother with a cheerful, “No, she can’t come to the phone, she’s busy ruining rock and roll.”

Sienna was still seeing red when Brent caught up with them near stage left.

“What did you do?” Brent asked Myles.

“Connected with her family,” Myles said.

Sienna held up the phone. “If you ever touch this again, I’ll break your fingers.”

Myles pressed a hand to his chest. “Violent little Californian.”

Brent did not smile. “Not funny.”

Myles’ own grin faltered by a fraction. “Christ, dad.”

“I said not funny.”

Something in Brent’s face made the air change. Not louder. Colder. Even Myles seemed to feel it. He rolled his eyes and tossed both hands up.

“Fine. Everybody’s sensitive today.”

He sauntered off toward the backline cases, humming to himself.

Sienna looked at Brent. “Thanks.”

Brent shrugged, but there was no humor on him now. “He goes too far when he’s bored.”

“Does he know that?”

“He knows,” Brent said. “He just likes the sound it makes when people crack.”

That sat with her longer than she wanted it to.

The afternoon turned ugly at six.

A support act had overrun. The local promoter wanted to add two more VIPs to a full side-stage list. Jenna’s headset died. Cal got stuck on a sponsor call in a stairwell with no signal. One of Chester’s in-ears went missing and then reappeared in the wrong case. Through all of it, Jax vanished for seventeen minutes and came back smelling like cold air and smoke.

Sienna found him by the bunks before doors.

The bus sat tucked behind the arena wall, engine idling low, a private animal breathing in the dark. Inside, the narrow aisle glowed blue from the tiny floor lights. Somebody had pulled most of the curtains. The whole place felt close and secretive and mean.

Jax was half inside his bunk, one boot off, one still on, reaching for something under the pillow.

“You’re due onstage in twenty.”

“Good for me.”

“Jenna’s looking for you.”

“Jenna is always looking for me.”

Sienna crossed her arms. “Were you planning to go missing until someone dragged you out?”

He found what he wanted: a silver chain, tangled with a backstage pass from some older tour. He stared at it for a second too long before dropping it into the bunk pocket.

That tiny pause should have meant nothing. Somehow it didn’t.

Then he looked back at her, mask back in place. “You standing there to admire the decor?”

The curtain brushed his shoulder when the bus shifted. For one second they were boxed in by navy fabric and low light and the hum of the engine under everything. Too close. Too private. She could see the faded seam on his pillow, the nick in his thumbnail, the bruise yellowing near his ribs where his shirt had ridden up.

“You can’t keep doing this,” she said more quietly.

“Doing what?”

“Whatever this is.” She made a hard little gesture between them, between him and the whole tour, the whole mess of him. “Making everyone chase you. Burning every room down because you can.”

His face went still in a way that felt more dangerous than shouting. “You got me all figured out after a week?”

“No. I’ve got eyes.”

He leaned back against the bunk frame, watching her. “And what do those California eyes see?”

“A man who thinks being wanted is the same as being worth something.”

The words landed. She saw them do it.

Too far, some sensible part of her said.

But he only smiled, and that was worse.

“Get out,” he said.

“Be onstage in ten.”

“Get out, Sienna.”

She held his gaze another beat, then shoved the curtain aside and stepped down into the aisle.

He went onstage in nine.

Later, after the encore and the sweat and the screaming and the crackle that came over a crowd when a band hit hard enough to make people forget themselves, Sienna ended up outside the side barricade because security was short two staff and Jenna needed a body by the artist exit.

Rain had passed. The night smelled washed clean except for cigarette smoke, hot brakes, and spilled lager near the curb. Fans lingered in clusters under the sodium lights, hoping for a wave, a photo, a scrap of attention to take home and polish into memory.

Most of them were ordinary in the way devotion often is. Damp hair. smudged eyeliner. hoodies over sequined tops. A man in his forties with his daughter on his shoulders. Two girls barefoot and holding their heels in one hand. A boy no older than sixteen clutching a vinyl sleeve to his chest like it could bruise.

Near the barricade end, a young woman had gone ghost-white.

Sienna noticed because the crowd around her shifted. The woman was breathing too fast, hand fisted in the front of her own coat, eyes fixed on the service gate as if she was trying not to bolt and couldn’t make her legs agree. Her friend spoke to her in a rush that only made it worse.

Sienna started toward them.

Jax got there first.

He must have slipped out the side door behind a security guard. One second the gate area was clear, the next he was there in black denim and stage sweat, hair damp at the temples, a hooded jacket half on like someone had shoved it at him on the way out.

The fans surged and hushed at once.

But Jax didn’t play to that. He went straight to the panicked girl and bent until he wasn’t looming over her. “Hey,” he said, quiet enough Sienna nearly missed it. “Don’t look at all this. Look at me.”

The girl’s eyes flew to his face.

“That’s it,” he said. “You with me?”

She nodded, trembling.

“You’re all right.” His drawl went soft around the words. “Breathe in slow. Like this.”

He showed her, palm flat against his own chest. No grin. No swagger. Just stillness, all of it fixed on her.

The girl tried and failed. He didn’t react to that either.

“Again,” he murmured. “C’mon now. There you go. I ain’t going anywhere.”

Her friend mouthed thank you over her head, wide-eyed.

Jax glanced at the security guard. “Get her some water, would you?”

Then back to the girl. “You know your name?”

It should have sounded ridiculous. Instead it sounded kind.

She whispered it.

“Good girl, Ellie. Keep looking here. Not at them.” He tipped his chin toward the crowd, already holding the rest of them back with one raised hand, empty of threat. “Tell me five things you can see.”

By the third thing, her breathing had eased.

Sienna stopped three paces off and watched. This Jax had none of the sharp edges he wore everywhere else. No show in it. No audience, though fifty people were staring. He spoke to the girl like she was the only thing in front of him that mattered.

When Ellie finally laughed, tiny and embarrassed, he smiled back in a way Sienna hadn’t seen before. It changed his whole face. Made him look younger. Or maybe just less wrecked.

The security guard came back with water. Jax twisted the cap off before he handed it over.

“Small sip.”

Ellie took one.

“There you go.” He rose slowly, checking that she was steady. “You got someone with you?”

She pointed at her friend.

“Then you head on home, yeah? Warm bed. No standing out here trying to impress idiots.”

A few people laughed, softer now.

Ellie clutched the bottle in both hands. “Can I still have a photo?”

He tilted his head like she’d asked for the most ordinary thing in the world. “Course you can.”

He took the picture. Signed the vinyl for the boy. Passed back two phones. Told someone to get a cab. Squeezed a father’s shoulder when the man said his daughter had waited all year.

When he turned, he found Sienna watching him.

The softness disappeared so fast it was almost brutal. Something shut behind his eyes. His mouth flattened.

“What?” he snapped.

She didn’t answer right away. She was still staring at the ghost of the man from half a minute ago, trying to figure out where he’d put him.

Jax took a step toward her. “You got something to say, say it.”

“I was going to say that was kind.”

He barked a laugh with no warmth in it. “Don’t.”

“Don’t what?”

“Stand there acting like you caught me doing something noble.” His voice stayed low, but the anger in it had teeth now. “It was a fan having a bad minute, not a religious experience.”

“I didn’t say it was.”

“No, you just looked at me like you’d found a stray dog under the porch.” He moved closer, enough that she caught sweat, smoke, the citrus bite of whatever someone had wiped from his neck after stage. “I don’t need your damn approval.”

Her own temper came back sharp and quick. “Good, because I wasn’t offering it.”

“Then quit looking at me like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like there’s something under the skin worth digging for.”

For one beat they just stood there, the gate light bleaching the concrete, fans murmuring beyond the barrier, security pretending not to hear.

Then Sienna said, very even, “If there wasn’t, you wouldn’t be this angry.”

He stared at her.

That struck too. She could see it.

His jaw clenched. “You don’t know a thing about me.”

“I know enough.”

“No,” he said, and now the drawl was back in full, sharpened to a blade. “What you know is how to run your mouth and carry a pass list. Don’t confuse that with knowing me.”

He turned away before she could answer, shoving a hand through his hair hard enough to pull the damp strands back from his face.

One of the girls by the barrier called his name. He pasted on half a smile without looking at Sienna again and went to sign another ticket stub like nothing had happened.

Sienna stayed where she was.

The night pressed cool against the heat in her cheeks. Beyond the gate, a bus engine rumbled. Somewhere overhead, a sheet of loose metal knocked gently in the wind.

Hatred, she thought, would be simpler if he were only what he tried so hard to look like.

But simple had left this tour on the first night.

When Jenna’s voice cracked over the radio asking where the hell everybody was, Sienna lifted the handset to answer.

“On my way,” she said.

And she was. But as she headed back toward the loading door, she could still hear Jax’s voice in the dark, low and steady and unexpectedly tender.

Breathe in slow.

I ain’t going anywhere.

Liar, she thought, not sure if she meant him or herself.

By the third morning, Sienna could tell how bad Jax was before he said a word.

It was in the way the bunk curtain moved.

On the better days, it snapped back and he came out all swagger and bad temper, bare feet on the bus floor, hair shoved off his face, mouth already looking for something to sneer at. On the worse ones, the curtain twitched once and stayed half shut while he sat inside the dark of it, breathing like the air had gone thick.

That morning, Brent was eating dry cereal from a paper cup at the little table. Myles had one boot on and was trying to find the other by kicking under the bench. Chester was on the phone with his wife in a voice so soft it barely carried over the engine.

Sienna stood at the counter with a tray of coffees gone lukewarm and watched Jax’s hand appear first.

It gripped the edge of the curtain.

It shook.

Not a dramatic tremble. Not enough for anyone wanting not to notice. Just a fine, angry vibration at the fingers, like the body’s own private betrayal.

Then he came out.

No shirt. Black jeans hanging low. Tattoos dragging over his ribs and shoulders in dark coils. Eyes bloodshot enough to look bruised. He saw her seeing him, and his mouth turned flat.

“You got a staring problem, California?”

“You got a functioning liver problem?”

Myles snorted into the seat cushion. Brent stared very hard into his cereal.

Jax held her gaze another second, then reached past her for the water bottle Jenna had left out and drained half of it without breathing. His hand still wasn’t steady.

Sienna handed him the black coffee anyway. “Drink that before you ask for vodka.”

His eyes cut to hers. “Or what?”

“Or Jenna hears about the bottle under your mattress before ten a.m.”

For one beat she thought he might smile. Not nicely. But honestly.

Instead he took the coffee and brushed past her hard enough that his shoulder clipped hers. It would have felt accidental if he weren’t so exact about where he put his body.

“Bossy little thing,” he muttered.

“Functioning little thing,” she said.

He kept walking, but she saw the side of his mouth twitch before he ducked into the bus bathroom.

It should not have felt like a win.

It did.

By the end of the first week, she stopped believing his chaos was random.

There was a shape to it. A rhythm as fixed as load-in.

Vodka first, if he could get away with it. Coffee if someone cornered him. A period around noon where his temper got mean and bright, every nerve turned outward. A strange calm just before stage, when he either vanished entirely or went silent enough to worry everybody more. Then the show, where he burned through all of it like it had never touched him at all.

After, he split in one of two directions. Too wired to come down, or so emptied out he looked half dead under the dressing-room lights.

Sienna found pills twice that week.

The first time they were tucked into an old throat lozenge tin inside a leather wash bag, mixed shapes and colors rattling together. The second time they were in the inside pocket of a denim jacket slung over a lighting trunk, hidden in a folded packet of rolling papers. She didn’t know what all of them were. She knew enough to hate the sight.

She took them to Jenna both times.

Jenna didn’t even look surprised. Just tired in a way that made her face seem older for a second.

“Cal can’t get him dropped from the tour unless he blows a sponsor or gets arrested on paper,” she said, locking the pills in her laptop case. “And if he drops him anyway, the insurance people eat us alive.”

“So we just keep him upright?”

Jenna gave a laugh without humor. “That’s the dream.”

The days blurred fast after that. Arenas that all smelled of dust, fryer grease, wet concrete, old beer baked into drains. Hallways painted that same ugly practical grey. Security radios crackling. Laminates slapping against chests. Fans pressed at barricades with glitter on their eyelids and hope in both hands.

Sienna ran messages. Replaced lost towels. Collected signatures. Counted bottles. Watched Myles turn cruelty into a joke before anyone could pin it on him. Watched Brent get quieter every time Jax and Myles went too far. Watched Chester call home from loading docks with trucks backing up behind him, his whole face changing when his little boy answered.

And she watched Jax.

She watched him forget whole pieces of the night before.

Not all at once. In flashes.

Who signed a girl’s chest in Manchester. Why his knuckles were split in Leeds. Where his silver chain had gone for six hours before it turned up under the front lounge seat wrapped around a set list and a room key that wasn’t his.

Once, outside a venue kitchen, he looked at her and said, “Why’re you so pissed off this mornin’?”

“You called me a parasite at breakfast.”

He blinked. “Did I?”

“You also asked me if runners come with batteries.”

Myles laughed so hard he nearly choked on a chip.

Jax just stared, as if deciding whether they were making him the punchline. Then he rubbed a hand over his mouth and said, low enough only she could hear, “Wouldn’t’ve wasted that line sober.”

It was the closest thing to an apology he had offered her.

She hated that she noticed.

The bruise came on a Thursday.

They were in a narrow backstage corridor with cinderblock walls painted cream years ago and left to yellow under bad lights. Cases lined one side. A coil of cable sat like a black snake by the fire door. Soundcheck had run late. Jenna’s radio had been hissing nonstop for an hour. Cal was due with two local press people and a sponsor rep in less than twenty minutes.

Jax was missing.

Again.

“Find him,” Jenna said, one hand pressed to her forehead, clipboard jammed against her ribs. “If he’s with a girl, I don’t care. If he’s in a cupboard, drag him out. We open in forty-five.”

Sienna found him in wardrobe.

Not with a girl. Not passed out. Worse, somehow.

He sat on the floor between two rolling rails of stage clothes, back against the wall, one knee up, head tipped back like the plaster was all that held him there. A half-empty vodka bottle rested by his boot. His eyes were closed. His skin had gone that wrong color again, pale beneath the ink, lips drained out.

For one cold second she thought he was unconscious.

Then he said, without opening his eyes, “You stomp loud as hell.”

Relief hit her so sharp it came out as anger. “You’re on in forty-five minutes.”

“Mhm.”

“Get up.”

He cracked one eye. “Ask sweet.”

She stepped into the little aisle between sequined jackets and black stage shirts and looked down at him. “Get up, Jax.”

He took a swallow from the bottle instead.

That did it.

She bent, snatched the vodka from his hand, and moved back before he could grab her wrist.

His eyes opened fully then. Blue and mean and suddenly awake. “You out your damn mind?”

“You nearly missed line check yesterday and your intro cue today.”

“I didn’t miss either.”

“Because people keep covering for you.”

He pushed up too fast, one hand braced on the rail. For a second the movement turned ugly. His body listed left, corrected hard. There and gone. Easy to miss if she hadn’t been watching for days.

But she had.

He saw in her face that she had.

Something dangerous settled over his own.

“Give me the bottle.”

“No.”

“Give. Me. The bottle.”

“No.”

The air between them tightened.

He stepped forward. She held her ground, though every nerve in her body said run or swing or do something.

“You think because you carry a radio and a pass list you get to take things from me?” His voice had dropped low, southern drawl thickening around the edges. “That what this is?”

“I think because you’re supposed to be on a stage in forty-five minutes, you don’t get to pickle yourself in a wardrobe first.”

His laugh was short and vicious. “There she is.”

“There who is?”

“The girl who loves tellin’ everybody what they can and can’t do.”

She folded her hand tighter around the bottle neck. “Somebody has to.”

“No,” he said, closing the space again. “You just like it.”

She should have backed off. Jenna on the radio. Cal pacing somewhere. The sponsor rep. The clock. All the practical things.

Instead she said, “I like not watching grown men act like toddlers with a death wish.”

The words landed.

He went very still.

Outside the wardrobe room, a forklift beeped in reverse. Somebody laughed down the corridor. Music from the stage bled through concrete in a low, shapeless thump.

Jax’s face changed by degrees. Not louder. Worse.

“You think you know what I’m doin’?”

“I think you’re getting sloppier.”

“Careful.”

“No. You be careful.” Her voice came out harsher than she meant it to, sharpened by too many mornings, too many hidden bottles, too many swallowed shocks. “You’re shaking before noon. You black out and call it a joke after. You mix whatever pills you can find with enough vodka to drown a horse, then walk on stage under lights hot enough to cook you. What exactly do you think that ends as?”

His nostrils flared.

“Don’t,” he said.

She ignored it. She couldn’t seem to stop. “Do you want the answer? It ends with everyone around you pretending not to hear the crash until it happens in public.”

His eyes blazed. “You self-righteous little—”

“It ends with Jenna screaming for medics and Cal trying to keep sponsor logos out of the photos and the rest of the band standing there while you drop in front of ten thousand people.”

He moved so fast she thought for one blind beat he might snatch the bottle and pin her both.

He only got close. Too close.

Close enough that she could see the burst red veins in the whites of his eyes. The faint scrape at his jaw from a bad razor. The sweat drying at the hollow of his throat. Close enough to smell stale spirits under mint and stage soap and something medicinal he had tried and failed to hide.

“Say it plain,” he said softly. “You think I’m tryin’ to die.”

She stared back. Her pulse beat high and hard.

“I think,” she said, each word cut clean, “you don’t care if you do.”

The silence that followed was ugly and alive.

When Jax answered, his voice had lost its bite. That made it hit harder.

“You really need me to be that man, don’t you?”

She frowned. “What?”

“The ruined bastard.” His mouth twisted. “Makes your job neat. Makes you the brave one, draggin’ me around by the collar while everybody tells you how hard you work.”

“That is not what this is.”

“Ain’t it?” He tipped his head, studying her with that cruel attention he saved for weak spots. “You don’t look at me like you hate me half as much as you look at me like you wanna fix somethin’.”

“That’s rich, coming from you.”

He barreled over her. “You walk around here actin’ like if you can just say the right hard thing, shove the right bottle away, catch the right disaster before it hits the press, then maybe you matter enough to keep.”

The floor seemed to shift under her feet.

He saw he’d struck something. Of course he did. He was rotten, not stupid.

His voice went lower. “That why you took this job? Needed a bunch of half-broken idiots to prove you’re useful?”

For a second she couldn’t breathe.

Not because he knew. He didn’t. He was guessing in the dark and still finding soft tissue.

Her mother’s voice flashed up anyway, bright and exhausted through too many phone calls over too many years. Stop taking on other people’s mess. Stop confusing being needed with being loved.

Sienna set the bottle on the nearest costume table very carefully so she wouldn’t throw it at his head.

“You want to do this?” she asked.

His jaw shifted once. “Looks like we’re doin’ it.”

“Fine.” She stepped closer too, until the hanging jackets brushed her shoulder blades and there was nowhere to go but through him. “You call me controlling because you can’t stand that somebody says no and means it. You think any boundary is an insult because you’ve spent years surrounded by people too scared, too paid, or too dazzled to tell you the truth.”

His expression hardened, but he didn’t interrupt.

So she kept going.

“You want honest? Here it is. You don’t scare me when you shout. You don’t scare me when you flirt. You don’t even scare me when you get mean. What scares me is how practiced you are at making your body pay for things your mouth won’t admit.”

Something flickered in him then. Quick as a blade catch.

She pressed.

“You drink until you can’t remember. You take God knows what just to level out. You run yourself ragged, then get under stage lights and let all those people scream your name like that sound can keep your heart beating.” Her throat felt raw now, but she did not soften. “So yes, Jax. I think part of you is trying to die in front of an audience, because then at least someone would finally have to see it.”

His face went white under the color already gone from it.

For one terrible second she thought he might laugh.

Instead he said, very quiet, “You don’t get to talk to me like you know where the bodies are buried.”

“No?” she shot back. “You leave them lying around.”

That one went in deep.

His shoulders pulled tight. His eyes dropped for the shortest moment, not in shame exactly but in impact, as if she’d hit bone.

Then he looked at her again, and what she saw there was so stripped bare it made her own anger falter.

Not rage.

Not this time.

Hurt. Old and ugly and instantly hidden.

When he spoke, the drawl had thinned almost out of his voice. “You think I ain’t already aware of what I am?”

The question was so naked it felt private by force.

Sienna’s mouth parted, but nothing came out.

Outside, someone shouted for five-minute warning. A road case wheel clattered over a threshold. Real life, still moving, still impatient.

Inside that cramped wardrobe room, neither of them moved.

He gave a tiny nod, like he’d answered something for himself. Then the accent slid back over him like armor.

“That all you got?”

She hated that his eyes were brighter. Hated more that she knew why.

“No,” she said. “But it’s all you’re getting.”

He let out a breath through his nose. Not a laugh. Not far off one either. More disbelief than anything.

“You really are a vicious little thing.”

“And you’re exhausted.”

“Maybe.”

“You’re also late.”

A corner of his mouth twitched, broken and humorless. “There she is again. Our girl with the clipboard soul.”

She should have slapped him. Instead she heard herself say, “And there you are. Bleeding out where everyone can clap for it.”

He stared at her for a long beat.

Then, to her horror, he smiled.

It was faint. Ruined. Not happy in the slightest. But real.

“Jesus Christ,” he murmured. “You cut nice.”

The compliment hit like an insult and something worse.

She crossed her arms because otherwise she might do something stupid with her hands. “Put some water in your system. Wash your face. If I smell vodka from the wings, I’m telling Jenna you’re not fit to go on.”

He looked at the bottle on the table, then back at her. “And if I go anyway?”

“Then I’ll stand side stage and wait to see if you prove me right.”

That smile vanished.

Good, she thought.

But the charged thing in the room did not vanish with it. It thickened. Changed shape. The fight had burned through the easy hatred and left something hotter, more dangerous, breathing in the space between them.

He took one more step in.

Now there was barely air.

Her back touched sequins cold as coins. His chest rose and fell slow, as if he were fighting for control molecule by molecule. She could see the pulse jumping in his throat. He looked wrecked. Beautiful in the way storms are beautiful when you’re foolish enough to stand near them.

“You oughta quit lookin’ at me like that,” he said.

She knew better than to ask which way.

So of course she asked. “Like what?”

His gaze dropped to her mouth and came back up, not even pretending otherwise. “Like you wanna save me and hit me at the same time.”

Heat climbed her neck so fast it made her furious.

“You’re delirious.”

“Might be.” His voice roughened. “Ain’t wrong, though.”

The radio on her hip crackled to life with Jenna’s voice, sharp enough to cut glass. “Sienna. Tell me you’ve found him.”

Neither of them moved.

Sienna snatched the handset without taking her eyes off Jax. “Found him.”

“Well?”

She watched his face while she answered. Watched the old arrogance trying to settle back into place. Watched how tired he was underneath it. Watched him hate that she had seen.

“He’ll be there,” she said.

Jenna swore with relief and cut off.

Sienna lowered the radio.

Jax reached past her then, not touching, only leaning around to take the vodka bottle from the table. He held it a second between them.

Then he unscrewed the cap and poured the rest of it into a laundry sink full of black rinse water and silver glitter.

The smell of it rose sharp and clean and wasted.

He dropped the empty bottle into the bin.

No apology. No explanation.

He grabbed the edge of a hanging towel, wiped his mouth, and headed for the door.

At the threshold he stopped without turning around.

“You don’t know enough,” he said.

It should have sounded like the same old warning.

It didn’t.

It sounded tired. Almost honest.

Sienna looked at the sink where the vodka had disappeared in a thin iridescent sheen.

“Then stop making me guess,” she said.

He stood there a second longer, shoulders squared, head bent just slightly as if the lights above him were too bright.

When he left, the room seemed smaller after him.

Sienna stayed where she was until the stage manager called second warning down the corridor and the whole building woke up meaner, louder, hungrier. Then she pushed off the rail and followed.

From side stage, she watched him walk out into the blast of white light and noise.

The crowd rose at once, a living wall of sound. Jax took the mic stand in one hand like he’d been born knowing how. If anyone in that arena looked close enough, they might have seen the strain at the mouth. The slight drag in the set of his shoulders. The cost of the thing.

No one ever looked that close.

The first line tore out of him raw and perfect anyway.

Brent came up beside her, sticks in one hand, expression unreadable in the stage wash. “Found him, then.”

“Yeah.”

Brent glanced toward Jax, then back at her. “He give you hell?”

Sienna kept her eyes on the stage. On Jax under the lights. On the beautiful lie of how easy he made it look.

“I gave some back,” she said.

Brent huffed once through his nose. “Fair.”

Then he jogged into his place, and the song hit full force.

Sienna stayed in the wings with her radio clipped to her hip and her pulse still not right.

Hatred would have been easier.

But hatred did not leave silence like that behind. Hatred did not make her feel the echo of his body in a room after he’d gone. Hatred did not look like a man pouring vodka down a sink because she told him, plain and cruel, that she thought he might die.

Out under the bruise-blue stage lights, Jax tipped his head back and sang like he had something left worth wrecking.

By noon the bus had gone quiet in the way only tour buses ever did, unnatural, expensive quiet, heavy with old air and the hum of tires eating freeway.

The curtains were half drawn against a white sky. Empty coffee cups rolled gently in the shallow groove of the table every time the driver changed lanes. Someone had left a packet of salt-and-vinegar crisps split open on the bench, and the whole lounge smelled faintly of stale beer, laundry powder, and vinegar.

Sienna sat cross-legged on the front bench with a laminates box between her knees and a yellow pad balanced on top, checking the next three dates against Jenna’s handwriting.

Two meet-and-greets.

One radio interview.

One promoter dinner Jenna had circled hard enough to nearly tear the page.

No side-door access.

No additions after four.

No fucking exceptions.

She was halfway through separating guest stickers by color when Chester came down the aisle in socks, phone in hand, reading glasses low on his nose.

He looked like somebody’s tired dad because he was somebody’s tired dad. Black T-shirt, grey joggers, wedding ring dull in the bus light. He had probably slept badly folded into his bunk like the rest of them, but there was still something orderly about him. He made tired look decent.

“Seat taken?” he asked.

Sienna glanced at the entirely empty lounge. “Loads of competition, yeah.”

A small smile touched his mouth. “Thought so.”

He sat opposite her with a grunt, rubbed one hand over his jaw, then looked down at his phone again. On the screen, for one second before it dimmed, she saw two little girls in school uniforms and a dark-haired woman who was not smiling for the camera so much as tolerating it.

He caught her seeing and locked the screen.

“Home?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

He put the phone face down on the table between them as if that solved anything.

Sienna stacked three laminate sheets. “Everything okay?”

Chester leaned back and stared past her shoulder at the windscreen. The road outside ran grey and flat between hedges, trucks, and service signs. Rain from earlier had dried in dirty tracks.

“Depends what you mean by okay.”

That was honest enough that she set her pen down.

He tipped his head, considering the phone like it had personally offended him. “My youngest has a class thing Friday. Costumes. I told her I’d help make some cardboard wings before I left.” He gave a quiet huff. “Her gran’s doing it instead.”

“You can video call in,” Sienna said, though she knew as she said it how thin it sounded.

“Yeah. I can.” His fingers drummed once on the table. “And my wife can hold the phone and act like that’s the same as me bein’ there.”

He spoke gently. That made it worse.

Sienna looked at him a second. “You don’t have to make it sound prettier than it is for me.”

That earned her a glance.

“No,” he said. “Guess I don’t.”

The bus rolled over a rough patch and the cups rattled. Somewhere behind the bunk curtain, Myles coughed, swore, then went quiet again.

Chester lowered his voice on instinct. “You’re seeing the worst of it at the moment. Or close to it.”

“Moment?” she said. “That’s optimistic.”

His mouth twitched. “Fair.”

He folded his arms and stared down at the laminate box. “You know I nearly lost my marriage?”

Sienna had known the shape of it. The edges. Not the weight.

She said nothing, just waited.

“That one time.” He scrubbed a hand over the back of his neck. “People talk about it like it was one stupid night, one mistake, one drunken bit of tour bullshit. Makes it sound small. Contained.” He shook his head. “It weren’t. It started before that. Started way back when I liked that anyone looked at me like I was twenty-five and dangerous and not a man with two kids and a mortgage and a wife tired of school forms and boiler repairs.”

His voice stayed level, which somehow gave it more force.

“I didn’t trip and fall into another woman,” he went on. “I let myself enjoy bein’ admired. I let that become a place I kept walking back to. The actual cheating was one night. The betrayal took months.”

Sienna watched his face while he spoke. Chester never seemed loose the way Brent did or reckless the way Myles and Jax did. He was held together so tightly you almost missed the strain lines.

“Did your wife forgive you?” she asked.

He smiled then, but there was no comfort in it. “That’s a word people like because it sounds neat.” He looked at the dark phone screen again. “She stayed. That’s not the same thing.”

The bus seemed to get smaller around that sentence.

“She knows where I am every night now,” he said. “Or she can if she wants. I send photos. I answer the phone. I don’t disappear. I don’t flirt because I’m bored. I don’t drink like I used to. And still” He lifted one shoulder. “Still there are days I can hear it in her voice. The thought she’s stupid for believing me again.”

Sienna swallowed.

Chester looked at her properly then. “I’m not tellin’ you this for sympathy either.”

“Then why?”

“Because men like Jax and Myles think damage only counts if blood comes out.” His eyes sharpened. “It doesn’t. Most of the worst things are quiet. They happen in kitchens months later. In the way somebody looks at your phone when it lights up. In the way your little girl asks if you’re comin’ home this time and means it.”

He let that sit.

Sienna had no answer big enough for it.

Chester exhaled through his nose. “Jax thinks because he mostly ruins himself, he isn’t doin’ the same kind of harm. That’s rubbish. He drags everyone into it. Staff. press. sponsors. us. You.” His expression softened a fraction. “And before you ask, yes, I know he’s not the only one. Myles gets a pass because he turns every ugly thing into a joke before anyone can pin it down. But I’m too old to be impressed by either of them now.”

The bunk curtain near the rear shifted once.

Just once.

Sienna noticed because she had got used to noticing where Jax was without meaning to.

If Chester noticed too, he didn’t show it.

He pushed his glasses up and reached for the phone. “You got people at home?”

“My mum,” Sienna said. “And a little sister who thinks everyone in music is either glamorous or dead.”

Chester gave a real laugh at that. “Smart girl.”

“She’s twelve. She’ll grow out of it.”

“No,” he said, standing. “If she’s lucky, she won’t.”

He moved off toward the tiny galley, and Brent appeared a few minutes later in a faded sleeveless top and socks that did not match. His hair stuck up in the back, and he had a bruised half-moon under one eye from sleeping against something hard.

He opened the cupboard above the little machine, looked in, and said, with deep offense, “Who finished the decent biscuits and left the sad ones?”

Sienna didn’t look up from her lists. “You live with thieves.”

“Animals,” Brent corrected.

He found a packet anyway, frowned at it, then took one and came to sit on the arm of the opposite bench.

“Are those the coconut ones?” she asked.

“Don’t insult me.”

He bit into one and immediately looked insulted anyway.

That made her smile despite herself.

Brent saw it and lifted the biscuit in accusation. “See, this is how it starts. A person lowers standards one tiny notch and next thing you know they’re accepting coconut.”

“Bit dramatic.”

“I tour with Jax Blackwood. Drama’s the house wine.”

He chewed, swallowed, then seemed to remember he had come to say something else. He tipped his head toward the back. “Chester talk your ear off?”

“A little.”

“He only does that when he means it.”

Sienna capped her pen. “So do you.”

Brent went still for a beat.

Then he sighed and slid down to sit properly across from her, elbows on knees. Out in the aisle, the bus lights made his skin look sallow. He was younger than Chester, older than Myles, with that particular bruised patience drummers sometimes had. the kind that came from holding everybody else to tempo while pretending you didn’t mind.

“I hate this bit of tour,” he said.

“Which bit?”

He laughed once, but there was no humor in it. “The bit where music becomes three percent of the job and the rest is babysitting men with money and habits.”

Sienna looked toward the curtained bunks.

Brent did too.

“Myles is a prick,” he said flatly. “Funny one, sometimes. Can be generous. Can also be cruel because he’s bored and wants to see if people will bleed for him. Jax—” He stopped, searching for it. “Jax is worse, because every room bends around him and he knows it.”

“Do you hate him?”

Brent thought about that properly.

“No.” He rubbed his thumb over the seam in his track pants. “Would be easier if I did.”

The bus swayed. Rain ticked once or twice against the window, then stopped.

“He was good to me once,” Brent said. “Early days. Before all this got so big. I was a mess over my dad dyin’, and Jax sat on a piss stinking club floor with me at three in the mornin’ and didn’t say a word till I could breathe again.” He shrugged like he regretted admitting it. “So no. I don’t hate him. I hate what happens around him. I hate that every decent thing gets swallowed by the circus if you let it.”

Sienna rested her forearms on the laminate box. “Why stay?”

Brent smiled tiredly. “Because when it’s good, there’s nothing like it. You know that already or you wouldn’t be here. And because I love the music, and because Chester’s one of my best mates, and because I keep thinking one of these years we’ll all grow up.”

“Will you?”

He barked a laugh. “I buy action figures at service stations. I’m doing my best.”

That got her.

His smile faded first. “But I’m tired, Sienna. Everyone keeps saying Jax is the problem because Jax is loud about it. Truth is the whole machine’s sick. Promoters want the bad-boy story right up till insurance calls. Press loves a collapse if they can shoot it in good light. Fans say they care, then ask for selfies when he can barely stand.” He tapped the table. “Then people like Jenna mop up after all of it and get called difficult for not smiling.”

As if summoned by name, Jenna came down from the front jump seat with a laptop under one arm and a headset around her neck.

She had her hair twisted up with a pen through it and no makeup left except a smudge of mascara under one eye. She looked like she’d been folded and unfolded too many times.

“What’s this?” she said. “Group therapy? Charge for it.”

Brent held up the coconut biscuit packet. “We’re discussing suffering.”

“Then you’ve chosen the right snack.”

She dropped into the seat beside Sienna without asking and stared at the closed laptop on her knees for a second too long.

Up close, Sienna could see the red web in the whites of her eyes.

“When did you last sleep?” Sienna asked.

Jenna snorted softly. “What day is it?”

“Tuesday.”

“Then Friday, probably.”

Brent reached over, stole a biscuit from his own packet, and handed it to her. “Medicinal.”

Jenna accepted it with grave respect. “Thank you, doctor.”

She bit into it, made a face, and still ate it.

That was somehow sadder than if she’d refused.

Sienna turned a little toward her. “You don’t have to do all of it alone.”

Jenna looked at her then, really looked, and some of the steel dropped away.

“Sweetheart,” she said, not unkindly, “I know that. The issue is nobody else can do the specific bits I’m doing when Jax and Myles set fire to a room and walk out whistling.”

Brent rubbed a hand over his mouth.

Jenna’s laugh was short and ugly. “Do you know how many hotel managers I’ve apologized to? How many venue security chiefs. How many girls crying in service corridors because one of those idiots said something at two in the morning and now everyone’s filming.” She shook her head. “Years of this. Years. I can book trucks, reroute freight, calm sponsors, fix visas, replace a missing snare head in twenty minutes. But mostly I clean up male ego with a radio clipped to my bra.”

Sienna’s mouth twitched despite the ache of it.

Jenna saw and pointed at her. “Exactly. It’s funny till it’s your life.”

She pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes. When she dropped them again, her voice had gone flatter.

“I’m tired of waiting for a headline saying one of them’s dead,” she said.

Nobody answered.

From the back of the bus came the metallic slide of a bunk curtain opening.

Not loud. Not dramatic.

Just enough.

Jenna closed her mouth.

Brent’s shoulders stiffened.

Sienna turned.

Jax stood half in the aisle, one hand braced high on the bunk frame. He wore black jeans low on his hips and an old grey T-shirt gone thin at the collar. His hair was flattened on one side from sleep. No sunglasses. No grin. Just that unreadable, washed-out look he got sometimes before he put the day on like armor.

He looked at Jenna first. Then Brent. Then Sienna.

“You all done?” he asked.

His voice came out rough with sleep and that southern drawl turned low enough to scrape.

Brent stood too fast. “Nobody said—”

Jax lifted one hand. Brent shut his mouth.

That was the part people never understood. Jax did not have to shout to run a room. Most of the time he barely had to move.

His gaze settled on Sienna and stayed there a beat too long.

Then he looked away first.

“Relax,” he said. “Ain’t nothin’ I ain’t heard before.”

He reached into the cupboard above the sink, found nothing useful, slammed it shut harder than needed, and went toward the tiny back lounge without another word.

The bus seemed to exhale after him, but not in relief.

Jenna muttered, “Brilliant.”

Brent sank back down. “He heard the worst part.”

“No,” Jenna said, voice tired again. “He heard the truest part.”

No one said much after that.

Chester came back with tea for himself and one for Jenna that she had not asked for. Myles eventually surfaced smelling of mint gum and bad intent, took in the mood, and for once decided not to poke it with a stick. Outside, the afternoon pulled itself thinner and greyer as they ate distance.

By the time they rolled into the hotel car park near dusk, the bus windows reflected their own faces back at them.

The hotel was one of those chain places off a dual carriageway with a fake fireplace in the lobby and carpets patterned to hide sins. Sienna helped unload rooming envelopes with Cal at reception, carried a crate of bottled water to the lift, then went looking for the missing folder Jenna swore she had left in the small conference room off the bar.

The room smelled of stale coffee and lemon polish. Stackable chairs lined one wall. Somebody had left a flip chart standing by the window with WELCOME CRIMSON TIDE in blue marker and a little guitar doodle under it.

The blue folder sat exactly where Jenna said it would, tucked under a tray of untouched shortbread.

Sienna picked it up.

The door clicked shut behind her.

She turned.

Jax leaned back against it, arms folded.

He had put himself back together a little since the bus. Hair pushed off his face. Chain at his throat. The same old dangerous ease arranged across his shoulders.

It did not quite reach his eyes.

“If you’re planning to accuse me of theft,” she said, “try the biscuits. They’ve had a harder day.”

One corner of his mouth moved like he almost might smile.

Almost.

“Always gotta come out swingin’, don’t you?”

“With you? Saves time.”

He watched her for a second in the yellow conference-room light. “You think I came in here for pity?”

“I think you came in here because you heard something you can’t charm away.”

That landed. She saw it.

He pushed off the door and came closer, slow, quiet, boots dull on the carpet. “Everybody on this tour’s got a speech about me now.”

“Maybe because you keep giving them material.”

His jaw shifted.

Any other day, he would have laughed. Thrown something sharper. Told her she was obsessed with him, uptight, jealous, boring. He would have found the easiest crack in the wall and widened it until the whole thing turned into a fight he could win.

He did none of that.

“What’d Chester say?” he asked.

There it was. Not rage. Not swagger.

Something barer.

Sienna tightened her hand on the folder. “You heard enough.”

“Maybe I wanna hear it from you.”

“Why?”

His eyes held hers. Blue gone dark in the low room. “Because you don’t dress truth up so it smells nice.”

That pulled her up short.

For a second she just looked at him.

Then she set the folder down on the table between them and answered the way he had asked.

“Fine,” she said. “Chester thinks you tell yourself you’re only hurting you, and that’s a lie. Brent thinks every decent thing in the room gets swallowed by whatever mess builds around you and Myles. Jenna is exhausted from waiting for the call where one of you doesn’t wake up.” She took a breath. “And I think you know all of that already.”

He went very still.

The fake fireplace hissed softly out in the lobby. Somewhere down the corridor a lift dinged.

Jax looked past her toward the rain-streaked window. “And what else do you think?”

Sienna hesitated only a beat.

“I think you use being the worst version of yourself so nobody can ask for the real one.”

He flinched.

Not much. Most people would have missed it.

She didn’t.

Heat rose under her ribs anyway, ugly and immediate, because hurting him did not feel like winning. It felt like pressing on a bruise just to prove it was there.

He dragged a hand over his mouth. “You got me all figured out then.”

“No.” Her voice softened despite herself. “I think if I had you figured out, I’d like you less.”

His laugh came out quiet and wrecked at the edges. He shook his head once.

“That’s a hell of a thing to say.”

“It’s true.”

He looked at her then, straight on, without the usual tilt or mockery. “You think there’s somethin’ real in me worth diggin’ for?”

She almost told him not to make her regret it.

Instead she said, “I think there was a reason you sat on that floor with Brent. I think there was a reason you helped Ellie breathe. I think there was a reason you poured that vodka away before stage.” She held his gaze. “And I think you’re scared of those reasons because they ask more from you than being the disaster does.”

He didn’t move.

Didn’t grin.

Didn’t sharpen.

Silence opened between them, and for once it was not a weapon.

When he finally spoke, his voice had dropped low enough she had to lean in to catch it.

“You ever get tired of seein’ right through people?”

“All the time.”

A real smile ghosted over his mouth then, brief as a struck match.

Gone just as fast.

He looked down at the table, at her hand beside the folder. At the little white scar over her wrist where powder and panic and a camera flash had left their mark nights ago.

“I heard Jenna,” he said.

Sienna said nothing.

He swallowed once. Hard enough she saw it.

“I know she ain’t wrong.”

That was it.

No flourish. No excuse. No joke dragged over the body of the thing.

Just that.

The room changed around it.

Sienna felt her own breath catch on the way in.

Jax lifted his eyes back to hers, and there was something frightening in the openness of them. Not because it was soft. Because it was so plainly unused.

“I don’t know how to stop once it starts,” he said.

The confession sat between them, small and terrible.

She believed him.

Not trusted him. Not forgave him. But believed him.

“Then stop before it starts,” she said quietly. “One hour earlier. One drink earlier. One lie earlier. Stop waiting till you’re already at the cliff and calling that fate.”

He let out a breath that almost sounded like pain.

“Christ,” he muttered, looking away. “You really don’t know how to be gentle, do you?”

“I can be gentle,” she said. “I just don’t think it’s what you need.”

He nodded once.

Not agreement exactly. More like recognition.

Then he reached for the folder, fingers brushing hers for half a second by accident or not. Warm skin. Rough knuckles. A jolt neither of them acknowledged.

At the door he paused.

Sienna expected a line then. Something crooked and easy to ruin the moment before it meant too much.

He kept his back to her.

“Don’t tell me you’re sorry for me,” he said.

“I’m not.”

Another pause.

“Good.”

He opened the door.

Then, without turning, he added, “But… don’t stop tellin’ me the truth either.”

And that, more than any apology he had never given, left her standing still in the ugly little conference room with her pulse kicking too hard and the first dangerous thought settling deep:

Maybe he had heard her.

Maybe, for once, he had not run.

The room still shook with the encore when Jenna caught Sienna by the elbow and shoved a stack of fresh laminates into her hand.

“Keep those on you. Sponsors in the blue lounge. Cal’s already bleeding out through his eyes. And if you see Jax, you keep him away from cameras for ten bloody minutes.”

Sienna barely heard the end of it.

The arena had the stunned, overheated feel that came after a huge show—steam rising off bodies, roadies shouting over rolled cable, bass still living inside the concrete like an aftershock. Sweat glued the back of her shirt to her spine. Confetti clung damp to the soles of her trainers and followed her down the corridor in silver scraps.

Out onstage, the crowd was still chanting the band’s name though the house lights had come up.

Biggest night of the tour so far, Cal had said three times already. Biggest crowd. Biggest press turnout. Biggest chance for one of the usual disasters to become permanent.

Sienna scanned the corridor outside the dressing rooms and didn’t see Jax.

She saw Chester toweling off the back of his neck, face flushed and tired. Brent sat on a road case with both sticks still tucked into one fist, staring at the floor like he’d left half his brain under the lights. Myles was laughing too loudly at something a local promoter had said, a drink already in his hand, shirt half open and sweat drying shiny on his chest.

No Jax.

That on its own meant nothing. Jax vanished all the time. Into toilets with girls. Into storage rooms with vodka. Into shadows five minutes before somebody important needed a clean photograph.

But tonight a cold little line went through her anyway.

She crossed to Chester first. “You seen him?”

Chester looked up, blinking himself back into the hallway. “Who?”

“Don’t be annoying. Jax.”

He wiped his mouth with the towel and shook his head. “He came offstage, threw his in-ears at nobody in particular, and kept walking.”

“Toward where?”

Chester gave a helpless lift of one shoulder. “Back here. Thought he was with you.”

That irritated her more than it should have.

“Why would he be with me?”

Chester’s mouth did something tired that was not quite a smile. “Because lately he goes where you point him.”

Before she could answer, Jenna barked from six feet away, “Has anyone got eyes on our problem child?”

“No,” Sienna said at once.

Jenna closed her eyes for one hard second. “Of course not.”

Cal came barreling around the corner with his headset hanging crooked and his suit jacket over one arm. He looked as if the show had taken years off him in under two hours.

“Upstairs is full of label people,” he said. “Tell me he’s not already in there starting something.”

“He’s not in the hall,” Jenna snapped. “Myles, put the fucking glass down and help me look.”

Myles took a swallow instead. “Maybe he found religion.”

“Nobody’s that lucky,” Brent muttered.

Sienna had already started walking.

She knew Jax’s patterns by now. Not because he was simple. Because he was repetitive in the way some damage was repetitive. When things got too loud, he peeled off. Not always toward pleasure. Sometimes toward nowhere. A narrow room. A dark corner. A place no one would check first because everyone assumed he’d be exactly where he always was—half naked, half cruel, fully committed to making trouble.

Tonight the backstage corridors were a maze of black drape, concrete, half-packed catering tables, and open cases with coils of cable spilling out like guts. Security let her through with one look at her laminate and the expression on her face.

She checked the nearest dressing room first.

Empty. Mirrors lit. A wet towel on the floor.

Then the side green room with the ugly brown sofa and abandoned fruit tray.

Empty.

A production office with three dead laptops and a smell of printer heat.

Empty.

She kept moving, faster now, the noise of the post-show crowd thinning as she got deeper into the service maze. The farther she went, the more the building changed. Less perfume, more dust. Less champagne, more hot metal and bleach. Somewhere a forklift beeped in reverse. Somewhere else somebody laughed, too far away to matter.

His name was already in her throat before she said it.

“Jax?”

Nothing.

She turned down the corridor that led toward old rehearsal lockups and overspill storage. The lights here were worse—long fluorescent strips that hummed and flickered and made everything look sick.

One of the doors at the end stood open three inches.

That was enough.

She pushed it wider.

“Jax, if you’re in here with a girl I swear to God—”

The rest died in her mouth.

He was on the floor beside a folding chair, one arm trapped under him at a bad angle, the other jerking against the concrete hard enough to slap the ground. His boots hammered once, twice. His whole body arched. A half-crushed plastic cup had rolled under the table near his head. White foam wet the corner of his mouth.

For one blank second her mind refused it.

Not drunk.

Not passed out.

Not playing.

His eyes were open and seeing nothing.

“Jax.”

She was already moving, dropping to her knees so hard pain shot up both shins. The room smelled sharp and wrong—sweat, stale vodka, something chemical under it. On the table she saw an uncapped bottle, a crumpled foil packet, a white smear on black laminate.

Her hands shook once, violently, then steadied because they had to.

“Jax. Jax, can you hear me?”

His jaw clenched. His body snapped again, a brutal full-body convulsion that scraped his shoulder against the concrete. She yanked the folding chair away so he wouldn’t hit it and grabbed a bundled hoodie from the floor to shove under his head as best she could. Not to hold him down. Don’t hold him down. Don’t put anything in his mouth. She knew that much. Her own breath had gone thin and fast.

“Help!” she screamed, voice tearing raw in the small room. “Help me! Somebody get in here now!”

No answer.

His movements started to change. The violence burned through itself. Jerks became tremors. Tremors became a terrible, loose stillness.

That was when fear turned clean and white inside her.

“Jax?”

She touched his shoulder. His skin was drenched and burning. His chest did not rise.

No.

No, no, no.

She rolled him as best she could, fighting the dead weight of him, getting him onto his back. His head lolled. His lips had gone strange around the edges, not yet blue, but wrong. His throat made one ugly wet sound and then nothing.

She put her ear near his mouth.

No breath.

Two fingers to the side of his neck.

Nothing she could trust. Nothing at all.

“Help!” she screamed again, louder, so hard spots burst across her vision. “Jenna! Cal! Somebody fucking help!”

Then she laced her hands and put them on his chest.

The first compression jarred all the way up her arms.

He was solid under her palms. Sweat-slick skin under an open black shirt, ribs and muscle and tattooed flesh, all the hard living architecture of him reduced to a place she had to push and push and push. She counted out loud because if she stopped counting she would hear too much.

“One, two, three, four—”

Her voice bounced off the walls.

His head rocked with the force of it. His hair stuck damp across his forehead. He looked younger flat on the floor. Not softer. Just stripped of performance. Nothing left between him and the room.

“Come on,” she gasped. “Come on, you asshole. Don’t you do this.”

Footsteps finally thundered in the corridor.

“What happened?” Jenna’s voice, too high.

“In here!”

Jenna came through the door first and stopped dead.

For one beat she simply stared.

Then the tour manager in her slammed back into place. She snatched her radio, shouting for medical, for security, for anyone with emergency clearance, while Sienna kept compressing.

“I need an ambulance backstage now,” Jenna barked. “Now. Male, unresponsive, post-seizure, not breathing—yes, arena level B storage corridor, room twelve. Move!”

Cal shoved in behind her and went white in a way Sienna had never seen on a grown man.

“Jesus Christ.”

“Don’t just stand there,” Jenna snapped. “Clear the hall.”

Cal jolted into motion, turning and roaring for space, for medics, for someone to find the venue defib. The neat manager voice was gone. This was animal noise in expensive shoes.

Sienna kept counting.

At twenty-eight she pinched Jax’s nose, tipped his head back, sealed her mouth over his, and breathed.

His lips were cold with sweat. His chest rose under the breath and fell again with no life in it. She gave another and went back to compressions.

Her hair had fallen forward across her face. She spat it away and kept going.

Myles appeared in the doorway then, Chester and Brent behind him, and all three of them changed expression at once when they saw the floor.

Myles took a step back like the room had hit him.

“No,” he said. Then louder, angrier, as if volume could undo it. “No, no, what the fuck—Jax!”

Chester caught him hard across the chest before he could lunge in and ruin her rhythm.

“Let her work.”

Brent had gone silent. Completely silent. His hands, those steady drummer’s hands, shook at his sides.

Sienna no longer knew what number she was on. Her arms burned. The heels of her palms felt bruised already. She found a rhythm in the panic and locked herself to it.

Push.

Push.

Push.

She heard Jenna in fragments—yes, now, side access open, send them through loading, tell them it’s Jax Blackwood if that gets their feet moving faster.

A wet cough snagged in Jax’s throat.

Hope burst so hard it hurt.

She stopped compressions for one second, listening.

Nothing. Just a trapped sound. No breath, no pulse under her fingers that stayed.

“Fuck,” she whispered, and started again.

Myles made a noise behind her that did not sound like anything human. Chester murmured something low to him that got lost in the blood rush in her ears.

Sienna bent and breathed for him again.

“Don’t you dare,” she said against his mouth, not caring who heard. “You don’t get to tell me to tell you the truth and then die in a storage room.”

The words broke halfway through. She swallowed them down and kept going.

At some point Brent dropped to one knee near Jax’s boots and said, voice hoarse, “Sienna. Switch with me if you need.”

“No.”

“You’re shaking.”

“I said no.”

He looked at her face and backed off at once.

The medics arrived in a burst of black uniforms, red bags, hard plastic cases. The defibrillator came in with them. So did more air, more command, more hands.

“Everybody back.”

Sienna moved only when one of them touched her shoulder and said, “We’ve got him.”

Her whole body rebelled against letting go. Then she fell back onto her heels, hands hanging useless in front of her, and watched strangers cut the rest of the world away from him.

One medic took over compressions. Another fitted airway equipment with quick, practiced movements. Pads went on his chest. Someone called out for a rhythm check.

The machine made its cold electronic noise.

No shock advised.

“Resume compressions.”

Jenna had one hand over her mouth. Cal stood with both hands braced on top of his head, staring like a man watching his house burn from the front garden. Myles was pacing in a tight, vicious line, swearing under his breath. Chester had his arm around Brent’s shoulder, though Sienna wasn’t sure which of them was holding the other up.

“Possible overdose?” one medic asked sharply.

Cal answered first, too slow. “I—”

Sienna cut in. “Vodka. Pills maybe. Coke earlier in the week, not tonight that I saw. He seized first.”

The medic nodded once and relayed it without comment.

They worked him there on the concrete while the fluorescent light buzzed overhead and somebody’s radio crackled nonsense from the hallway and the whole huge night of the arena carried on around this one square of floor as if it had not split open.

Sienna stared at Jax’s hand.

It lay palm-up beside his thigh, fingers curled inward, a fresh scrape over the knuckles. She had noticed those hands too often. Wrapped around vodka bottles. Fisted in his own hair. Pointing at crowds. Taking a microphone stand like it owed him something. Brushing hers in a conference room and making her hate the fact she’d felt it.

Now it was just a hand. Slack. Empty.

The medic at his chest changed out with another.

“Come on,” that one muttered under his breath as he compressed. “Come on, mate.”

The monitor changed tone.

Everyone in the room froze around it.

“Hold.”

A beat.

Then: “We’ve got electrical activity. Checking pulse.”

Nobody breathed.

The medic’s fingers pressed at Jax’s neck.

“There. Faint carotid. We’ve got a pulse.”

The air left the room all at once.

Jenna made a sound like she’d been punched. Cal dropped his head and swore into both hands. Brent sat down hard on the floor where he was. Chester closed his eyes. Myles turned away and slammed his fist into the cinderblock wall once, hard enough to bark skin off his knuckles, then stood there with his forehead against it.

Sienna did not move.

She wanted to cry. To throw up. To crawl across the floor and put both hands on Jax’s face and call him every foul name she knew. Instead she sat in the space she’d been left and watched the medics secure the little thread of life they had dragged back.

“He’s not conscious,” one of them said, not unkindly, because he must have read the room in a second. “We need to move now.”

They loaded Jax onto the stretcher with strapped efficiency. Oxygen. Monitoring leads. A line started in his arm. His head rolled once before they braced it. His face looked frighteningly blank under the arena lights.

Sienna got to her feet because the stretcher moving away from her felt impossible.

“I’m coming.”

Jenna grabbed her wrist, then let go when she saw the look on Sienna’s face. “Yes,” she said immediately. “Yes, you’re coming.”

Cal snapped back to life. “I’ll come too.”

“No,” Jenna said. “You stay and lock this down. No statements. No leaks. No one speaks till we know what the hell we’re saying.”

“I am not staying here while—”

“You are if you want there to still be a tour to come back to.”

He looked as if he might argue. Then he looked at Jax strapped to the stretcher, at the medic pushing past him toward the corridor, and something in him gave way.

“Call me from the ambulance,” he said to Jenna, voice scraped hollow. Then to Sienna, quieter: “Stay with him.”

As if she needed telling.

They moved fast through service corridors cleared by security. The stretcher wheels rattled over seams in the concrete. A side fire door opened, and night air slammed into them—cold, damp, smelling of diesel and rain on hot pavement.

Fans still clustered beyond the barriers farther out, some shouting when they saw movement, though none of them understood what they were seeing. To them it was just crew urgency, another hidden thing being whisked through the back. Not a heart that had stopped. Not the singer who had owned an arena an hour ago lying grey and still under a blanket with an oxygen mask fogging and clearing over his face.

The ambulance doors stood open under harsh white light.

Jenna climbed in first. Sienna followed without asking. One medic pointed her to the bench and she sat because her knees would not have kept her standing much longer.

The doors slammed.

Inside smelled of plastic, antiseptic, and the metallic edge of emergency. The vehicle lurched. The siren rose.

Jax did not wake.

A medic worked over him, checking numbers, adjusting flow, watching the monitor as if he could force the line to behave by glare alone. Another asked Jenna questions—name, age, known conditions, substances, next of kin—and Jenna answered with clipped precision until she hit the last one and stopped.

Silence cracked there.

“No partner,” she said. “No parent we call first. Use me.”

Sienna looked at Jax then.

Without stage lights, without his mouth doing damage, without the swagger and the heat and the smirk, he looked devastatingly mortal. Sweat still shone at his hairline. There was a tiny white crust at one corner of his mouth that a medic wiped away with gauze. His lashes lay dark against skin gone too pale. A bruise was already showing where compressions had done what they had to do.

Jenna sat opposite with both hands clenched between her knees so hard the knuckles had blanched.

Sienna looked down at her own hands.

They trembled now that they were no longer useful. The heels of her palms were reddened. There was a smear across one wrist—dirt, sweat, maybe him. She could still feel the shape of his chest beneath her, the resistance of bone, the awful absence after each breath.

The ambulance hit a turn. Jax’s stretcher shifted a fraction and the straps held him fast.

Sienna leaned forward before she could stop herself and touched the edge of the blanket near his arm. Not skin. Just fabric. Just enough.

“Don’t you quit now,” she said, so softly only she could hear it. “You don’t get to.”

The monitor kept sounding its thin, stubborn proof.

Not safe.

Not okay.

But there.

And for that night, for that terrible ride through the city with the siren opening traffic ahead of them and the biggest show of the tour shrinking behind, there was only that one answer.

Jax Blackwood had not died on the concrete floor.

Not yet.

The first time Sienna saw daylight again, it was through the hospital waiting room windows with the color leached out of it.

Morning had come and gone twice since the ambulance. She knew that because the vending machine sandwiches had changed, because Jenna had slept in the chair for exactly forty minutes on the first night and not at all on the second, and because Cal had started wearing the same shirt two days in a row without seeming to notice. Time in a hospital did not move right. It sagged. It hummed. It smelled of hand sanitizer, overbrewed coffee, and something faintly scorched from the canteen downstairs.

Jax had not opened his eyes.

They had shaved small patches of his chest. There were bruises under his skin from the CPR, ugly yellow-blue marks blooming over ribs she had pressed with both hands while begging him not to leave. A monitor watched him with stubborn green lines. Machines breathed their own patient rhythm around him. Tubes. Tape. A pulse oximeter clipped to his finger. None of it looked like the man who had sneered at her over coffee or leaned into a microphone like he wanted to set the whole room on fire.

He looked too still to be Jax.

Sienna sat in the hard chair by the bed with one leg tucked under her and a paper cup of bad tea cooling in her hand. A nurse had come in at six to do observations and smiled at her with the weary kindness hospital staff seemed to keep ready in one pocket.

“You should go home for a shower,” the nurse had said.

Sienna had looked at Jax instead. “I’m fine.”

That had been a lie since room twelve.

Jenna came in just after eight carrying two coffees and a folder thick enough to mean trouble. Her hair was scraped back badly, not in the neat severe way she did for venues, but like she’d twisted it up using only irritation. She handed Sienna a cup and dropped into the chair by the window with a groan that sounded older than her face.

“Cal’s downstairs trying to kill a reporter with politeness,” she said.

Sienna took the coffee and wrapped both hands around it. “How bad?”

“Bad enough that sponsors are ‘concerned.’” Jenna made finger quotes with no amusement in them. “Bad enough that one idiot online has already posted that Jax overdosed in a toilet with three girls and a knife.”

Sienna shut her eyes for a second. “People are disgusting.”

“People pay for the lights, darling. That’s the problem.”

Jenna opened the folder. Insurance paperwork. Tour suspension forms. A typed sheet with hospital contact details clipped to the front. Her thumb rested on the page without turning it.

“They’re suspending the next run of dates,” she said. “At least for now.”

Sienna looked at her. “And the band?”

“Chester went home for two days to see his kids. Brent’s holed up in his hotel room pretending he isn’t worried sick. Myles is being an unbearable prick because he is scared and doesn’t know how to be anything else.”

That tracked so perfectly Sienna almost laughed, but the room was too full of machines for it.

Jenna looked past her to Jax. Her face changed there. Softer. Tired in a different place.

“The doctors think he’ll wake,” she said quietly. “They just don’t know when, he's in a really bad way.”

Sienna stared at Jax’s hand lying palm-down on the blanket. Strong fingers. Ink disappearing under hospital tape. No rings. No watch. No one’s touch worn into him.

“He shouldn’t wake up alone,” she said.

Jenna’s eyes moved back to her. “No.”

It sat between them for a moment, plain and heavy.

Then Jenna leaned forward, elbows on knees. “I need to ask you something, and I need you not to answer fast just because you’re knackered.”

Sienna said nothing.

“If they discharge him to home recovery, and they likely will, once they’re happy he can be supervised, I need someone there who won’t turn his house into another party, won’t sell a photo, won’t panic, and won’t let him talk his way out of basic care the second he can string a sentence together.”

A bitter little smile pulled at Sienna’s mouth. “So not Myles.”

“Christ, no.”

Jenna’s gaze held hers. “I want you to go with him.”

Sienna looked down at the coffee lid. There was a brown ripple staining the sip hole. Her own face in this decision felt very far away.

“You trust me that much?”

“I trust you more than anyone near him right now.” Jenna sat back. “And before you ask, yes, I know how mad that sounds. You’ve known him five minutes and most of that time you’ve wanted to throttle him.”

“I still do.”

“Good. Means you’re less likely to baby him.”

Sienna let out a breath through her nose. “Why me, really?”

Jenna glanced at the bed. “Because he’s got houses and money and people who know his name, but he hasn’t got anyone I’d leave him with.” She paused. “And because when his heart stopped, you didn’t freeze, you saved his life.”

The words landed hard. Sienna felt again the brutal give of his sternum under her palms. Heard the count in her own voice, gone ragged. Saw the pale waxy color of his mouth before the medics pushed in.

“You make it sound simple,” she said.

“It isn’t.” Jenna rubbed one hand over her face. “I’m asking because I can’t be there full-time. Cal can’t either. There will be statements and doctors and lawyers and all the boring parts of disaster. Someone has to keep the room steady.”

Sienna looked at Jax.

She had known him awake as a menace, a flirt with destruction, a man who weaponized charm and cruelty depending on what got him through the hour. She had known him collapsed on concrete with foam at his mouth from fitting and no breath in him. There should have been a clean line between those versions. There was not. That was the problem.

“How long?” she asked.

“Days. Maybe a week or two at home, depending on what recovery looks like.”

Sienna should have said no. Any sane woman with a suitcase and a little self-respect would have gone back to California, found some normal job with normal people who did not nearly die between load-in and encore.

Instead she said, “If he wakes scared, he shouldn’t be alone.”

Jenna nodded once, like she had expected that exact answer and hated herself for counting on it.

On the fourth day, Jax opened his eyes for less than a minute and scared everyone by trying to pull at the oxygen line.

Sienna was there alone with him. Jenna had gone to call Cal. A doctor had just left. Rain made a soft ticking sound against the window. She had been reading text messages from her mother and not really seeing them when the bed shifted.

At first it was small. A twitch in his arm. Then his lashes lifted and there he was all at once, blurred, disoriented, and furious at the world for existing.

“Hey,” she said, too fast, standing so abruptly the chair legs scraped. “Don’t don’t pull anything.”

His hand was already clumsy at the tubing. She caught his wrist.

His gaze tried to focus on her face. Failed. Tried again. His lips moved under dry skin.

“What,” he rasped, voice shredded to threads, “the hell.”

The southern drag was still there under the damage. It hit her in the chest so hard it nearly hurt.

“You’re in hospital,” she said. “You had a seizure caused by a overdose. You scared about twelve years off my life, so maybe don’t start with the attitude.”

His brows pulled together. For one strange second he just looked at her, blank and lost, all the swagger stripped clean off him. Then he shut his eyes again as if even that much was too much.

A nurse came in. Then a doctor. Then Jenna. Jax surfaced and sank all afternoon, never awake long enough to take in more than fragments. By evening he knew his own name, knew he was in hospital, knew enough to grimace when they explained he had been unconscious for days.

He did not ask for family.

He did not have any to ask for.

By the time discharge was discussed, a private cardiac nurse had been arranged for daily checks, strict instructions had been printed, and Cal had managed to get the press fed a cleaned-up version involving “a serious medical event” and “the band’s full focus on recovery.” The tour was on pause. The machine had not stopped, exactly, but it had stalled and smoked by the roadside.

Jax listened to the doctor with his jaw set and his face pale under the stubble. Every now and then his fingers twitched against the blanket, as if his body still had some private current running through it.

“No alcohol,” the doctor said.

Jax gave him a look that might have passed for agreement if you were charitable and stupid.

“No stimulants. No unapproved medication. No driving until cleared. Limited stairs if you feel dizzy. Someone with you at all times for the first stretch.”

“Jesus,” Jax muttered.

The doctor did not blink. “You’re lucky to be alive. You can say thank you by following instructions.”

When they were alone again, Jax looked toward the window and said, “You enjoyin’ this?”

Sienna was standing by the armchair folding his discharge papers into the least chaotic pile she could make from them. “What, laminated proof that a doctor thinks you’re an idiot?”

“The part where I can’t scratch my own arse without supervision.”

She glanced at him. He looked weak enough to be cruel and embarrassed enough to hate it. A dangerous mix. Familiar now.

“No,” she said. “I’m not enjoying any of it.”

His eyes came back to her. Tired blue, bloodshot around the edges. “Then why are you still here?”

That question had more weight than the words deserved. Maybe because she had been asking herself the same thing every hour.

She set the papers down. “Because I was there. I found you”

His mouth shifted. “That doesn’t answer it.”

“It does for me.”

He held her gaze a second longer, then looked away first.

The house sat above the cliffs like it had been placed there by someone rich and lonely.

Cal drove them from the hospital in a dark SUV that smelled faintly of leather polish and old mints. Jax slept most of the way in the back seat, head turned toward the window, one hand loose over his stomach. The city thinned. Buildings gave way to scrub, long roads, ocean flashing steel-grey in the distance whenever the land dipped. By the time the gate opened, the afternoon had gone washed-out and windy.

The drive curled up through low stone walls and salt-bleached grasses. The house appeared all at once: white render, too much glass, black railings, clean expensive lines trying hard not to admit they were cold. It looked like a magazine spread for people who wanted to believe money could count as peace.

Sienna got out and tasted salt on the air immediately. The sea below battered the rocks with a hollow, steady thunder. Gulls wheeled and complained overhead.

“Well,” Cal said, staring up at it, “at least if he tries to bolt he’ll need better ankles than he currently has.”

Jenna shot him a look. “Not now.”

“Sorry.”

He did sound sorry.

Inside, the place was immaculate in the way rarely lived-in places are immaculate. Pale stone floors. A kitchen with no clutter. A sitting room arranged around views instead of comfort. Floor-to-ceiling windows framing the ocean like it was another expensive object he’d bought and forgotten to touch. There were signs of Jax, but only in flashes. A leather jacket slung over the back of one dining chair. Ashtrays on the terrace with rainwater in them. A guitar on a stand in the corner, one string broken. Three unopened parcels by the entry hall. A bowl that should have held keys and instead held nothing.

No photos.

No family snapshots shoved into frames. No childhood. No woman smiling from a mantel. No life that had roots in it.

Sienna stood in the center of the sitting room with Jax’s overnight bag in one hand and understood, with a clean unpleasant certainty, how a person could disappear inside a house this size.

Jax made it ten steps in before he had to stop and brace a hand against the wall.

Cal moved forward. “Easy.”

“Don’t,” Jax snapped weakly.

The fact that he nearly swayed while saying it ruined the effect.

Jenna took over with brisk authority. “Bedroom. Water. Tablets on schedule. Nurse at nine tomorrow. He is not to be left to play martyr and pretend he feels fine.”

“I can hear you,” Jax said.

“That’s a relief. There was some doubt.”

For the first time in days, Sienna saw the edge of a real smile threaten at his mouth. It vanished almost at once, but she caught it.

His bedroom was upstairs, of course, because men like Jax always believed stairs were decorative until they nearly died. It took them too long to get him there. He hated every step. Hated Cal’s hand hovering near his elbow. Hated his own breath turning shallow by the landing. By the time he sat on the bed, color had left his face again.

The room was enormous and bare in the wrong places. Huge bed. Expensive linens. A wall of windows toward the sea. Built-in shelves with records and books stacked without order, half of them still in plastic wrap. On the bedside table sat a glass ashtray, a dead lighter, and a prescription bottle from months ago.

No one had been taking care of him here. Not really.

Jenna noticed it too. She picked up the bottle, looked at the date, and swore under her breath.

Cal did a fast tour of the house with the nurse’s instructions in hand, muttering to himself about locking up alcohol, medications, and “anything else stupid.” That turned out to be more work than it should have been. He came back twenty minutes later with a crate from the kitchen and another from Jax’s study.

“Found vodka in the freezer, vodka behind the books, vodka in a tennis bag, and I don’t even want to discuss the bathroom cabinet.”

Jax lay back against the pillows, eyes shut. “You people are very judgmental houseguests.”

“Nearly dying makes others bossy,” Sienna said.

His eyes opened. “You always this cheerful?”

“Only around you.”

Jenna exhaled, tired but relieved by the bickering because bickering meant he was here to do it.

By dusk, Cal had gone. Jenna stayed long enough to meet the private nurse who would return in the morning and to hand Sienna a neat stack of instructions, numbers, and passwords she had no business being trusted with.

“If he gets chest pain, shortness of breath, collapses, seizes again, or acts confused, you call emergency first and me second,” Jenna said.

“Got it.”

“If he tells you he’s fine, assume he’s lying.”

“Already learned that one.”

Jenna hesitated near the bedroom door. Her eyes went to Jax, who had drifted into a thin, uneasy sleep. Then to Sienna.

“You can still say no,” she said quietly. “Even now.”

Sienna glanced around the room. At the dead lighter. The broken-string guitar. The white sheets under a body too thin with exhaustion. At the sea beyond the glass, huge and indifferent.

“No,” she said.

Jenna studied her for a beat, then nodded and left.

The house changed when everyone else was gone.

It got bigger. Quieter. The expensive surfaces stopped performing and just became empty. The heating ticked somewhere in the walls. Wind worried at the glass. The ocean kept hitting the cliffs below like it had a grudge.

Sienna went downstairs and made tea in a kitchen that had six kinds of olive oil and no decent bread. She found mugs in the wrong cupboard, a pan scorched and left in the sink, takeaway menus stuffed in a drawer with unopened bills. Fame had bought him a beautiful shell. It had not taught him how to live inside it.

She carried a mug back upstairs for herself and a glass of water for him. He was awake when she came in, lying on his side now, staring out toward the darkening sea.

“You move quiet,” he said.

“You’re meant to be resting.”

“That what this is?” His voice was rough with sleep and pain. “Feels more like supervised humiliation.”

She set the water on the bedside table. “You nearly died. You don’t get sexy phrasing for it.”

A breath that might have been a laugh left him. He winced right after, hand coming to his ribs.

“Don’t do that,” she said immediately.

“What, laugh?”

“Yes. It clearly doesn’t suit you.”

His eyes slid to her. Even exhausted, even wrecked, there was still that dangerous awareness in them. Smaller now. Dimmed. But there.

“You stayed,” he said.

She sat in the armchair by the window, tea warming her palms. “Apparently I’m an idiot.”

“Yeah,” he murmured. “That tracks.”

They were quiet after that. Not comfortably. Not yet. But the silence no longer had teeth in it.

After a while he said, “I don’t remember all of it.”

“The collapse?”

He nodded once.

“Maybe that’s a mercy.”

He stared at the ceiling. “I remember your voice.”

The tea stopped halfway to her mouth.

“What part?”

His throat worked. “Countin’.” He swallowed. “Bossin’ me around.”

Despite everything, a thin smile tugged at her mouth. “Someone had to.”

He turned his head on the pillow and looked at her properly then, without smirk or challenge to hide behind. Weakness had made him honest in flashes. It was almost worse than the swagger.

“Why’d you?” he asked. “You could’ve let the medics do their job. Could’ve run for help and left it there.”

Sienna set the mug down on the floor beside her chair before she dropped it.

“Because you weren’t breathing.”

His eyes stayed on hers.

“That’s it?”

She thought of the hospital nights. Of his empty house. Of Jenna saying no partner, no parent we call first. Of the way saving someone rearranged the room inside you whether you wanted it to or not.

“No,” she said at last. “That’s not all of it.”

He waited.

She could hear the sea below, the heavy pulse of it against stone.

“I stayed because once you’ve had your hands on someone’s chest trying to force their heart back into the world, you don’t get to pretend they mean nothing to you after.”

The words hung there, too true and too bare.

Jax did not speak for a long moment. The wind pushed at the windows. Somewhere downstairs the fridge motor kicked on with a low hum and shut off again.

When he finally answered, his voice had gone quieter than she had ever heard it.

“Sienna.”

Just her name. No joke. No edge. No performance.

It did something unhelpful to her ribs.

“You should sleep,” she said, because she was suddenly afraid of what came after that tone.

His gaze stayed on her another second, then fell. “You takin’ the chair?”

“For now.”

“There’s a whole house.”

“And if you stop breathing again?”

A faint line appeared between his brows. “I’m not plannin’ to.”

“That wasn’t my question.”

Something shifted in his face then. Not irritation. Not quite shame. Something tired and rawer than both.

“Stay,” he said.

It was not seductive. It was not clever. It sounded like a man who had woken up in the wreckage of himself and found one person still standing there.

So she did.

She left the lamp on low and curled in the armchair with a throw from the end of his bed. The room smelled faintly of clean laundry, stale smoke trapped in old fabric, and the medicinal sharpness that still clung to him from the hospital. Every so often he moved in his sleep with a pained little breath that made her lift her head and check the rise and fall of his chest.

Outside, the sea kept throwing itself at the cliffs.

Jax had tried to get out the bed to go to the bathroom, but winced as he moved. Sienna instantly woke.

"whats up" she asked worried

"I need to pee"

"you can use the bottle"

"Fuck that, I'm going to the bathroom"

"ok I'll help you"

"you ain't helping me to pee" he said mortified.

"No you idiot I'll help you get to the bathroom" she said smiling.

Jax struggled to even get out the bed let alone walk unaided. They did get there and on the return Jax felt giddy and Sienna thought he was going to pass out. Luckily they made it to the bed. Where Jax got comftable, Sienna stayed in the chair. She looked over at him. Jax slept. Lived. Breathed.

Sienna watched him in the half-light and knew with a kind of weary clarity that walking away would have been simpler before room twelve, before the ambulance, before this house with all its silence.

Now it was too late for simple.

Saving him had tied a knot neither of them knew how to undo.

And somewhere beneath the fear, beneath the anger, beneath every reason she should have gone, she knew she did not want to.

The first thing Jax did when he woke properly was try to get out of bed and swear at the light.

It was barely dawn. The room had that thin grey wash that made everything look colder than it was. Sienna jerked awake in the armchair with the throw twisted round her legs and her neck screaming at her. For half a second she didn’t know where she was. Then she saw him, half-upright against the pillows, breathing too fast, one hand fumbling at the blanket as if he meant to stand.

“Don’t,” she said, already on her feet.

His head snapped toward her.

He looked wrong in a way she still had not got used to. No stage paint, no smirk, no mean glitter in his eyes. His face was pale under the scruff on his jaw. There were shadows under his eyes like bruises. The muscles in his chest and arms were still there, but illness had taken the edge off him. He looked less like a frontman and more like a man who had lost a fight in private.

“Where” His voice cracked. He swallowed and tried again. “What day is it?”

“Saturday.”

He stared at her, trying to place that. She could see him reaching for memory and not liking what he found.

“The house,” he muttered.

“Yes.”

His gaze dropped to the wire trailing from the monitor the nurse had put on. To the tape mark still left on his hand. To the pill organizer the nurse had set on the dresser. Shame moved across his face so fast it was almost a flinch.

“Jesus.”

“Good morning to you too.”

He let out one rough breath that wasn’t quite a laugh and dragged a hand over his face. Then the panic hit him properly. Sienna watched it happen. His pupils widened. His shoulders tightened. His breathing turned shallow and fast.

“No,” he said under his breath. “No, no, no.”

She crossed to the bed. “Jax.”

“Don’t.” He shoved at the blanket. “I need to get up.”

“You need to breathe.”

“I need a drink.”

The words came out before he could stop them. They hung there between them, ugly and bare.

Sienna held his eyes. “No.”

His jaw worked. “Sienna.”

“No.”

He looked at the window then, at the pale line of sea beyond it, as if there might be an escape route there. His hand shook against the sheets. Not badly now. Enough.

“Can’t” He swallowed hard. “I can’t do this.”

“Yes, you can.”

“You say that like you know.”

“I know you’re still here.”

That made him look back at her.

She kept her voice level. “Put your feet on the floor if you want. I’ll help. But you are not bolting down the stairs, and you are not finding whatever bottle Cal missed, and you are not pretending this is a hangover.”

His mouth flattened.

God, he hated being handled. She could see it in every line of him. The humiliation of it. The rage. The helplessness under both.

“Don’t look at me like that,” he said.

“Like what?”

“Like I’m breakable.”

Sienna reached for the glass on his bedside table and put it in his hand. “You are breakable.”

His fingers tightened round the water. “That’s not better.”

“It’s not meant to be.”

He drank because arguing took more energy than he had. Half the water went down too fast and he coughed, wincing at the pain in his ribs. Sienna steadied the glass before he dropped it.

“Slow down.”

“I hate you.”

“You’ve said that before.”

“Mean it more now.”

“Good. Means you’re feeling stronger.”

He gave her a look that would have had more bite in it a month ago. Now it just made him seem exhausted.

She waited until his breathing eased. Then she crouched in front of him and looked up.

“Feet on the floor,” she said. “Come on.”

He obeyed with visible resentment.

The first minute out of bed nearly flattened him. He sat on the edge of the mattress with both feet planted on the rug and his head hanging, chest rising too fast again. His hair fell into his face. The old version of him would have turned this into a joke or snapped something filthy to make the weakness less obvious. This one just looked stricken.

Sienna rested a hand at the back of his shoulder. Heat under skin. Tension packed hard as wire.

“You’re all right.”

“I’m really not.”

“No. But you’re not dying this second.”

He closed his eyes. “You got a real gift for comfort.”

“I save my soft skills for people who deserve them.”

A faint, wrecked huff left him.

She helped him to the bathroom slowly, one hand under his arm despite the way his pride twitched at it. The house was quiet except for the low hiss of the sea beyond the glass and the old pipes clicking awake. He moved like a man learning his own body again. By the sink he braced both hands on the marble and stared at himself in the mirror.

Sienna almost looked away. The shame on his face was too naked.

There were yellowing bruises on his chest from CPR. The sight of them still hit her low and hard. Proof, in ugly color, of what her hands had done. Of how close he had come to staying gone.

He touched one mark with careful fingers.

“That from you?”

“Yes.”

He nodded once. Didn’t make a joke. Didn’t make her carry the weight of it alone either.

“Hurts like hell.”

“You’re welcome.”

His eyes met hers in the mirror. “Guess I had it comin’.”

She folded her arms. “That isn’t an apology.”

“I know.”

He looked away first.

The nurse came at eight, brisk and unsentimental, with blood pressure cuffs and pill timings and a voice that tolerated no nonsense from former rock gods. Jax barely spoke while she checked him over. He sat in a dining chair in a clean T-shirt and lounge trousers Cal had bought from some expensive place that made even recovery clothes look polished. His hair was damp from the shower. His face was drawn with fatigue.

Sienna made toast he didn’t want and weak tea he drank anyway.

Withdrawal made him ugly by midday.

Not mean. Not yet. Just raw. He couldn’t settle. Sweat gathered at the back of his neck even though the house was cool. His hands wouldn’t stop moving. He picked at the seam of the sofa cushion, at the label on the blanket, at his own thumbnail until she slapped his hand away from his mouth.

“Stop.”

He glared at her.

She glared back.

He dropped his hand and stared at the cliffs through the long sitting-room windows. The sea below looked iron-grey, the waves white where they crashed against the rock. The house was too clean for this sort of misery. Too much glass. Too much quiet. It made every ragged breath and restless shift feel louder.

“I used to think this place was impressive,” Sienna said.

He blinked. “Used to?”

“Now it just feels lonely.”

Something changed in his face. Small. But there.

“Bought it because someone told me I should,” he said.

“Who?”

“Accountant. Maybe a label guy. Don’t remember.” He rubbed his hand over his mouth. “Thought if I had the house, and the cars, and the bloody view, it’d feel like I’d got somewhere.”

“And?”

He looked around the giant room with its cream sofas and perfect stone and blank walls. “Turns out you can spend a lot of money and still come home to nothin’.”

She said nothing to that.

People loved to make stories about men like Jax. Wild boy. Bad habit. women in every city. Headlines loved a man already halfway set on fire. They never printed this part. The empty kitchen with expensive appliances no one had really cooked on. The dressing room bouquets sent by promoters and left to die in hotel bins. The silence after the crowd. The fact that no one’s photo sat in a frame in this whole damned house.

He shifted and winced.

“Pain?” she asked.

“Pride.”

A food delivery had arrived early morning while Jax was still sleeping.

“That can wait till after lunch.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“I didn’t ask.”

He looked at her then, with the first spark of old irritation she’d seen all day. It almost relieved her.

“Bossy.”

“Alive enough to complain, then.”

He ate half a sandwich because she sat there and watched him do it.

By afternoon he was shaking harder.

The nurse had warned them. Restless system. Rebound anxiety. Cravings. Mood swings. Watch him. Keep him hydrated. Keep him from turning one bad hour into a catastrophe.

Easy instructions. Hard man.

She found him in the hallway outside the study, one hand flat against the wall, breathing like he’d run a race.

“What is it?”

His laugh came out thin and wrong. “Nothin’. Just my body rememberin’ every stupid thing I’ve put in it, I reckon.”

He pushed off the wall, took one step, and had to stop again.

Sienna came close without crowding him. “Sit down.”

“No.”

“Jax.”

He turned his face away from her. “Don’t wanna do this in front of you.”

“In front of me,” she said, “you’ve been drunk, high, cruel, bleeding, half naked, and clinically dead. I think we’re past modesty.”

That got his eyes back on her.

For one second he looked offended. Then he looked appalled, because he knew she was right.

“Jesus,” he muttered again.

“Sit.”

This time he did.

There was a bench under the long hallway window. He sat on it with his elbows on his knees and his head bent. His breath sawed in and out. Sienna crouched in front of him the same way she had in the bedroom.

“Look at me.”

He didn’t.

“Jax.”

He forced his gaze up.

“That’s it,” she said. “Stay with me.”

His throat worked.

“You’re panicking,” she said. “That’s all. Not dying. Not having another seizure. Panic.”

“How d’you know?”

“Because if you were dying, I’d already be yelling.”

His mouth twitched despite himself.

“In through your nose,” she said. “Slow.”

He tried. Failed. Swore.

“Again.”

He obeyed because there was nothing else to do.

She counted for him, quieter than she had in that storage room, but with the same steady beat. In for four. Hold. Out slow. Again. Again.

After a minute his shoulders dropped an inch.

After three, he leaned his head back against the wall and closed his eyes.

“Christ,” he whispered.

Sienna sat beside him on the bench. Their shoulders nearly touched.

“That bad?”

“Feels like my skin’s on wrong.”

She watched the sea beyond the glass. “It’ll pass.”

“You got a lot of faith for someone who thinks I’m an ass.”

“I know you’re an ass. That’s separate.”

He let out a breath. “Fair.”

Silence settled between them. Not easy, exactly. But not sharp either.

Then he said, very low, “I didn’t think anybody would be first.”

She turned her head. “First what?”

“First thing I saw when I woke up.” He stared at his own hands. “Didn’t think there’d be anyone there.”

The plainness of it hurt more than if he’d tried to dress it up.

“What about family?”

He gave a hollow little smile. “Dad’s gone. Mum and me…” He shrugged once, a movement full of old damage. “We talk in Christmas texts and awkward birthdays. She's a recovering addict and I made myself hard to love on purpose for so long I got good at it. Now I'm just like her”

Sienna looked at him properly then.

“Why?”

His jaw tightened. For a second she thought he’d shut down. Then the answer came.

“Because if they only wanted Jax Blackwood, that was easier.” He looked out at the water. “The loud one. The reckless one. The one who’d snort anything and laugh and sing and take his shirt off and make the room feel dangerous. Folks love that bastard. He’s easy to sell.” He swallowed. “If they left him, well. Fine. He ain’t real anyway.”

Sienna felt something in her chest draw taut.

“And the real one?” she asked.

He gave a small, joyless shrug. “Ain’t figured he was worth much.”

She wanted to say something kind. Something clean and useful that would put a bandage over all that. But there are some wounds that hate tidy words.

So she said the truest thing she had.

“You don’t get to decide your own worth by how useful you’ve been to strangers.”

He looked at her like no one had ever put it to him that way.

Maybe no one had.

Late that evening, after he dozed through sunset and woke less frantic, he asked for his phone.

Sienna stood by the dresser with it in her hand and narrowed her eyes. “To do what?”

“Not call a dealer, if that’s what your face is sayin’.”

“It was absolutely what my face was saying.”

He managed the ghost of a grin. It vanished fast. “I need to ring people.”

She still hesitated.

“You can sit there and supervise me like I’m twelve,” he said. “Seems to be your dream.”

“It’s nowhere near specific enough to be my dream.”

But she handed it over.

He stared at the screen a long moment before unlocking it. His thumb hovered over his contacts. Then he chose Jenna.

Sienna could hear Jenna answer on the second ring, sharp and tired even through the tiny speaker. Jax put it on voice because his hand was shaking too badly to hold it steady at his ear.

“What?” Jenna said. “Is he breathing?”

“I’m breathin’,” Jax said.

There was a beat of silence.

Then Jenna swore, once and hard. “Well. Nice of you to join us.”

He looked at the blanket over his legs. “Yeah.”

Sienna watched his throat move.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

No excuses. No wheedling tone. No drunk charm.

Just that.

“For what?” Jenna asked, and there was no softness in it.

He took the hit. “For all of it. For makin’ your job a mess. For the lies. For the running. For every time you had to clean up after me. For scarin’ you.”

Jenna didn’t speak for a second.

When she did, her voice had changed just enough for Sienna to hear it. “You did scare me.”

“I know.”

“You nearly made me tell a room full of suits our singer had died"

“I know.”

“And if you think one apology fixes years of this, you’re stupider than you look.”

A weak breath that might have been agreement left him. “Prob’ly am.”

Jenna sighed. “Rest. Take the meds. Don’t make Sienna murder you. We’ll talk when you can stand upright for more than ten minutes.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She hung up before he could say anything else.

He stared at the phone screen after the call ended, as if surprised he’d got through it.

“Who next?” Sienna asked quietly.

He grimaced. “Do I have to?”

“If this is real, yes.”

That cost him something. She could tell.

He called Chester next.

That one was worse in a different way. Chester answered from what sounded like a supermarket, trolley wheels rattling faintly in the background, one of his kids asking for something sugary and being told no. Ordinary life, right there in Jax’s ear. A thing Jax had never known how to hold.

“Hello?” Chester said. Then, sharply, “Jax?”

“Hey, Chest.”

“You all right?”

Jax gave a short laugh. “No.”

Chester went quiet.

“I’m sorry,” Jax said. “For makin’ you carry my crap. For the nights your wife had to hear about me in the news. For every time I made the band feel like somethin’ dirty instead of somethin’ good.”

The trolley noise stopped.

“Jax,” Chester said, very carefully, “are you saying this because you’re scared?”

“Yes.”

The honesty of it made Sienna look at him.

“And because I mean it,” he added. “Both can be true, can’t they?”

Chester let out a long breath. “Yeah. They can.”

When that call ended, Jax looked wrung out. But he still rang Brent, who answered with a suspicious, “If this is a ghost I’m hanging up.”

Jax actually smiled then. Small and tired, but real.

“Sorry, mate,” he said. “For draggin’ you through hell and callin’ it a tour.”

Brent’s joke faltered. “Bloody hell. You sound sincere. I hate that.”

“Get used to disappointment.”

“Not likely.”

They talked for less than two minutes, Brent covering concern with sarcasm the way he always did, but by the end his voice had gone thick around the edges.

Jax did not call Myles.

Sienna noticed. She didn’t press.

When he set the phone down at last, his hands were trembling again from effort, and there was sweat beading at his hairline. But something in him had loosened. Not fixed. Never that fast. Just less hidden.

“Happy?” he muttered.

“No.”

He blinked. “No?”

“I’m not happy you nearly died,” she said. “I’m relieved you finally stopped lying for five minutes.”

He leaned back into the pillows and closed his eyes.

“That the thing with you?” he asked. “You only ever go for the ribs?”

“Yes.”

“Mean woman.”

“Terrible man.”

His eyes opened again, slower this time. Softer.

“Still here though.”

There it was again. Not swagger. Not flirtation polished for effect. Just surprise that she had remained.

Sienna picked up the glass from his bedside table and refilled it from the bottle.

“For now,” she said.

He accepted the water. Their fingers brushed. His hand was warm.

“For now,” he echoed.

Outside, the sea kept hitting the cliff in heavy white bursts, steady as a pulse. Inside, the room smelled of clean cotton, medicine, and the faint salt that drifted in through the cracked window. Jax drank his water. He looked wrecked. He looked ashamed. He looked, for the first time since she had known him, like a man with nowhere to hide.

Sienna still did not know if this version of him would last once his body stopped hurting and the world started calling his name again.

But he had woken and stayed awake.

He had panicked and not run.

He had apologized and not dressed it up in charm.

For one night, that was enough to believe in.

The first time Sienna heard him laugh properly, it came from the kitchen and ended in a cough.

She looked up from the island where she was sorting his noon tablets into the little paper cup the nurse liked to use and saw him leaning one hand on the counter, head bowed, shoulders shaking once with the laugh he was trying not to let turn into pain.

“What?” she said.

Jax pointed weakly at the toast.

She followed his finger. One slice had launched itself halfway out of the toaster and landed on the polished black hob.

“That’s not funny.”

“It absolutely is.” His voice still carried that rough, scraped quality from the seizure and the days after, but it had strength in it now. More than yesterday. “That toast gave up halfway through life. Bit dramatic.”

Sienna folded her arms. “You would admire that.”

He looked up at her then, mouth tipped at one corner.

“Mean.”

“Alive, though.”

That grin stayed a second longer than it had any right to. It did something strange to the room. The kitchen was all glass and pale stone and expensive emptiness, ocean shining hard beyond the windows, but suddenly it felt smaller. Warmer. Dangerous in a new way.

He had been home from hospital long enough to stop looking ghostly and start looking like himself again, which was not, Sienna was learning, the same thing as being better.

His colour had come back. The hollows under his eyes had eased. He could walk the length of the house without needing to stop and brace himself against a wall. He shaved every other day now, badly, leaving the sharp clean smell of soap and a rough shadow over his jaw that made him look less like a patient and more like the man whose face had once been blown up on arena screens forty feet high.

But recovery had sharpened him too.

Without booze and coke smoothing the edges into oblivion, Jax felt everything. Hunger. Shame. Restlessness. Temper. Want. It moved through the house like weather. Some hours he was almost easy, dry jokes, quiet music in the study, bitter complaints about saltless food. Other hours he slowly prowled from room to room with his hands shoved into his joggers, unable to settle, eyes too bright, as if his skin no longer fit him.

Sienna had become part of the rhythm of that. Breakfast. Vitals. Pills. Walk if he could manage it. Phone away by eleven. Water all day. No alcohol in the house. No visitors Jenna didn’t know about.

No lies, if she could help it.

The nurse had left an hour ago. Jenna was in meetings with insurers and promoters. Cal had driven back to the city. The house sat over the cliffs in a sheet of white light, quiet except for the sea hitting rock below and the old refrigerator motor kicking in now and then.

It should have felt calm.

It didn’t.

Jax pushed the dead toast slice into the bin and reached for the kettle.

“You’re not making coffee.”

He glanced over his shoulder. “I’m boilin’ water.”

“For what?”

He looked offended. “Tea exists, sweetheart.”

She narrowed her eyes. “Don’t sweetheart me.”

That grin again. “All right, California.”

She hated how much she liked that one.

He moved more carefully than before, but the old grace was back in pieces. The long body. The lazy strength. The tattoos moving over his forearms when he lifted the kettle. Even tired, even healing, he carried himself like a man built to take up attention. It irritated her on principle.

It also did less innocent things to her pulse.

“Sit down,” she said, sliding the pill cup across the island. “You’re due.”

He looked at the tablets as if she’d offered him roofing nails. “These are ruining my reputation.”

“You collapsed with foam at your mouth. I think your reputation took a hit all by itself.”

He muttered something under his breath that sounded suspiciously like fair enough, then took them.

That, more than anything, kept throwing her off.

The old Jax would have fought for the sake of the fight. He would have pushed until someone gave way, then pushed harder just to prove he could. This version still bristled. Still baited. Still liked to watch her go sharp with him. But every so often, where the explosion should have come, it didn’t. He just... stopped. Considered. Swallowed whatever ugly thing rose first.

It made him harder to guard against.

Because kindness from men like Jax was easy to distrust when it came lacquered in charm and midnight. Quiet effort was worse. Quiet effort asked to be believed.

By three that afternoon, the weather changed.

Sienna had taken inventory of the kitchen for the third time in two days just to give herself a job. She was writing eggs on the list when the intercom at the front gate buzzed through the house.

Jax looked up from the sofa in the sitting room.

“You expecting anyone?” he called.

“No.”

The buzz came again.

He set his book down too fast, body going alert in a way that still carried the ghost of fear. Sienna reached the wall panel before he could.

The screen flickered to life.

A woman stood at the gate in oversized sunglasses and a cream jacket too thin for the wind off the sea. Dark hair. Good cheekbones. Mouth painted the colour of expensive wine. One hand on her hip, the other lifting to the camera as she smiled like she had every right to be there.

“Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me,” Sienna said.

From behind her, Jax went very still.

The woman leaned toward the speaker. “Jax, darling, I know you’re in there.”

Sienna turned. “Who is she?”

His jaw worked once. “Talia.”

The name clearly meant something ugly. She could hear it in how flat he said it.

“Friend?” Sienna asked.

He gave her a look. “Not exactly.”

Talia pressed the buzzer again, long and cheerful this time. “Open the gate. I brought soup.”

Sienna stared at the screen. “Soup.”

“Probably not soup.”

“That somehow makes it worse.”

Jax scrubbed a hand over his face. He looked tired all at once, and older than he had ten minutes ago. “Don’t let her in.”

“Wasn’t planning to.”

“You don’t have to sound so pleased about it.”

She turned to face him fully. “Am I meant to be upset your mystery woman with fake soup is at the gate?”

His eyes flicked to the screen and away again. There it was—that old tightening in him, the instinct to control the room before it could control him.

“She’s not my woman.”

“Good. Then this is simple.”

Sienna pressed the talk button. “He’s not receiving visitors.”

Talia’s smile sharpened. “And you are?”

“Sienna.”

A pause. A quick assessment, even through grainy video.

“Oh,” Talia said. “You’re the nurse.”

Jax barked a laugh from behind her, then regretted it, hand going briefly to his ribs.

Sienna kept her voice cool. “No.”

“Assistant, then.”

“No.”

Talia tilted her head. “That’s interesting.”

Sienna was tired enough of men and women alike using tone as a blade. “You can leave the imaginary soup at the gate if you like.”

Talia’s mouth flattened. “Tell Jax I came because I was worried.”

Jax spoke before Sienna could. “Talia.”

He stepped beside her, close enough that she caught clean skin, mint toothpaste, and that warmer note that was just him. Not stage cologne. Not vodka sweat. Man. The nearness was distracting, which annoyed her immediately.

He looked into the camera.

“Go home.”

Talia removed her sunglasses slowly. Even on the screen, Sienna could see the calculation in her face. “You disappeared.”

“I nearly died.”

“Yes, that’s all over the internet, babe.”

Sienna’s grip tightened on the panel.

Jax’s voice turned to stone. “Go home.”

Talia studied him another beat. Then her gaze shifted, landing somewhere around Sienna’s shoulder with naked dislike.

“Fine,” she said. “But if you’re replacing your bad habits with blondes who answer the gate, at least pick one that smiles.”

The line went dead.

For a moment no one moved.

Then Jax reached past Sienna and shut the screen off entirely.

“Well,” she said into the silence. “Charming.”

“Sorry.”

The word surprised her enough that she looked up.

He was still staring at the blank screen, expression shut down hard.

“She used to come around a lot?” Sienna asked.

“Too much.”

“Before or after the other ten women with keys?”

His mouth twitched, but only just. “No one had a key.”

“Comforting.”

He finally looked at her. “I mean it. I’m sorry.”

“For what part? Her assuming I was here to hand you medication in sensible shoes, or her calling me your new bad habit?”

His gaze dropped to her mouth for one hot, dangerous second before he dragged it back up.

“That part too.”

The room shifted. Not by much. Enough.

Sienna stepped away first and headed for the kitchen because she suddenly needed distance and a task and cold stone under her palms. She set the shopping list down harder than necessary.

Behind her, his footsteps came slow over the wood floor.

“I didn’t ask her to come,” he said.

“I know.”

“She likes scenes.”

“I gathered.”

He stopped at the other side of the island. “You angry?”

Sienna let out a breath through her nose. “I’m not angry that women you’ve slept with exist, Jax. I’m annoyed that one of them showed up here smirking at me through a camera while you stood behind me looking like you wanted to either punch a wall or disappear into one.”

His expression changed at that. Not defensive. Caught.

“I wasn’t—”

“You were.”

He went quiet.

She turned to face him then, list forgotten.

“And if this is the bit where you get weird because some woman thought I belonged to you or worked for you or slept in your bed, don’t.” Her voice stayed level, which took effort. “I am not another thing you get to consume because it feels good in the moment.”

That landed.

He didn’t blink it away. Didn’t sneer. Didn’t throw the words back at her sharpened.

His hands flattened on the edge of the island, tendons flexing under ink. He looked at the stone instead of her.

“When she called you that,” he said after a long moment, “I hated it.”

Sienna folded her arms and waited.

“Not because you’re mine,” he said, slower now, as if stepping over broken glass. “You’re not. I know that.”

She said nothing.

“I hated it because she made you sound like...” He exhaled sharply. “Like one more girl I’d dragged into the mess. One more body in the room. Like I’d touched you with the same filthy hands I used for everythin’ else. I couldn't consume anything at the moment. Nothing going on down there, no offence"

The house was very quiet.

Below the cliff, the sea hit rock with a long dull crash.

Sienna had expected a fight. Some arrogant line. A demand. Instead he stood there stripped bare by his own honesty, not looking up because maybe he wasn’t sure he could.

When he did lift his head, his eyes were clear.

“I know what I do to people,” he said. “I know what I turn them into when I’m bad. I don’t want that with you.”

Something in her chest tightened and pulled.

“You don’t get to decide what I turn into,” she said, but there was less heat in it now.

“No.” He swallowed. “I know.”

“And you don’t get possessive because someone looked at me and made assumptions.”

His nod was immediate. “All right.”

That almost wrong-footed her more than the confession had.

She stared at him. “That’s it?”

“What d’you want me to do, argue you out of bein’ right?”

“Yes,” she said before she could stop herself. “Usually.”

That startled a laugh out of him. A real one this time, brief and rough and warm.

“Well, that seems a poor strategy if I’m tryin’ not to be a complete bastard.”

“Trying?”

He tipped his head. “Day by day.”

Sienna looked away because his face had gone softer again, and that was becoming a problem.

Evening came in blue and silver. The glass walls darkened. The sea turned from bright steel to something almost black. Sienna made pasta because it was simple and because watching Jax obey doctor’s orders over a bowl of plain food was still satisfying in a petty little corner of her soul.

He stood beside her while she cooked, not helping much, just handing things over when asked.

“That enough salt?” she said, stirring the sauce.

“For a prisoner, yes.”

“You are not a prisoner.”

“House arrest with medication.”

“You earned it.”

“Harsh jury.”

She passed him the spoon. “Taste.”

He did, then looked at her with mock gravity. “Marry me.”

Sienna snorted before she could help it. “Absolutely not.”

“See, that hurts, because I’m vulnerable.”

“You’re dramatic.”

“Says the woman who nearly fought a gate camera.”

“I would have won.”

“I believe that.”

When they sat down to eat, it happened naturally, which made it more dangerous than any staged moment could have been. No nurses. No Jenna on speaker. No medical panic sitting between them like a third person at the table. Just the two of them in the soft pool of light above the dining table, forks tapping ceramic, the windows full of dark sea.

Jax ate more than he had all week.

Sienna noticed because she noticed everything with him now, and because care had a way of sneaking up on you in practical clothes. Half a glass of water gone. Bowl nearly empty. No tremor in his hand until he reached for the second slice of bread.

“Don’t look so smug,” he said.

“I’m not smug.”

“You’ve got your nurse face on.”

“I’m not the nurse.”

“Could’ve fooled Talia.”

She kicked him lightly under the table.

He huffed a laugh and reached for his water. “You jealous?”

She set her fork down. “Do you want to live?”

That grin. “There she is.”

After dinner, he insisted on clearing the plates.

“You are not cleared for domestic heroics,” she said.

“I carried amplifiers for twenty years.”

“You also died backstage”

He paused, plate in hand. The line could have gone wrong. She saw the flicker of it cross his face.

Then he nodded once. “Fair.”

He rinsed the dishes anyway.

Sienna dried them, and the ordinariness of it nearly undid her. Him at the sink with sleeves pushed up. Her beside him with a tea towel over her shoulder. The low clink of plates. The warm smell of tomato and basil still hanging in the air. It was such a stupid, small thing, and it felt more intimate than watching him half-conscious in a hospital bed had.

When the last glass was set away, neither of them moved.

The kitchen lamp cast gold over the stone and left the rest of the room in shadow. His hand rested flat on the counter near hers. Close. Not touching.

“You should sit,” she said quietly. “You’ve been up too long.”

“I know.”

He didn’t sit.

Neither did she.

He turned then, slow enough to give her time to step back if she wanted. She could see every mark recovery had left on him even now. The tiredness at the edges. The faint bruise-yellow shadows where CPR had battered his chest under the T-shirt. The humility he wore badly because it was new and honest and had no swagger to hide behind.

“Sienna.”

Just her name. Nothing dressed up.

She looked at his mouth and hated herself a little for it.

“What?”

“I want to kiss you.”

The air left her lungs in one thin line.

Not I’m going to. Not come here. Not one of the lazy filthy lines he could probably deliver in his sleep and had, no doubt, delivered to half the women who ever followed him backstage.

A want. Offered plain.

Her heart was beating too hard now, too loud.

“You’re very sure of yourself for a man on heart medication.”

His gaze stayed on hers. “No, darlin’. I’m askin’.”

That southern drawl softened on the words, all rough edges sanded down by sincerity. It hit her low and deep.

She should have made a joke. Bought herself room. Time.

Instead she said, “Why?”

The honesty cost him. She saw that too.

“Because every time you walk out of a room I feel it,” he said. “Because you make me mad and then make me better and I don’t know what to call that yet. Because when I thought I was dying, the last thing I knew was you touchin’ me and refusing to let me go.”

His hand shifted, not touching, just nearer.

“And because if I do this,” he said, voice low, “I want it sober. I want it where no one’s watchin’. I want it real.”

Her eyes burned unexpectedly. Annoying, that.

She searched his face for performance and found none. No shine. No manipulation. Just a man standing in his own kitchen trying very hard not to ruin the moment by wanting it too much.

So she made the only rule she had left.

“You kiss me,” she said, “and this does not become another way you take.”

His answer came without a beat. “It won’t.”

“You get possessive again, I’m gone.”

“I know.”

“You scare me, I’m gone.”

His throat worked. “I know.”

She waited one more second, because this mattered, because he mattered now in ways she had not given him permission to matter.

Then she said, “Okay.”

He moved like he still couldn’t quite believe she’d said it.

One hand came up to her face, not grabbing, just cupping her jaw with a care so careful it nearly hurt. His palm was warm. His thumb settled under her ear. He gave her enough time to change her mind.

She didn’t.

Their first kiss was nothing like she had expected from Jax Blackwood.

No crowd. No vodka. No hands everywhere. No showmanship.

Just warmth.

His mouth touched hers softly, almost cautiously, and then stayed there, as if he was learning the shape of permission. Sienna’s fingers tightened around the tea towel still in her hand. Useless thing. She let it drop to the floor.

He made a low sound in his throat when she kissed him back. Not triumph. Relief.

That nearly wrecked her.

She slid one hand to his chest without thinking, feeling the steady beat there through cotton, the live hard proof of him. He shuddered once under her palm. His other hand found her waist and stopped there, holding but not taking.

The kiss deepened by inches, not by force. The angle changed. Her breath caught. His did too. It was slow enough to feel every choice inside it. Every place they could have gone wrong and didn’t.

When he finally drew back, his forehead rested against hers.

Neither of them spoke.

The sea kept breaking below the house.

His thumb moved once against her skin, like he still needed to check she was real.

“Well,” he said at last, voice gone rough again.

Sienna’s eyes stayed closed another second before she opened them. “That was not very rock and roll of you.”

A smile pulled at his mouth. Small. Wrecked. Beautiful.

“No,” he said. “Guess it wasn’t.”

For once, thank God, there had been no audience for it.

Only the dark glass. The dishes drying in the rack. The taste of him still warm on her mouth. And the strange, fragile sense that maybe want did not always have to arrive like a fire. Maybe, if handled right, it could come like this instead.

Chosen.

And answered.

He nearly ruined it the next morning by pretending nothing had changed.

Sienna came into the kitchen in one of the soft house jumpers she had claimed from the back of a chair and found him already there with the kettle on, hair damp from a shower, reading glasses low on his nose because apparently near-death had not improved his eyesight. He looked up once, saw her looking at him, and went right back to the mug in his hand like men who had kissed women senseless in warm lamplight did this every day.

“Tea?” he asked.

She leaned against the counter and folded her arms. “That’s what you’ve got?”

He looked over the top of the glasses then, mouth twitching. “Mornin’ to you too.”

“You kissed me.”

“I remember.”

“Good. I just wanted to make sure this wasn’t one of your black-hole memory gaps.”

That earned her a low laugh. Real one. Sleep-rough and rusty. He set the mug down and crossed to her slowly, like he still respected the line between wanting and taking. His hand touched her hip. Light. Asking even now.

“No memory gap,” he said. “Got every second of it.”

She should have teased him again. It was easier when they sparred. Easier than standing in a bright kitchen with the sea throwing white light through the glass and a man she had once performed CPR on looking at her like she was the first soft thing he’d ever held with both hands.

Instead she said, quieter, “Okay.”

He bent and kissed her once. Brief. Deep. Warm. Domestic, somehow. As if mouths could make promises before the rest of life had caught up.

Then the intercom at the front gate buzzed and ruined the moment with professional efficiency.

Jax shut his eyes. “That’ll be Cal.”

“Of course it is.”

“Man’s got a gift for timing.”

Cal did not come in carrying disaster. That almost made him stranger. He walked into the house with a leather folder, two phones, and the look of someone who had gone several weeks without unclenching his jaw. Jenna came behind him with a paper cup of coffee and a set of printouts clipped together so tightly the staple had bent.

Jax sat at the dining table because Sienna gave him the look that meant do not start posturing. He obeyed badly, which was still obeying.

Cal stayed standing. “Insurance will let us restart in three weeks if I sign off on conditions.”

Jax tipped his chair back half an inch.

Cal looked at the chair until all four legs were back on the floor.

“Read the room, Blackwood.”

Jax spread his hands. “I am. Looks bleak.”

Sienna bit the inside of her cheek.

Jenna slid the packet toward him. “No alcohol in dressing rooms, on the bus, or in hospitality under your access. No stimulant use. Random tests if insurers request them. Cardiac clearance before every run of dates for the first month back. Press access limited. Private security on you after shows. And if you vanish, even once, Cal pulls you.”

Jax’s eyes moved over the page. Once, years ago, maybe this speech would have sent him into a rage so theatrical the windows shook. Now he just looked tired, then angry, then thoughtful in that order.

“And Myles?” he asked.

Cal gave a flat smile with no humor in it. “Myles got his own list.”

“Good.”

That made Jenna glance up.

Cal rested both hands on the table. “I’m not interested in apologies, son. I need behavior. I need a month without headlines, without ambulances, without one of my crew having to dig powder out of upholstery while sponsors walk past pretending not to see it.”

The room went still. Even the sea seemed quieter through the glass.

Jax looked at the papers again. “You’ll get it.”

Cal did not soften. “I’ve heard you say versions of that before.”

Sienna saw the flicker in Jax’s face then. Not swagger. Not insult. Temptation. The old reflex rose in him like a hand from deep water: laugh it off, get cruel first, remind them he was still dangerous enough to matter.

He looked at Cal. Then at Jenna. Then at Sienna, only for a second.

“You ain’t heard me say it sober,” he said.

Cal studied him for a long beat.

“Fine,” he said at last. “Prove it.”

The rehearsal space they used for the restart sat on an industrial estate that smelled of wet pallets, diesel, and somebody frying onions two units over. It was less glamorous than the arenas. Low ceiling. scuffed black drapes. coffee burned to sludge in a metal urn near the back wall. The kind of place bands came to when they needed to get good again without witnesses.

Jax hadn’t been there ten minutes before the old skin started trying to crawl back over him.

A photographer waited outside the chain-link gate. Not official press. Just one of the feral ones who always seemed to know where trouble might bloom. He shouted Jax’s name before they’d even crossed the yard.

“Jax, give us a look. How’s the heart? Still clean? Sienna with you now, is she the minder or the missus?”

Sienna kept walking.

Jax’s shoulders tightened beside her. He knew the rhythm of this game. He had played it for years. Turn. Smirk. Feed them one line filthy enough to trend by lunch. Be the man they came for and nobody had to look too closely at the one underneath.

His head turned an inch.

Sienna said without looking at him, “Don’t.”

He huffed a breath through his nose. “Wasn’t gonna.”

“That’s a lie.”

“Maybe a little.”

When they got inside, Brent was already at his kit, tapping an idle pattern against the rim with two sticks while Chester tuned in the corner with his glasses on and his phone propped against an amp, family photo bright on the screen before it blacked out. Familiar. Good. Human.

Myles arrived last wearing sunglasses indoors and a grin too pleased with itself to mean anything good.

“Well, look at this,” he said, taking in Jax, then Sienna, then Jax again. “Resurrection tour.”

“No one asked you,” Jenna said from across the room.

Myles ignored her. He stepped close enough to clap Jax’s shoulder, then drew back with exaggerated concern. “You look terrible, mate. Very moving. Like a charity advert for bad decisions.”

Jax did not rise to it.

That unsettled Myles more than anger would have.

Rehearsal started rough and then got better. Jax’s voice was not what it had been before, but it had something the old one often lacked: discipline. He worked for notes instead of blowing himself ragged to prove he could still hit them. Chester watched him twice over the neck of his guitar with the cautious look of a man approaching a skittish dog. Brent kept time with his usual dry patience. Even Jenna, pretending to answer emails, looked up more than once.

At lunch, the room thinned. Chester called home. Brent went out for air. Jenna and Cal argued over laminate levels and guest caps. Sienna sat cross-legged on a road case checking a revised transport sheet while Jax picked at half a sandwich beside her like hospital food had permanently offended him.

Myles dropped onto the case opposite.

“So,” he said. “How long’s this little church phase meant to last?”

Jax didn’t look up. “As long as it needs to.”

Myles barked a laugh. “That her line or yours?”

Sienna kept her eyes on the page. She had learned that Myles often grew bored if you starved him.

He leaned forward instead.

“Be honest, Si. You got him on a lead now? Pills in one pocket, kisses in the other?”

Jax set the sandwich down.

Myles saw it and smiled wider. “What? We all know he likes a keeper. Last one just didn’t come with a CPR certificate.”

The silence after that felt physical.

Brent had come back in without anyone noticing. Chester too. Cal was by the far table. Jenna froze with a radio in her hand.

Myles, idiot that he was, still looked amused.

Sienna slid off the road case before it could become something uglier. “Leave it, Jax.”

Jax stood.

He did not stand the way he used to, all heat and spectacle and a body asking for a witness. He stood with a frightening kind of quiet.

“No,” he said.

The room seemed to pull inward.

Myles smirked like he thought this was part of the dance they had always done. “Oh, here we go.”

Jax took one step forward. “You do not speak about her like that.”

Myles took off his sunglasses, still grinning. “You serious?”

“Dead.”

The word dropped hard.

Maybe Myles heard it then. Maybe all of them did. The history in it. The ambulance. Sienna on a concrete floor counting compressions through her own panic. All the jokes suddenly standing in very bad light.

Myles’s grin thinned. “I’m taking the piss.”

“You’ve always hidden behind that,” Jax said. “You say somethin’ cruel, then act shocked when it lands.”

“That’s rich from you.”

“Yeah,” Jax said. “It is.”

That stopped everybody.

Jax nodded once, like he was agreeing to his own guilt before anyone else could throw it at him.

“I’ve been worse than you,” he said. “Longer too. That doesn’t buy you a pass. It means I know exactly what it looks like.”

Myles’s face shifted. Not remorse. Not yet. But the easy confidence had cracked.

Jax’s voice stayed level. “You make one more joke about her, about what happened, about any woman in this crew the way you have for years, and I’m done coverin’ for you. Onstage, offstage, press, management, all of it. You can be funny without bein’ filthy. Learn or get left behind.”

No one moved.

Brent looked openly stunned. Chester set his guitar down very carefully, as if sudden movements might break the moment. Jenna’s eyes flashed once toward Cal with something like disbelief and relief mixed together.

Myles swallowed his answer, found a smaller one, and hated it.

“You whipped now, is that it?”

Jax’s jaw tightened. Then he did a thing Sienna had never seen him do.

He chose plain truth over performance.

“I nearly died,” he said. “And when I woke up, I found out real damn quick who was there and who wasn’t.”

He glanced at Sienna then. Brief. Steady.

“I’m not lettin’ you turn that into a joke.”

Myles stared at him a second too long, then looked away first.

“Fine,” he muttered.

“No,” Jax said. “Not fine. Say it right.”

Myles looked like he might swing at him or laugh or storm out. Any of those would have been familiar. Instead he scrubbed a hand over his mouth and looked at Sienna with visible effort.

“Sorry,” he said, the word rusty as old wire. “That was low.”

Sienna held his gaze just long enough to make him feel it. “Yeah. It was.”

He nodded once and backed off.

The room exhaled.

Brent, because he was Brent, broke the tension by tapping a stick on a snare and saying, “Well. Lovely. Are we rehearsing or starting group therapy?”

That got the right laugh. Thin, but real.

Jax sat back down. His hand shook once before he clenched it. Sienna saw it. So did no one else.

She waited until the others drifted back toward cables and monitors before stepping near him.

“You okay?” she asked quietly.

He gave a short nod that meant not entirely.

“That was hard,” she said.

He looked at the floor. “Felt like pullin’ my own teeth out.”

A smile tugged at her mouth. “Very poetic.”

He huffed. “I got a way with words when under pressure.”

She touched his wrist. Small. Hidden from the room. “You did good.”

He lifted his eyes to hers then, and all the rough humor fell out of his face. What stayed was raw enough to hurt.

“I should’ve done it years ago.”

“Probably.”

“California women are brutal.”

“You need brutal.”

“Maybe I do.”

By evening they had three songs tight, two half-fixed, and a press plan nobody liked. Cal wanted one short controlled statement outside the rehearsal unit the next day. No questions about substances. No details about the medical event. Confirm suspended dates would resume under revised scheduling. Smile without looking too cheerful. Stay alive long enough to get back inside.

Jax listened to the plan with his arms folded and a bottle of water in his hand like it personally offended him.

The next morning the rain came down fine and slantwise, needling the asphalt silver. Two cameras had turned into six. A local entertainment crew waited by the gate with hair that did not move in weather and expressions hungry for slipups.

Jenna adjusted Jax’s collar, stepped back, and said, “Short answers. No smart mouth.”

He looked at her. “You really askin’ me to stop bein’ me in public?”

“I’m asking you to try being a version that doesn’t cost me legal fees.”

He almost smiled.

Sienna stood just inside the open roller door with Cal, close enough to be seen if anyone looked past him, far enough not to be part of the official line. She had no business feeling nervous. He was the one with microphones waiting.

But her pulse still climbed when he walked out.

The cameras clicked fast. A few shouted questions hit him at once.

“Jax, was it an overdose?”

“Are the dates insured now?”

“Is the band still together?”

He raised one hand. Not dramatic. Just enough.

“We’re back to work,” he said. His voice carried even without the stage in it. “Dates will resume when management says they resume. I had a medical emergency. I’m recoverin’. That’s all I’m sayin’ on that.”

One of the reporters called, “You expect people to believe you’ve changed that easy?”

There it was. The bait. The old role laid out at his feet like a familiar jacket.

Jax could have sneered. Could have flirted with the nearest lens. Could have turned himself into the dangerous idiot they all understood.

Instead he tucked his free hand into his coat pocket because Sienna knew that meant he was stopping it from shaking and said, “No.”

The cameras stuttered.

“No,” he repeated. “I don’t expect easy. I expect work. I expect people not to trust it right away. They shouldn’t. I gave ’em plenty reason not to.”

Cal went still beside Sienna.

A woman with a mic took a step forward. “So what’s different?”

Jax looked past the cameras for one second. Found Sienna in the doorway.

When he looked back, there was no grin at all.

“I want to keep livin’,” he said.

No one spoke.

The rain hissed on the concrete.

He went on, plain as bone. “I want the band back. I want to do the job right. And I’m done actin’ like destroyin’ myself is some kind of brand.”

A murmur moved through the small crowd. Somebody shouted, “What about the woman at the house? Is she your sobriety coach or your girlfriend?”

Jenna muttered something vicious under her breath.

Sienna’s whole body went hot. Here it comes, she thought. Deflection. Joke. Evasion.

Jax turned toward the open door instead.

Not much. Just enough.

He held out his hand.

Every camera in the yard swung.

For one absurd second Sienna considered not moving just to make him sweat. Then Cal gave her a look half warning, half surrender, and Jenna flicked her fingers like go on then.

So she walked out into the rain and placed her hand in his.

It felt warm despite the cold air. Steady despite the eyes on them.

Jax looked at the press, then down at their joined hands, then back up again.

“She’s Sienna,” he said. “She saved my life. She’s with me.”

A flash burst white across his face. Another. Another.

He did not let go.

“If that makes a headline,” he said, “make sure you spell her name right.”

For one beat nobody laughed because they were too busy recalculating him.

Then Brent, watching from just inside, made a choked sound that might have been a laugh strangled by shock. Even Chester smiled. Cal covered his mouth with one hand and looked toward the sky like asking whatever gods handled rock bands for one clean month.

Jenna called the end of it and herded them back in before anyone could claw for more.

The roller door slammed shut behind them with a metallic crash that left the rain outside.

Inside, the room held that stunned aftertaste big moments leave behind.

Myles stood by an amp case with his hands in his pockets and an unreadable face. He looked at Jax. Then at Sienna. Then away.

“Well,” Brent said. “That was disgustingly sincere.”

Jax still had hold of her hand. “Shut up, Brent.”

“No, I won’t. I’m emotional now.”

Chester laughed under his breath and came over to clap Jax once on the shoulder. Not hard. Not theatrical. Just there.

“About time,” he said.

Cal stepped in next, all business because that was how he survived feeling things. “If any of you ruin this by sundown, I’ll bury you under the car park.”

“Encouraging speech,” Jax said.

Cal pointed at him. “And yet you needed it.”

Then he walked off to answer one of his shrieking phones.

The room loosened.

Sienna finally looked up at Jax properly. Rain had caught in his hair. His collar sat crooked where Jenna had fixed it and the weather had undone her work. He looked tired, alive, and more exposed than she had ever seen him.

“You really did that,” she said.

He tipped his head. “Public claimin’. Very caveman of me.”

She rolled her eyes. “Don’t spoil it.”

His mouth softened. “I meant every word.”

She believed him. That was still new enough to feel dangerous.

Myles approached then, slower this time, with none of his usual swagger. He looked at Sienna first.

“I said sorry before,” he muttered. “I’m sayin’ it again.”

She gave him a nod. “Try doing better. It’ll save everyone time.”

Brent barked a laugh from across the room.

Myles actually looked faintly embarrassed. “Yeah. All right.”

He looked at Jax after that, and something old and ugly passed between them and then thinned. Not healed. Not solved. But checked.

Jax squeezed Sienna’s hand once, still not letting go.

That, more than the cameras, more than the speech, more than the conditions and the threat of tests and headlines and all the old poison waiting just outside the door, felt like the real proof.

Not that he loved her yet. They were not there, not said out loud.

But he had chosen.

In front of the men who knew his worst habits best.

In front of management who had every right not to trust him.

In front of cameras that would have happily sold his collapse back to him as myth.

He had chosen her.

He had chosen staying alive long enough to deserve her.

And when rehearsal started again, when Brent counted them in and Chester’s guitar cut through the room clean as wire and Jax stepped up to the mic, there was no old smirk waiting for the crowd.

Only a man taking a breath before the first line and meaning to keep it.

Jax missed the first note on purpose.

Only Sienna knew.

To everyone else in the dark side-stage wing, it looked like nothing more than a breath taken a shade too late before the encore. Brent had already cracked his sticks together. Chester’s guitar rang bright and clean. Myles leaned into his bass line with that loose, insolent grin he wore when a room loved him. The crowd shouted for the song before Jax gave it to them.

But Sienna saw the little pause.

Saw him plant his boots, lift the mic, and glance once toward the wing where she stood with her laminate turned backward and a headset crooked around her neck. He looked straight at her through the white sweep of light and missed the first note because he was smiling.

Not the old smile. Not the one that promised trouble and left someone else holding the bill.

This one was quieter. Real enough to warm her under the blast of stage heat.

Then he came in on the second line, voice rough gold, and the whole arena roared like they’d been waiting all night just to hand him that one moment back.

Three months ago she had counted compressions on his chest with blood in her mouth where she’d bitten her lip.

Now she watched him alive on purpose.

It still knocked the air out of her sometimes.

When the set ended, the stage became what it always became after a final bow: cables underfoot, shouted names, damp towels, a monitor tech already reaching for a case latch, somebody from local crew asking where they wanted the sponsor board, security trying to herd the hallway before the invited guests spilled through. The old version of this part used to mean danger. Missing bottles. Missing Jax. Jenna half a heartbeat from murder.

Now it meant work.

Hard, ordinary, blessed work.

Sienna had a post-show list in the back pocket of her jeans. She had transport timings, hotel key packets, revised call sheets, two voicemails from Cal she hadn’t yet returned, and a reminder to check whether Myles had tried to slip an unapproved name onto tomorrow’s after-party access again. He kept doing it on principle now, though with less spite than habit, and Cal kept ripping them off with the same dead-eyed patience of a man who had seen every circle hell had to offer.

Jenna caught Sienna by the elbow in the corridor.

“You’ve got ten minutes before he gets sentimental and starts looking for you.”

Sienna snorted. “He doesn’t get sentimental.”

Jenna gave her a look that said don’t insult my intelligence. “He’s from the South and he nearly died. They all get sentimental after that.”

Behind them, Brent came past peeling off his wrist tape with his teeth. “Can confirm,” he said. “I cried over a service-station sausage roll last week.”

“You cried because it fell on the floor,” Chester said, following him.

“It was still good.”

Myles slung an arm around Brent’s neck from behind and said, “That’s the kind of resilience that built this band.”

Then Jax appeared at the end of the hall in black denim and sweat-dark hair, scanning faces until he found hers.

There it was. That steadying change in him. He still moved like people parted for him and always would. But now when he looked for her, he didn’t do it as performance. He did it because he wanted her in sight.

“Sentimental,” Jenna mouthed, and walked off before Sienna could answer.

Jax came up, still breathing a little hard from stage. “You disappearin’ on me?”

“I’m working.”

He leaned one shoulder against the cinderblock wall and lowered his voice. “So am I. And I still found time to miss a note for you.”

Her mouth twitched. “You did that on purpose?”

“Course I did.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

He bent closer. Sweat and clean soap and the faint metallic smell that clung to venues lived on his skin. “You noticed, though.”

“I notice when you do stupid things.”

His grin kicked. “That your way of sayin’ you were watchin’ me?”

She adjusted the headset on her neck to hide the fact she was flushing. “Go shower. You smell like four thousand people.”

“Thought you liked me honest.”

“I do. I didn’t say I liked you sticky.”

Brent, passing again with a bottle of water tucked into the waistband of his jeans, made a gagging sound. “Please wait until I’m dead before flirting like this.”

Jax never looked away from her. “Nobody asked you, drummer.”

“Everybody asks me. I’m the heart of this operation.”

“You’re barely a pulse.”

Chester laughed and steered Brent away by the shoulder. Myles shot Sienna a look as he went by too, less sharp than it used to be, almost sheepish. There were still edges in him. Probably always would be. But he’d stopped using her as target practice every time the room got too quiet. These days when he slipped, he corrected himself faster. It counted.

Jax straightened. “Come back with me tonight.”

She blinked. “To the hotel?”

He gave her a look. “No, darlin’. To the moon.”

She had learned his voice had different gravities. The public one. The teasing one. The one he used when fear was near and he was trying to keep it from becoming visible. And this one—low, unguarded, aimed straight at her.

“Jax—”

“Come back to the house with me after this leg ends,” he said. “Not because Jenna asked. Not because Cal thinks I’ll lick batteries if left alone. Come because it’s where I want you.”

For a second the corridor noise thinned around her.

It had been weeks of hotels and flights and rehearsal units and a better kind of bus ride. Weeks of him taking his tablets without hiding them, of him going quiet instead of mean when the old restlessness got under his skin, of her learning that sober Jax could be just as dangerous to her pulse as the ruined one had been to her temper. Worse, maybe, because this version said what he meant and then stood there letting the truth remain.

“You’re asking me like a man trying not to get hit,” she said softly.

“I’m askin’ you like a man who knows you can leave if you want.”

That landed in her deep.

She slipped her hand into his for one quick squeeze because there were crew walking past and because she liked making him wait sometimes.

“We’ll talk after load-out,” she said.

His lashes lowered a fraction. He looked wrecked by that tiny touch.

“Yes, ma’am.”

He kissed her knuckles once, fast enough to be missed by everyone but the two riggers arguing near the fire door, and then he went to shower before Jenna could come back and throw something at his head.

That night they didn’t go to the hotel.

Cal had finished his calls. Jenna had signed the last transport sheet. The final truck had pulled from the loading bay under sodium-orange yard lights. Instead of climbing onto the bus with everyone else for the overnight run, Jax took the approved car and drove them the coast way to his house above the cliffs. Insurance had finally eased enough to allow it. His tests had stayed clean. His cardiologist had used the phrase encouraging progress in a voice so cautious it made Jax swear for an hour afterward, but he’d smiled the whole time.

They arrived after one in the morning.

The house no longer looked like a museum someone expensive had died in. There was life in it now. Sienna’s trainers by the back door. A cardigan over one kitchen chair. A cracked blue mug Jenna had once left and never claimed. Fruit in a bowl. Music scribbles on the dining table. A packet of biscuits Brent had opened and somehow not finished.

Jax flicked on the kitchen lamp and stood there a moment with the keys in his hand.

The sea was a dark sound beyond the glass.

“You hungry?” he asked.

“At one in the morning?”

He opened the fridge. “That’s not a no.”

She smiled and went to stand beside him. “What have we got?”

He inspected the shelves with grave concentration. “Cheese. Grapes. Half a roast chicken. Fancy mustard nobody’s ever actually wanted.”

“And yet you bought it.”

“I was goin’ through a reinvention.”

She laughed, and that seemed to do something to him. He turned, set the fridge door shut with one hand, and looked at her like she was a light he hadn’t expected to still be on.

“What?” she said.

“Nothin’.”

“That is never nothing.”

His thumb brushed the hem of her shirt near her waist. “Just you in my kitchen.”

Her pulse gave a foolish jump. They had kissed. More than kissed. They had learned each other in the stop-start, careful way people did after too much had already happened and neither wanted to bruise what was good by rushing to prove it. But every so often he said something plain like that, and she felt nineteen and startled again.

“So feed me,” she said, because if she didn’t keep moving she might just climb him where he stood.

He made a soft sound in his throat. “Bossy thing.”

They ate barefoot at the counter, sharing chicken with their fingers and tearing crust from bread Chester’s wife had sent down with him after the last rehearsal. Jax stole her grapes. She stole his last piece of cheese. They talked about nothing holy Brent’s inability to pack one bag instead of three, the look on Cal’s face when a reporter asked if the band’s good behavior was a publicity strategy, the way Myles had started making a visible point of asking before he touched anybody else’s phone.

Ordinary things. Precious because they were ordinary.

Later, when the dishes were stacked and the house had gone quiet around them, Jax led her upstairs with one hand at the small of her back.

His room still held traces of the man he had been when she first arrived there the severe order, the expensive emptiness, the sense that nobody stayed. But the bed had become theirs in the uneven, human way that mattered. Her shampoo lived in his shower. His reading glasses were on her side of the nightstand because he always forgot where he put them. There was a T-shirt of hers knotted around one bedpost from a morning they had both overslept and left laughing.

He shut the bedroom door and leaned on it for a second.

“You all right?” she asked.

He nodded, then shook his head. “Yeah. I just”

His voice caught. That almost never happened.

Sienna moved closer. “Talk.”

He looked down at her. In the low lamp light his face showed everything too plainly to hide behind charm. The scar of exhaustion wasn’t gone from him. Neither was the old sadness. She suspected those would always be part of his make. But they no longer ran the whole machine.

“I used to come back here and feel this place close over me,” he said. “Like puttin’ a lid on a box. Didn’t matter if there were women in it or music in it or a bloody tiger in the hall. It still felt empty.”

She touched his wrist.

He covered her hand with his.

“And now you’re here and there’s your shoes downstairs and that awful tea you like and hair ties all over my bathroom and I can hear you laughin’ in rooms after you’ve left them.” He exhaled hard through his nose. “I didn’t know a house could feel different because of one person.”

Emotion rose hot and abrupt in her throat.

“Jax”

“No, let me say it right.”

He pushed off the door and took both her hands. His own were warm and callused and steady. Not shaking now. Not reaching for anything but her.

“I’ve wanted women,” he said. “I’ve been obsessed, possessive, selfish, high, lonely, all of it. I’ve said things I didn’t mean just to keep somebody there for one more night. I know the difference.”

She stood very still.

“When I wake up and you’re in the room, I feel grateful before I feel anything else. When I screw up, I want to tell you the truth before you have to drag it out of me. When somethin’ good happens, you’re the first person I look for. And when it scares me” He laughed once, rough and disbelieving at himself. “Hell, especially when it scares me.”

Her eyes stung.

“I have never loved anyone the way I love you,” he said.

The room seemed to sharpen around that sentence. The lamp glow. The salt-dark window. The distant break of water against the rocks below. His thumb rubbing once over her knuckles like he needed the anchor of touch to finish.

Sienna let out the breath she’d been holding.

“You took your sweet time,” she whispered.

His mouth parted in startled laughter. “That what you’ve got for me?”

Tears slipped anyway. She hated crying mid-beautiful moment and hated it more when he looked wrecked by seeing it.

She cupped his face.

“I love you too,” she said. “And I loved you before it was sensible, which was incredibly annoying of me.”

He shut his eyes for one beat as if the words physically hit him.

When he kissed her then it was nothing like the old danger that had always burned off him in rooms full of witnesses. This was slow and deep and almost disbelieving. A man learning that being wanted didn’t have to come with a trap hidden inside it. Her fingers slid into his hair. His hands settled at her waist, then higher, then back again as if asking every inch.

They undressed each other without hurry.

Jax started with her shirt, pushing it from her shoulders while Sienna worked open the buttons of his. She kissed the strip of chest she exposed, then another when she got the next button free. His hands settled on her waist, warm and familiar, holding her close while her mouth moved over his skin.

The sea rolled below the house, audible through the open window. The lamp beside the bed stayed on.

Neither of them reached for it.

Sienna wanted to see him.

That mattered tonight.

She let her hands travel down his chest.

Then she stopped.

Her palm rested over his heart.

The steady beat beneath it brought the hospital back with brutal clarity. His skin cold beneath her hands. Voices above her. Machines making sounds she still sometimes heard in dreams.

Jax covered her hand.

“Sienna.”

She raised her eyes.

“I'm here.”

“I know.”

His thumb brushed across her knuckles.

She leaned forward and kissed the place beneath her palm.

Once.

Then again.

Jax's fingers slid into her hair.

The third kiss wasn't reverent.

His breath caught when her teeth grazed his skin, and Sienna felt the change in him immediately.

“Careful,” he murmured.

She looked up. “Why?”

“You know why.”

She did and she found his hardness and glanced over it.

That was precisely why she did it again.

His moan came out rough and disappeared when she kissed him.

After that, tenderness became harder to separate from want.

His hands moved over her bare back, down to her hips, pulling her against him. Sienna felt how badly he wanted her and pressed closer instead of teasing him about it.

Jax kissed her deeply, his fingers tightening against her skin.

She pushed him backward toward the bed.

“Bossy.”

“Shut up.”

“That wasn't a complaint.”

The backs of his knees hit the mattress.

Sienna gave him one more push.

Jax went down laughing and caught her around the waist, dragging her with him.

She landed across his chest.

“Idiot.”

“Come here.”

“I am here.”

“Closer.”

His mouth found hers before she could answer.

The laughter faded

His hands slowed again as they explored each other, rediscovering familiar places after everything his body had endured. Sienna kissed the scarred and remembered parts of him without making a ceremony of them. Jax touched her with equal patience, lingering wherever her breathing changed, learning her again even though he already knew her.

Soon patience became difficult.

Their kisses grew deeper. Their breathing changed. Sienna's fingers tightened in his hair when his mouth moved down her neck, and Jax smiled against her skin when she whispered his name.

“Don't look so pleased with yourself.”

“I haven't done anything yet.”

“Exactly why you shouldn't look pleased.”

“That sounds like a challenge.”

“It wasn't.”

“Shame.”

She kissed him to stop the next smart remark.

It worked for perhaps five seconds.

Then there was only heat, skin and the familiar weight of him close to her as he entered her. Sienna wrapped herself around him, moaned and held on, their earlier tenderness giving way to something needier. Jax buried his face against her neck, breathing her name against her skin as they moved together.

She wanted this version of him too.

Alive enough to laugh.

Alive enough to irritate her.

Alive enough to want her.

When pleasure finally overwhelmed everything else, Sienna clung to him and buried her face against his shoulder. Jax held her through it, his own control following soon after, his breathing breaking against her neck as his body tightened against hers.

For several seconds neither of them moved.

Then Jax kissed her shoulder.

Sienna laughed weakly. “Don't.”

“I didn't say anything.”

“You were going to.”

“I was gonna say that was Amazing so much better than sneeking in the bus or backstage.”

She lifted her head.

His grin appeared.

“Liar.”

“Absolutely.”

Later, tangled in sheets damp with heat, Sienna lay with her cheek on his chest.

His heartbeat filled her ear.

Steady and stubborn.

She stayed there longer than she needed to, listening.

Jax traced lazy lines down her spine.

“What’s your face for?” he murmured.

“I was thinking.”

“Dangerous.”

She pinched his side.

He flinched. “Ow. All right, what were you thinkin’?”

She lifted her chin to look at him. “What happens next.”

His hand stilled, and his attention settled completely on her.

“The tour ends,” he said. “We breathe. I keep doing the boring heart-healthy shit. Brent starts another emotional affair with motorway food. Chester goes home and tries to remember how to be quiet. Myles gets restless and pretends he isn’t. Jenna sleeps for a week with her phone off. Cal probably has a small stroke if I so much as look at a vodka advert.”

She smiled. “And us?”

The humor faded from his face.

Months ago, she might have regretted asking. Jax would have found a joke, a distraction, anything that kept tomorrow safely outside the room.

This Jax stroked his thumb over her shoulder and answered her.

“Us is you stay if you want.”

Sienna waited.

“We make this place less haunted. We fight about cupboard space.”

“You have six cupboards.”

“Five once your coffee shit moves in.”

“My coffee shit?”

“You have equipment.”

“I have a coffee maker.”

“You have accessories for the coffee maker.”

She bit back a smile. “Continue.”

“I learn how strong your coffee has to be before you stop insultin' mine.”

“That could take years.”

“I've got time.”

The words caught somewhere inside her.

Jax seemed to realize it.

His fingers slipped into hers.

“We do ordinary things, Sienna. Grocery shopping. Dinner. You leaving your crap everywhere.”

“I don't leave crap everywhere.”

“You absolutely do.”

“Jax.”

“We argue. You win some.”

“Some?”

“A generous offer.”

She pinched him again.

“Violent woman.”

“Finish your plan.”

His smile softened.

“We wake up here. Come home here. Sometimes nothing happens at all.” He brought her hand to his mouth and kissed her fingers. “We do ordinary things till they're ours.”

Her chest tightened.

“That sounds suspiciously like a plan.”

“It is a plan.”

“You? Planning?”

“I nearly died, sweetheart. Now I schedule things.”

She laughed against his skin.

Jax wrapped both arms around her and kissed the top of her head.

Sienna settled over his heart again.

This time she didn't need to count the beats.

She simply listened.

3 months later

Pregnant.

The word didn’t fit in the room at first. It felt too large for tile and towels and the faint smell of Jax’s shaving soap.

She looked at the test again.

Still pregnant.

Outside the half-open door she could hear him in the kitchen singing under his breath while the kettle boiled. Badly, on purpose. Some old soul thing he’d put on from his phone. Cupboard door. Spoon clink. The ordinary music of a man making tea.

Her hand went to her stomach before she could think about it.

She had to get things clear in her head before telling Jax as he definitely has commitment issues. Plus he was still tempted by drink and coke she could tell that as some days he really struggled even though he tried to hide it from her. This could send him spiralling and she hated him when using.